motion mixer ignores one morph channel, why?

[lukaspanic]

Hello,

first of all, since this is my first post here, hello to everyone :)

Now to my problem: I have a character ready to animate with bones etc and including a few morphs for facial expressions and for the eyelids.
I made an animation where the character is sleeping and you see him breathe (spine moves, arms move, facial expressions for inhaling and exhaling). The eyes are closed, all the time, no change to that channel.

Once i make my character an actor in motion mixer and add the animation as a motion, everything works fine except the eyes are wide open.

I tried to make an animation where only the eyes open and close a little to see if i can get motion mixer to work with my eyes at all but it messes them up every time. They are always wide open, no matter what I do.

What am i doing wrong?:stumped:
For reference, the character is morfi from the Wordware Book Cartoon Character Creation 1
The eyelids are separate from the head and are opened and closed with bones

[Wonderpup]

It might be worth adding the morph tracks via the x channels, in case they were not part of the original actor- I'm not sure if motion mixer auto detects morph channels.

[lukaspanic]

I have tried it but Motion Mixer gives me an error saying "Channel is assigned to an actor". If i ScanXChannels the result is "No additional channels found"

[Wonderpup]

If you go over to Spinquad.com there is a forum there dedicated to the Cartoon Character Creation books where you can put questions directly to the author- he may be able to help you out. (One problem I did have with rigging bones for eyes is trying to use RPR and targeting- the two don't like each other.)

[THREEL]

Hello lukaspanic,

How's it going? If you haven't got your problem figured out, here's a thought. It might be the problem, or might not. Have you looked at the subdivision order for the object layer your characters eyelids reside in. Subdivision order is under the Geometry tab in the properties panel of the object you're working on. If you've never used it before, Subdivision order includes these options: First, after morphing, after bones, after displacement, after motion, and last. It is supposed to tell the points, polygons, etc. where to move to get the "look" that you want. If you're using morphmixer, bones, or whatever to move specific areas of your object, you (almost) never want "First'. The thing is, when you are using a combination of ways such as bones and morphmixer together, to make your creation move, it can be difficult to choose a subdivision order that will give you the correct "look". Sometimes you have to try all of the options and pick the best solution. I'm not saying this is your problem, but it's worth giving it a try.

I hope this will be of some help to you.:thumbsup: THREEL