Is there a way to move bone without moving children

[animas3D]

Hello friends,

Is there a way, during the rigging process (at frame zero) to move a bone that might have parent/child hierarchical dependencies on it to another position without moving it's children? This is only for designing the rig, not for animation (although maybe that might be helpful).

For example, in a 3D program I use, if you press a key on your keyboard, you can move or rotate a bone to a new position without affecting its children during the rigging process.

Does something like that exist in Moho, because right now, the only way I can see to do it would be to unparent all of its children, move the bone, and then reparent everything. That is tedious.

Thank you!

[Greenlaw]

On frame 0 you should be able to unparent the child bone temporarily and then move the parent. (Parent Tool, Alt click to select child, Click empty space to unparent.)

The child and its decedents will remain in place and you can transform the parent freely without affecting the child and its decedents.

Once you're finished transforming the parent bone, you can reparent the child. The child and all of its decedents will parent in place.

Note that you can do this only on frame 0, which is where you should do all your rigging edits anyway.

Hope this helps.

[Greenlaw]

Additional info:

If the parent has many children connected directly to the parent, you can select all of them and unparent them at once. It should only take two clicks and you shouldn't have to unparent them individually.

If this is something you need to do repeatedly, unfortunately there's no way to make selection sets for bones. (Maybe someone has a script for this? I'll ask/look around.) But to be honest, I've been using Moho in TV production for over 8 years and haven't found this to be a big problem.

Hope this helps.

[Greenlaw]

Oh, forgot to mention: you can make arbitrary selections of bones all at once using the Lasso mode option. This can let you make fairly large selections of bones very quickly.

Note that you want to select only the immediate children. If you select their decedents too, they will unparent from their parents.

[animas3D]

Thank you for your help. Your suggestion of unparenting multiple bones is a good one, however it only partially removes the burden.

in my experience, when designing complex rigs for animation there inevitably comes a point where you what to modify your character design by moving some points around and then modifying your rig to accommodate the new design.

If this happens towards the end of the hierarchy, it is usually not that complicated. However if it happens in the middle of a rig, or towards the beginning, and a there are a lot of parent/child dependencies, it can get hairy.

I will do as you suggest, but if you know of a script or add-on that allows you to keep the parent/child dependencies while allowing you to reposition a bone, please let me know.

Thanks again!

[Greenlaw]

You might look into Eugene's MR Transform Rig Tool. I'm not sure it will do exactly what you need but this is an advanced tool that let's you perform complex rig edits that can't normally be done in Moho without a lot of extra work.

[animas3D]

Thank you. It is an interesting script. I still need to understand what it does (and I'll look into that further, as well as his YouTube channel). However, it doesn't look quite what we were talking about.

However, it does make me curious about other scripts and the notion of scripts in general. Are there any must-have scripts that you can think of? A couple of suggestions would be a great start!

Cheers!