Armature jumps to a different position when selected

I have a strange issue in my Blender file. Selecting any bone in pose mode causes the whole armature to jump to a different spot/pose. Changing animation/armature settings or playing the animation resets it to the correct spot in the animation but it jumps back the moment any bone is selected.

  • The armature and mesh is linked from another file, in that file there is no problem.
  • It only happens with an animation/action associated with the mesh. If I delete all animations then I can move the armature and select bones without any issues.
  • Creating more than 1 keyframe causes it to happen again.
  • The place it jumps to is not the default position/pose.
  • I have encountered this once before and I was able to fix it after several hours of trial and error but I never was sure what ended up working.
  • In the file I also have strange behaviour animating other objects with them jumping around when I go to move them.
  • I’m on 4.3.1.

So far I have tried the following and nothing worked:

  • Making it a local copy does not fix the issue.
  • Creating a new animation doesn’t fix the issue.
  • Deleting it all and re-linking
  • Deleting it all and appending
  • Checking settings in playback and other places to check they are set to default.

I have searched around and tried some AI chats but haven’t been able to find anything like this.

Is my file bugged or is there some hidden setting that might cause this? Any ideas on what else I can try would be much appreciated.

Well the first thing that comes to mind is in the file you are linking from, do the mesh object and armature object both have matching loc/rot/scale?

That is the usual culprit of problems like these…

If not, you may have to post up the file

Randy

Hi Randy thanks for your reply, the scales were off but I don’t think that’s the cause because the bones themselves were moving.

I did find a fix though. Now it appears to working. I still have no idea what the problem was but I’ll detail how I solved the issue. For further context, my main file has several scenes and some folders are linked.

Solution:

  • Delete the scenes one by one and test by clicking bones in pose mode until the problem goes away.
  • Once I discovered where the issue was I was able to reload the file
  • Go to the problem scene
  • “New Scene” and “Full Copy” on the problem scene (it was “c30” in the image)
  • Delete the original scene.

armature_issue_moving_bones_fix

It doesn’t make sense to me that full copy would copy everything but the problem but I’m happy it’s seemingly fixed.

I thought it might have been to do with linking but I think the last time I encountered this issue I didn’t use any linking so I’m not sure on that one.

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