I am animating a character for game and I’ve used layers on action editor for the 1st time. At first had issue with blendshape not working on action editor. later someone on facebook blender group said to drive blendshape with bones. So I did that and now new problem arrived.
Sorry! it didn’t let me post multiple pic as I’m new user, so had to merge them
So basically what happened is whenever I click the blendshape bone, it shows all the keyframes of character armature and curves in graph editor too. It’s getting hard to animated since both BS bone and character rig keyframes are shown together and overlapping.
And I couldn’t find any solution. so I’m here to get some help regarding this issue. Is there anyway to not show other bones keyframe when they are not selected? If anyone is familiar with this problem please help me.
When armatures share the same action, the bones from both armatures will still show in the Action Editor. If you don’t want to see the other bones, you can just make a separate action for the BS and Character armature.
The other option is to just merge the armature for the blend shapes into the main one, that’s what I’ve done for my character.
I keep it as two armatures for working and so that the main rig, which is Rigify based can still be adjusted and even re-generated if need be.
Then I prep and save a ‘final’ version of the character which is used for all linking and Library Overrides. This is when I join both rigs together, but can use layers to show or hide the various controls.
I am not sure about it but it looks as if you had 2 armatures, one that only drives the shapekeys the other is character rig. I do not know why you did it and probably its going to cause you lots of headaches just because you did it.
I wonder if there is a reason, because if it is an error you should fix it by joining the armatures. And then, you will have those controller bones for the shapekeys.
I did the same test a while ago because I would like to use unreal engine so I confirm that it works. Yes, the “morph targets” once imported, if they are activated by bone will work 100%.
They not only appear in action editor, they appear in timeline too. if it was only action editor that would not have been problem
I will try merging the bones as Andromaxpro suggested. If that doesn;t work I will make seperate action.
Thank you for suggestion
If I merge two bones in rig file, will it still have animation data for that bone in animation file? I have linked rig file for the one I;m animating. Thanks for answering. I just recently moved from Maya to Blender so I’m not that familiar with all Blender stuff yet.
yeah it has 2 armatures. I recently moved from Maya to Blender and I did not know that Blendshape doesn;t work on action editor layers. that;s when someone on FB suggested to use seperate bones. and this problem occured. I will try merging those armatures. I still have new problem occuring. lets see if merging bones will fix that problem. Thank your for your answer.
@AndromaxPro@thetony20@KamauKianjahe Thank you so much for your answers. Combining two bone fixed issue although I had to do it hard way because I had to create new bones in rig file, combine new bone with character rig and had to copy all BS animation keys to New BS bones and clean up again in rig file. Really thank you for the solution
In the dope sheet there’s also the shape key editor. But the thing is, if you use it in a game engine and you want automatic activation you should use a bone. Because otherwise you just import the morph targets and then you have to set up blueprints to activate them. Instead with bone movement the activation is done automatic.
Yeah, likely going to be a little messy doing it after already linking and animating, rather then having it all setup and one rig from the start. But once sorted things should work fairly well and it’s easy enough to add more blendshapes to the rig, which will then just show up as new animation controls in any linked file.
