I’m having an issue with bone constraints.You can see that in the video Damped Track constraints I added initially work smoothly.Then I think I accidentally changed something, and now the damped track I’ve added afterward aren’t working properly. Bones are only rotate on one axis (x or y?) I haven’t been able to find a solution for this. Can anyone help?
Setting up Damped Track like this creates a Dependency Cycle. The bones are being told to track the position of a bone that is their child. But that child’s position is dependent on the position of the parent.
This is often used in tutorials as a way to automate dynamic wiggling. But it doesn’t give a predictable or consistent result.
There is a free addon called Wiggle (a rewrite of the original Wiggle Bones addon). You could try that, to see if it does what you need.
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I understand what you’re saying. Thanks for the addon suggestion, but the issue is that my previously working damped track system suddenly stopped functioning correctly. I even reset Blender to factory settings, but it still didn’t fix the problem.I want to know where I went wrong.
On the Window menu, there’s an option to display the system console window. That will let you see any errors that are being reported, and let you know if you are getting a Dependency Cycle.
The problem with dependency cycles, is that they can kinda-sorta look like things are working. But as you scrub the timeline, the results aren’t consistent between different playbacks. It’s best to avoid them if you can.
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Yes, it’s indeed giving a dependency cycle error as you mentioned. However, despite my research, most of the solutions I found didn’t work. I’m reinstalling Blender, but the same error keeps appearing in different versions as well. Why does this error keep occurring?
What solutions have you been looking at?
There will always be a cycle when the parent targets the child, which is controlled by the parent.
I’ve seen a lot of YouTube tutorials which suggest doing things the way you had originally set it up. These give the impression of a soution. Probably good enough for the tutorial to look complete. But they all crreate a cycle, and should be avoided for predictable results.
Without using that wiggle addon, you can add a dynamic effect with a helper object that has soft body dynamics on it. Then the aramture bones can target vertex groups within that helper mesh.
This video does something similar using cloth dynamics. He zips through it pretty fast, but it should give you the general idea.
The wiggle addon would simplfy the job though.
I can’t believe the solution is so simple! I just need to give the ‘influence’ value for each bone at the beginning. If I start with ‘1’, the same problem occurs, but if I change it, it is fixed. Thank you for your help.