Linked Model and Rigg not updating...

Support Animation and Rigging
#1

Okay I have a Mesh and Rigg that I Grouped together in a .blend file… I then linked… (not appended) them into a Project file to be animated… I then gave the Rigg a proxy… I Keyed some animation on that Rigg to build an animation and Rendered it out… I then noted some minor Rigging errors … which I went back into the original Modeling .blend file to fix… I saved the file out… I then opened my Project file that the model group was linked into expecting the Rigg to be updated… but no luck…

What have I missed? is there something else I need to do to get the Model Mesh and Rigg to update without having to do the animation all over again?

#2

i guess you have to set the correct protected layers of the armature

#3

So when I save the Origonal file I have to make sure the protected layers are set the same as they origonaly were? … or no…? also I see where it says… “Protected layers in proxy instances are restored to Proxy settings on file reload”… But I"m still not getting that to effect anything… I can see that my Origonal model/Rigg file has several bones that I changed from IK constraints to Track to constraints… In the animation file the IK constraints are still there… no update to the rigg…

#4

Okay I did a test… I took my Mesh/Rigg and ‘linked’ it into a new animation file… gave it a proxy on the Rigg and everything worked… So … how do I get the old animation file to update with the changed Rigg? I"m not even sure where the old file is getting the Mesh/Rigg from … since it should be referencing it out of the File that i have changed and saved… is there some Blender Cache somewhere that I need to clear?

#5

http://www.infoocean.info/avatar3.jpgi guess you have to set the correct protected layers of the armature

#6

you could append the animation datablock into the new file, and assign to the rig. it should work. take in account that the action datablock it works storing the name of bones, so if you change them, it won’t work properly.

#7

Thanks Eileen36 and gmendieta… I finally decided it was some kind of disorder between 2.61 and 2.62… I relinked the file in 2.62 and just reanimated… so not sure why it was doing what it was doing still but I went through some interesting reads on the Blender site on datablocks and linking that still didn’t really give me a clue as to why it wasn’t working so…
My real fear is … Is this going to happen when I get a big project going with lots of linked files and such?
Hope not…

#8

u have only to find your way to work. i’m changing a lot of times my rigs, and having a median understanding of how blender works internally (not to deep) it’s enough to change things and get it working. i’m doing everyday this kind of things. if u want, send me a message. maybe i could find what’s wrong.

#9

Thanks for the offer gmendieta… but it the file wasn’t that big of a deal I got it working and all… it was just worrying me as I didn’t want to get stuck with the same problem in the future… and I wanted to know if anyone else had had the same problems before… I’m chalking it up to changes in the programing… That kind of goofiness seems to always crop up regardless of what software your using… So no worries guy…

#10

From my experience this is how it works:
Say you have an armature in a linking file and a source file. Your linking file makes a proxy of the armature. Ok now … any data that can be stored by the linking file’s proxy armature (poses, constraints … I’m not sure about IPOs) will obviously be redundant with the source file’s data. Which data should be used? Well, for protected bone layers, source file data is used, and unprotected layers use local data.

Sometimes I wanted to add a constraint to my rig. To do this, I would add it in my source file, protect the layer, save the source file, load the linking file (the new constraints are now applied), and save the linking file. It so happens that I prefer to animate unprotected bones (because Blender annoyingly doesn’t let you manually enter bone coordinates/rotations/scaling on protected layers) so I have to go back and unprotect the same bone layers, and save again. Now everything is ready.
Whew.

Yeah, that’s how it works for me.

And yeah, sometimes I royally screw things up by … I donno … renaming bones or something, and my animation breaks, and I don’t know how to fix it. In this case, I do as mentioned above - I start a new file, link everything in, and append the IPO data, and sometimes that works :stuck_out_tongue:

#11

[QUOTE=TwirlySocrates;2079766]
Sometimes I wanted to add a constraint to my rig. To do this, I would add it in my source file, protect the layer, save the source file, load the linking file (the new constraints are now applied), and save the linking file. It so happens that I prefer to animate unprotected bones (because Blender annoyingly doesn’t let you manually enter bone coordinates/rotations/scaling on protected layers) so I have to go back and unprotect the same bone layers, and save again. Now everything is ready.
Whew.

oooooh… okay now I see… for some reason I was not getting what others were saying about protected layers… That did it right there… I then went into my source file… changed the layers that were protected to unprotected… (or unselected to selected in the protected layers list) then Saved… then Opened… my Animation file and checked the constraints… everyrthing transfered over perfect… Okay… Great… Thanks Twirly… and gmendieta… (sorry I wasn’t understanding what was being said before)…

#12

i’m really pleased norvman.