Removing bodyparts from override layer (MoBu 2011)

Rigging
#1

Here is what I did: I had an animation where the character does
all kind of stuff with his upper body while standing still. Not just
body animation but props, reach and constraint weights are keyed
as well.

When I needed a very similar animation but in a crouching pose
I copied the already made take and pasted on top of the
crouching pose as an override layer. Then I deleted all keys on
the legs and hips expecting that I start seeing their pose from
the main anim layer underneath.

Unfortunately what actually happened was that all controllers in
the leg and hips jumped to the origin and kept overriding stuff
from there. How can I remove those bits from the layer?

For now I can save a crouching pose and paste that above the
complex anim, but sooner or later I’ll encounter a situation which
can’t be worked around this easily, so I thought I ask soon enough. :slight_smile:

#2

There is a drop down filter near mute/might have to expand the hight, for what parts are affected by the story track, so you can limit the affect to just upper body.

#3

Sorry I forgot to tell that I’m editing takes and not
working in the story window.

#4

well now, isn’t that just convenient!

Joking,

This is easy easy, what you did by creating an offset pose on top is perfectly fine, it just is adjusting the space that the nodes are moving in…

but to fix your problem/workflow there you kind of have to make sure you never get keyframes on the lower body parts that are when adding/pasting the take in to the new layer. As soon as you do, the layer overides the animation.

So either as selection mode grab the fk and ik ctrls for the upper body, select the keys in the timeline, copy- go to override layer, paste. You will get a warning but that only applies to addtive layers…so ignore it.

This should leave hips/legs as the base animaiton and the override will be the upper body motion.

A bit touchy,but works.

I would just trust in my layers though and just add the pose offset over the top. but if for some reason the pose causes a problem then the paste selected works just fine.

#5

Hmm I see… so what you’re saying is that, in Photoshop
terms, once I pasted something as a new layer I can’t
make “pixels” transparent later, only “black”, which works
fine in “additive” blending mode but doesn’t help in “normal”.
:\

Anyways, I ended up with storing and pasting a dozen
poses for the body and directly pasting keyframes for
the rest of the properties (constraint weights, null positions
and the like). Wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be and it
forced me to finally group stuff for faster selection. :slight_smile:

Thank you for the help.

#6

Glad you got it worked out:) happy to help.