Hi - Oh Great & Wonderfull Rigging Deities.

I noticed some very weird behavior of the Chief Loon's arm bones in the timeline in a recent animation I did.

I thought it was A:M ver14c specific problem (and put in a report) - but I am now wondering if perhaps it is a problem with Chief Loons rig ?

I had been happily animating away for hours (used maintain shoulder orientation for both arms) - and all of a sudden it appears that the channels get wierded up for the left forearm bone. So I deleted - I thought - all the bad channels and re-animated (not as happily). Same (similar) thing happened again.

Any insight into what might be causing this weirdness to happen?

EDIT: Also when I start a new clean chor with just Chief Loon - and animate along - using maintain shoulder orientation - I do not see any weirdness in the channels - I can not figure out what I might have done to cause this. Twice. Is there something funny about using the manipulators?, or animating on frame 0?

I see no problem with the rig, I can't even reproduce the problem. Can you upload the chor to svn so I can take a look?

Is this on the new computer, is it Vista?

Yes this is on my new computer - but windows xp pro.

The chor was created from scratch with 14c.

The zip file contains everything except chief loon - I was using the one off the svn. There are 2 chors - labeled notok & ok - but when I looked at the ok one - it too wasn't really ok - yet I could animate with it. I did eventually go back to 13s with the ok one (even tho it wasn't, and I didn't realize it at the time) and finish animating.

But I am afraid to start anything again with 14c or the Loon for that matter.

I am unable also to figure out what I could have done to create this. I keep trying to turn on/off the maintain shoulder - manipulate the shoulder bones using rotate, move forearm bones - delete channels, all sorts of stuff to try and recreate problem.

I deleted the bones that appeared to be a child of another bone in the PWS chor action. I save the chor and still can't reproduce the problem.

The only way I could get this problem was to drag and drop one bone to another, but deleting the bone that ended up as the child bone isn't a problem.

Thanks so much for looking Mark

Yes, I too had deleted those bad channels and tried to animate from there. What I noticed then was that if I then re-animated the forearm bone on frame 0, and frame 14-ish that the phantom channel data came back for the forearm past frame 14 - but yet I couldn't see it in the timeline (see new chor)

Also I too thought I might have dragged the bones as well but it's hard to imagine how I would have dragged them under 3 different bones, and do it repeatedly.

very very weird stuff.

I don't see it in the timeline or in the animation. I don't see any additional movement of the forearm after frame 15.

I might be imagining it - might be an illusion with the bicep moving and hand movement and I'm confusing it with forearm movement (see around frames 130 - 145 ).

Yes I am very confused as to what I might have done to do this.

Dragging the bones was my first guess - but I can't imagine how or when I did that.

The forearm geometry is twisting, but that is the way it is suppose to be. This is do to the hand Z rotation. The forearm has twisting fan bones.

The other thing that is ocurring to me now - when I tried dragging a bone to be a child of another on purpose in the PWS - it showed with the bone symbol - rather than a constraint symbol as my first examples showed.

Also what I just realized is that once a bone gets accidently dragged (I sure don't know why I would want to do that) - it's impossible to undrag it or put it back where it belongs - unless there is some trick to it that I'm not seeing. Undo doesn't work.

I've also just noticed that 13s won't let you drag bones onto bones - that's probably why it hasn't happened before to me - This was the first time I had used 14c to animate.