Vitruvian Bone Options

[Floonicorn]

I'm using Moho Debut. I have the option to use Vitruvian bones, but whenever I try to create one there's no option to group bones. I have all of the bones selected and have tried with both layers showing and with only one layer showing. Is there something I could be doing wrong?

[Greenlaw]

Hi Floonicorn,

Vitruvian Bones is a Pro feature. I'm guessing that in Debut you can animate a rig that uses Vitruvian Bones, but you need to use Pro to create them.



Sorry.

[Floonicorn]

Oh. Alright. Since Debut is much more limited, is there a way to work around this lack of Vitruvian or Smart Bones?

[Hoptoad]

Here is a work-around for Vitruvian Bones. . .

If you want to create, for example, 3 different right arms for a characters and switch between them, you could create those 3 arms on 3 different layers and create the bones for the arms as usual, but uncheck "Visible" for the 2 least-useful arm layers (in Layer Settings), and hide their bones (choose the Select Bone tool, select a bone and click the Shy Bone box). When you want to use one of the hidden arms while animating, on that particular frame, uncheck "Visible" to hide the visible arm, then make one of the non-visible arms become Visible via the checkbox, and use Bone> Show All Bones in the menu to see its bones.

You could use Actions instead of Smart Bone Actions. Actions can't do everything Smart Bones can do, but they are pretty powerful nonetheless.

[Greenlaw]

If using Debut, I would place variants of a character (front, 3qtr, side, etc.,) inside a switch layer. The tricky bit with this setup is you'll need to match each variant's post to cut smoothly with the previous variant, and I don't think Debut has Onion Skin mode.

I wouldn't put sub-rigs inside Switches because animating a character's bones in multiple bone layers could get really gnarly to animate with.

Let me think about it. It's true that Debut is very limited compared to the Pro version but maybe there's a reasonable workaround.