I have this character for which I have made some shape keys (open, close eyes… the such). I have made things fancier and mad them Driven shape keys (I have connected them to the bone movement)
so far so good…
Then to make things even more fancy I have made some action constraints and constrained some actions to the rotation of the other bones…
Then I tweaked bone weights, because some parts of the model weren’t moving right…
and now, when I try to move bones that drive shape keys… nothing happens… I have checked Ipo Curve Editor… my Driven shape keys are gone! disappeared!
I am at the 30 th revision of the model, and my Driven shape keys exit in 16 th but not in 17 th and all later revisions of the model…
QUESTION:
Why this happens, I have not done anything (as far as I remember) to touch those Driven shape keys…
Can I import them from the earlier iteration of the model (it will save me a lot of work)
How?
This was a long message, but I would be very grateful for any help!
Hi Ristesekoloski, I notice a while back that you had had a problem updating your changed base Mesh. Fligh helped you with the advice the you could hit the W key and choose - Propogate to all Shapes. You should do this only to the vertices that you have changed in the base Mesh. If you were to for example Select All, and Propogate - All shape meshs would have the same shape as the base mesh. Is this maybe what happened?
EDIT: It’s recommended not to edit your base mesh after applying shape keys. It can give weird results!
Thanks Patdog! I have already done that, but that was not the case here! I have remade my shapes after propagating base shape to all shapes…
Thing is, my Ipo Driven Keys dissapeared! Shapes were there, but I couldn’t animate them moving assigned bones. Also were gone those cute colored blocks that appear in Ipo window when there are Driven keys assigned.
So, thanks for your answer, but it doesn’t help - I have done that mistake and learned from it.
Mike_S! Thanks, but I think that there is no point in posting the file now, as I have redone Ipo Driven Keys (now I am at revision 39 of the file)…
Whn I am at it- and this may sound as a stupid question… Is there a way to erase an action? when I click on the X it makes the action local and does not erase it… While experimenting I have made some twenty action, most of which are empty… any advice?
Well the point would be that you don’t know how you managed to “lose” those shape keys and to prevent it happening again
To delete an action, is rather an obscure process :
Delete an Action
Blender automatically creates ‘fake-users’ to actions, so that they can be stored in blend files as a sort of library of actions.
To simply get rid of these actions once you have removed references to them (‘action constraints’, ‘action windows’, ‘nla strips’, etc.), press SHIFT F4, then find the folder named Action, right-click on the name of an action you wish to remove, and press “f”. The “number of users” should change to 0, i.e. you’ll see ‘F 0’ in the Data Select window.
Save the file, then re-open it and the action(s) are deleted.
Despite the rather cryptic and scary tooltip for the ‘X’ button in the action eidtor, “Deletes link to this datablock”, that button does NOT delete the action, it merely “disconnects the action from the currently selected object”. This “delete link” procedure is used when it is desireable to create a new Action that is NOT based on a current action, or to simply temporarily deactivate the current Action / IPO.
Editing weights after adding keys has never been a problem for me, but who knows what went wrong… Did you maybe change the order of keys? Ipo curves are corrupted after reordering keys, it was verified in a bug report.
Yes you can, but what do you want to import, the shapes or only the drivers?
If it is the drivers, the Ipo curves and drivers can be imported, but the bone assignments will be lost. You have to enter the bone names again, but redoing the curves is a lot more work than that.
Mike_S THANKS! I needed that piece of info (I have actually saved this thread as a reference ;-))
toloban: actually, I am not sure what I did that erased Ipo Keys… i think that i only changed body weights during the iterations of the process.
The drivers are what I was interested in (shapes were untouched)
In the meanwhile, I have found out that making Ipo Key Drivers is really fast using copy - paste process. It actually took some 15 minutes for 18 ipo key divers using this feature (not the first time, it took me hours of experimentation). it should be mentioned that my drivers are simple translation driven shape keys, so that is the reason for this ease.
And now another question!
Is there fool proof way to transfer complex NLA animation to other character with the same rig? This animation is made of some 10 different actions with transitions and hold - action selected… I know that actions per se can be transferred (tried that, it works), but NLA animations?
I was thinking of a little modification to a script I use, but it was smart of you to copy and paste curves. In the end it would have saved little work, because Python has a limited access to drivers.
