I realize you are irritated by the problems you are having, and you seem a little quick on the foul language, but could you please refrain from using curse words in your .blend attachments … young kids visit this forum …
And now for your problem … The first thing you have to do is to enable proxy linking to those armature layers you want to proxy link by going to the Armature panel and then to the bone layer tabs and then Ctrl-LMB on the bone layer that you want animation access through linking . When you Ctrl-LMB on the bone layer, the light gray dot will turn black (this indicates that all the bones in that bone layer is animation enabled through a proxy link) .
Do that for all your armatures . Then make sure all your armatures are in Pose Mode and save your file .
Open up your external scene and link using groups like you did before . And just like you did before, from the Outliner, RMB and “Link Group Objects to Scene” . And that’s it . You can start animating the linked group . You do not need to go into the 3D view and Ctrl-Alt-P to make each armature a proxy, it was all done for you through the Outliner .
It is important that all your rigs be in Pose Mode in the saved file when linking for this to work smoothly (one of your head rigs was in Object Mode, and I had to make proxy through the 3D view and experienced some of your problems) … All the parenting relationships/transforms seem to get deleted/screwed up when you proxy link to them individually …
The enabling of proxy links through the bone layer is very poorly documented (almost none at all except a mention of it is in the Mancandy FAQ or so I hear), and your rigs would not have been posable in your linked scene, so I hope I prevented you from throwing another F-bomb across the web
How do you reset the transformations? (not clear them)
What is apply transformation for if it’s not for resetting transforms to 0?
Do you mean Ctrl-A ? That only applies/clears scale/rotations . If you want to clear location transforms you have to use Alt-G …
Cheers VP, How obscure. How did you find out about that.
Anyway it seems to work now. For some reason I have to press undo to get all the hierarchy to snap into position and if I do switch to object mode on the armatures it won’t allow me to switch back to pose mode so then I have to manually make proxy. But that seems to work fine so it’s al good.
Sorry about the swearing. Where I could from we use that sort of language as punctuation.
As for Alt G. Thats not what I means either. I mean to reset the co-ords to 0 without moving the geometry.
While trying to help someone else make a proxy instance on the forum . BTW there is a tool tip that tells you exactly what I said to do if you hover your mouse over the bone layers for a while, but yeah the lack of official documentation for a lot of the little improvements they added during BBB can be frustrating at times … Like what is the keyboard short cut for showing which vertex group a vertex belongs to ? …
As for Alt G. Thats not what I means either. I mean to reset the co-ords to 0 without moving the geometry.
Well you can’t do that in Blender unfortunately, like I explained to someone else switching from other apps a while ago, Blender takes the “Global orientation is the parent” paradigm very strictly in its Object Mode/animation system and consequently you can’t “clear transform” to a new location with 0 coordinates … Some workarounds are : lock the Loc parameters after you move your object/parent it to an empty and move the empty/set an object “rest pose” by keying the location and saving the action/pose …
I realize it’s these little things (which are not explained nor documented, I just happened to know some 3D programming concepts) that can drive someone crazy coming from another app (the whole Z up thing drives me nuts myself, as it is internally inconsistent with some major aspects of the program like curves and armatures) who doesn’t know how and why some basic things are set up the way they are, but I think it is more a confusion issue then some fundamental flaw . Once you understand the rationale of why it is set up this way, the easier it is to find a simple workaround …
And then there is of course 2.5 and Durian … though little basic aspects like you are running into most likely won’t be “fixed” in them …
Hey tmcthree,
These issues are frustrations of mine as well.
Regarding proxying two armatures: in general it’s best to set up the rig so that there is only one control armature. Then you only need to make single armature proxy. It’s also nice this way, because then all of the animation for a character will stay in a single action.
As for applying transforms, there unfortunately isn’t a way to do that in Blender. Bones effectively have that functionality in the sense that wherever they are placed in edit mode is considered “zero”. But there’s no way to do this with objects, unfortunately. Which sucks, especially when using objects (like lattices and curves) to do deformations.
Hopefully some of these issues can be resolved on Durian… but no promises.
No worries. Don’t get me wrong. I think Blender is brilliant, the software and the ethos and it can be even better. I’m really not bothered by the little Idiosyncrasies, provided they have a reasonable work around and don’t interfere with flow. (I won’t mention it, but you know what I’m thinking about).
I tested “the advanced visualiser” and “kinemation” for Wavefront back in about 1992-93. That was painful.
