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"Mirror All Smartskin" doesn't seem to mirror the bones part of the Smartskin.


luckbat

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Okay, here's the deal.

 

My character wears a cloak. The cloak has 60 bones arranged in vertical chains of four. I control the movement of the cloak by means of a pair of "lifter" bones which mirror the range of movement of the arm bones. The lifter bones use Smartskin to drive the motion of all the cloak bones, with various arrangements to accommodate various arm positions. (See screenshot below.)

 

In practice, it works quite well. There's just one problem. I can't seem to find any means of mirroring the right lifter's Smartskin over to the left lifter. Selecting "Mirror All Smartskin" only copies over the spline deformations, completely ignoring the bone keys I have so meticulously set up.

 

Am I missing something? Why does "Mirror All Smartskin" only mirror the muscle keyframes and not the bone ones? Normally I'd grit my teeth and just manually copy-and-paste-mirrored over all the keys, but even that doesn't work. When I copy a given keyframe and try to paste-mirror it into the left-lifter's Smartskin window, all the cloak bones properly receive the correct mirrored values, but the lifter bone itself does not. Instead, it just sits there, inert, while each round of Paste Mirrored overwrites the previous state of the cloak bones, which defeats the purpose of Smartskin. In fact, there doesn't seem to be any way to mirror the keys for the left lifter bone at all--it just refuses to receive any kind of pasted value whatsoever. It's very frustrating.

 

So, in a nutshell, my question is this: How can I go about mirroring my elaborate bone-based Smartskin from the right lifter bone to the left one? Is "Mirror All Smartskin" not intended to handle bones? What should I do?

post-2568-1128051289_thumb.jpg

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Wild stabs in the dark...

 

Have you tried keying the left bone first then... copy mirrored? Make a smart skin for the left that "doesn't do anything".

 

Don't know anything for sure... but check the key button thingies, bottom left... to make sure you are getting everything...

 

Like I said, just stabs in the dark... be careful with those... they hurt.

 

Vernon "!" Zehr

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Don't know the real answer but some ideas.

 

All the bones need to be named either right or left, and be in reverse position of each other (I think I learned that from an old post of yours actually)

 

Have you messed with mirror tolerance in the tools->options panel?

 

Make a new copy of your model, delete everything but the half of the cape that works and the appropriate bones, make one new overall parent bone and try scaling it all to the opposite side, then import this new model of the cape and stitch it in place.

 

Good luck

 

-Alonso

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Smartskin copies cp/spline positions acording to bone movement, not bone positions or movement. You have to go and copy bone position for each keyframe (have to click on the bone to highlight it) and then paste mirrored to the other bone... haven't tried this yet, and it might not work. If it doesn't, you will have to do it manualy.

You could make a pose slider do what you want and in the smartskin change slider at keyframes so you can independently make changes to the pose later, instead of editing the smartskin over and over again.

 

This is a very complex way of dealing with clothing, but I understand sometimes you want more control than cloth can offer... keep plugin' away at it though... you may have a lightbulb pop up soon over your head.

 

EDIT:

It could also be a hierarchy problem... the lifter bones have to be children or parents in the same way in case you have some other constraints involved here with the other bones. I think that AM may "look" for the bone in the hierarchy looking in a place where it expects to find it in the hierarchy. This is only conjecture on my part... but it could be that you have to select the intended bone to paste to, also, so that you are pointing directly to the bone you want it pasted to.

Edited by entity
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