Moho 13.5: Edge case - bone length - can be improved.

[strider2000]

I'm playing with 13.5 and noticed an edge case that can be improved.

If you have bones that are nearly coincident, then trying to lengthen the bone, with the transform bone tool is very difficult, because you can't easily pick the resize handle.

Why would I want to do this?
I have an rig that has different head positions, front, 3/4 right, right, 3/4 right back. I'd like to use Vitruvian bones to essentially combine a switch layer and the controlling head bone, making animation much easier than it was before.

What's the problem?
The problem is that the most logical arrangement (or the one that was most obvious to me) is to have the grouped bones nearly coincident. I arranged them so that their size is just a little different. However, when I tried to resize the bones it was very difficult. The problem is two fold
1) When you're not on the bone outline, but on the interior, the top bone is selected. I don't think there's much that can be done about that. It's reasonable.
2) If you are on the outline, the proper bone is selected, but as you reach the resize marker, it becomes difficult to select. When you zoom in, the resize markers don't scale to the bone edge, so you can't select them that way.

If you've played with Moho enough, there are work arounds, but I thought I'd mention it.

[Greenlaw]

I'm not sure I understand the problem, but maybe this helps? If you need to lengthen a bone and Moho won't let you easily grab the handle at the end of the bone, you can hold Ctrl to lengthen the bone by dragging near the handle instead of on the handle. Ctrl basically modifies the Rotate mode while clicking and dragging near the bone to Scale mode.

If that's not it, can you post an image or video example?

[hayasidist]

if you set the "spatially conflicting" bones to be different colours, you can hide / show bones of selected colour(s) with a script from Lukas

http://www.lostmarble.com/forum/viewtop ... 95#p186422

(I use it all the time in such situations!)

[strider2000]

Thanks for the ideas. Always cool new things to learn. Here's a quick video of the issue I encountered.

Like I said, it's definitely an edge case and it's not stopping me, and I'm just playing around, but I just thought I'd share with people what I saw.

[synthsin75]

One problem is the order you created the bones. If you go from largest to smallest in the stack, it doesn't have that problem. Ctrl also works to scale, like Denis said, but there is an issue I brought up in beta. Bones have always been selectable by their outlines. And even though 13.5 did away with their internal outlines, those are still the selectable part of bones. So even though you don't see them, you're still basically clicking on them. This is especially noticeable when bones are stacked, as you can click on a bone that appears to have no other bone outline to interfere with it and still end up selecting a bone "above" it. So you have to watch out for that invisible cross in the middle of a bone.

[3deeguy]

I give bones meaningful names. In my rig I had several bones that overlapped right down the center of the face. For example one was named "nose bridge parent" which was parented to "nose bridge child". That made it easy to select "nose tip parent" or "nose tip child".
I reused the same bones to rig different parts of the face. I resized, re-rotated and re-translated (and renamed) for each feature.

[Greenlaw]

Thanks for making the video. I see what you mean now; when the bones are stacked like that, it can be difficult to select the underlying bones. Using different scales is a clever solution.

What we need is a better way to select occluded bones. The Select Bone menu is another way to select the bones, but it can get cumbersome with lots of bones in the layer. I think what we really need is a Bones window that lets use group bones and make custom selection sets. Or, when bones are stacked like that, maybe there should be a way to click over a bone while pressing a modifer to make a list of bones under the cursor appear? I've see something like this to select from stacked items in other programs. Even Moho sort of does this with Switch Layer items in the viewport when you right-click over the visible item while pressing Ctrl+Alt.

Oh, I know! Since you only see one bone at a time on the timeline, you only need the bones to be easily selectable on frame 0, right? So would Offset Bones work for this? This way, the bones can be spread apart on frame 0 and will be properly stacked only in the timeline where it doesn't matter because Vitruvian Bones is in effect.

That said, I'm not sure Vitruvian Bones are really needed in this situation. Wouldn't a single head bone and a Switch layer for the artwork do this trick? It would be simpler to set up and animate.

To me, Vitruvian Bones are more useful when you need to switch between differently structured rig setups, not for switching between copies of a single bone.

[Greenlaw]

Oh, I know! Since you only see one bone at a time on the timeline, you only need the bones to be easily selectable on frame 0, right? So would Offset Bones work for this? This way, the bones can be spread apart on frame 0 and will be properly stacked only in the timeline where it doesn't matter because Vitruvian Bones is in effect.

It just occurred to me that what I'm describing is a hybrid of Vitruvian Bones and Victor's old Switch Bones technique.

[strider2000]

Oh, I know! Since you only see one bone at a time on the timeline, you only need the bones to be easily selectable on frame 0, right? So would Offset Bones work for this? This way, the bones can be spread apart on frame 0 and will be properly stacked only in the timeline where it doesn't matter because Vitruvian Bones is in effect.

It just occurred to me that what I'm describing is a hybrid of Vitruvian Bones and Victor's old Switch Bones technique.

Yeah, that's cool, I just linked to his Switch Bones technique in this thread. Still good example of how the Vitruvian bones can be useful.
http://www.lostmarble.com/forum/viewtop ... 51#p195851

Yes, you're correct that Selecting on frame 0 is what I needed (ie to create the groups). I also agree that switch layers works fine in my example. I was just trying things, playing around when I noticed the issue. I just figured others might hit the issue when doing something similar, perhaps for completely different reasons.

Wes,
Thanks for the note about the internal lines. That makes lots of sense.

[Greenlaw]

Cool! And, yeah, I understand why easier bone selection is necessary. Every now and then, I find myself on a frame where some bones overlap, and the one I need to animate becomes tricky to select. Sometimes I have to select the top bone and temporarily shy it to do what I need. Luckily, this situation happens very rarely, but it's annoying when it does happen.

Oh, I just recalled a past situation that is ideal for Vitruvian Bones. Several years ago, I made a character for a DreamWorks show that had different hair sub-rigs for each head angle in place at frame 0, and it was such a pain to animate because of the overlapping bones.* This was before I knew about Victor's Rig Switch trick, and I would have used it for that situation.

Nowadays, Vitruvian Bones is definitely the way to go for this setup.

*I just remembered how I animated the hair. I was using Sketch Bones to 'drawnimate' the hair blowing in the wind using the Sketch Bones tool, but because of the overlapping bone chains, it was difficult to select the 'strands' (bone chains) I wanted to used Sketch Bones with. I think I did wind up using Offset Bones but only to make it easier to select the bones at frame 0. (This was also when I started using the Design Mode toggle switch more routinely.) I did the same thing for another character's extra long tail too...DM toggle, select tail bone chain, then DM toggle back to 'drawnimate' the tail.