Cowboy Fingers Rieklings

[Cavalorn13]

Hey guys...I am making animations for rieklings, but this sh*t occurs more often in them. I dont even use fingers (they are in default position) in this one and he looks like a damned cowboy ready to shoot. I used my own rig at first and it happened, then I switched to ABC's Biped Rig and it happens also. Frustrating thing is that in most animations his fingers are alright, even in those which use fingers. So I have no idea what causes this. Ingame I use official updated ABC skeleton. Please help so I can make a lot of animations...Im loosing will to work :_D
 

[Seijin8]

2 hours ago, Cavalorn13 said:

Hey guys...I am making animations for rieklings, but this sh*t occurs more often in them. I dont even use fingers (they are in default position) in this one and he looks like a damned cowboy ready to shoot. I used my own rig at first and it happened, then I switched to ABC's Biped Rig and it happens also. Frustrating thing is that in most animations his fingers are alright, even in those which use fingers. So I have no idea what causes this. Ingame I use official updated ABC skeleton. Please help so I can make a lot of animations...Im loosing will to work :_D
 

Sorry to say that you aren't likely to get general help on this.  The number of people who understand the animation side are very few, and they are usually not randomly browsing help topics here.

 

Would recommend reaching out to @Billyy, Anubis, or @SirNibbles for an assist.

[MadMansGun]

weird, have you tried deleting any keyframes that are on those finger nodes, and just setting them at the beginning and end of the animation?

 

also screenshots for your export settings may be helpful.

[SirNibbles]

Got a mention from my name here.

 

This problem has to do with the finger bones, and happens every so often.

 

Set your animation scene on the 0th keyframe first, might sound stupid but it's actually pretty important not to forget this.

The whereabouts of this problem seems to affect the middle and ring finger, so hide everything in your scene except the riekling bones (if they are already hidden, unhide them for now) then click the bones that move the riekling index/middle finger (one by one, don't do this fix for both at the same time because it'll bug). Now click the 3ds max tab "animation" followed by "bone tools", now spam click the "reset stretch" and "reset scale" button.

Do this for approx 30secs of spamming (sometimes clicking both of them once fixes it, but there's no way to test untill in game, so might as well make sure you overdo it). The end resulting "stretch factor" should end at 1.0; it probably was on something different then 1.0 at the 0th keyframe.

And now it should be fixed.

 

In my experience this happens because at some point in your animation you animated a bone to it's maximum limit (for humans e.g: put the thumb controls to 10.0) I'm not really sure why this should cause a problem but I have encountered this problem a lot of times and also fixed it a lot of times with the solution I've written.

 

Good luck

[MadMansGun]

.....things like this make me glad that i don't use rigs.

[Grey Cloud]

If nothing else, the title of this thread conjures up some strange images. ?

Next you'll be telling us that Roy Rogers had an itchy Trigger finger. ?

[Billyy]

I don't pretend to understand why this stuff happens, but humanoid creatures do this frequently with their fingers. Draugr, Falmer, Riekling, Giant being the common offenders. I know during export if I'm going to see this behaviour because on export the log will complain about invalid skew/scale in orange. (Warning : Animation for bone NPC L Finger32 [LF32] has invalid skew/scale). I fix it by doing what Nibbles has suggested with the Selecting affected bones (error tells you which bones are having issues) Animations > Bone tools > reset/scale+reset stretch. Then attempt to export again and see if you get an errors.

 

Sometimes works first time, sometimes only some bones stop giving errors and sometimes it doesn't do shit. Then you just brute force keep doing it until it works. Sometimes smashing them multiple times is the way to go. On rare occasions it makes it worse, or if it just doesn't seem to work ever and then you can try starting export with another fresh copy of the animation, or trying to box more bones attached to them (IE if finger bones giving issues maybe you try resetting resetting scale/stretch of the wrist/arm bones. Basically it's an art, but often just resetting scale/stretch both once, then trying export, will eventually get them all working. Also I think resetting scale first then stretch is more reliable...

 

 

 

You can see in this behaviour in my screenshot here for a draugr (worst offender). In this case there are so many, but they're all arm nodes, so I'd just box all the bones in both arms instead of trying to pick out each one.

 

 

It took me 3 attempts but now I've lowered the error bones down to these, which is where I'd pick out each bone and continue the process until their are no skew/scale errors. After which there should be no more cowboy fingers. Any bone that has a skew/scale error will dot that jerky shit, so in my case both draugr arms would be wacky inflatable armsing about if I didn't fix errors.

 

[Cavalorn13]

On 9/24/2020 at 1:51 PM, SirNibbles said:

Got a mention from my name here.

 

This problem has to do with the finger bones, and happens every so often.

 

Set your animation scene on the 0th keyframe first, might sound stupid but it's actually pretty important not to forget this.

The whereabouts of this problem seems to affect the middle and ring finger, so hide everything in your scene except the riekling bones (if they are already hidden, unhide them for now) then click the bones that move the riekling index/middle finger (one by one, don't do this fix for both at the same time because it'll bug). Now click the 3ds max tab "animation" followed by "bone tools", now spam click the "reset stretch" and "reset scale" button.

Do this for approx 30secs of spamming (sometimes clicking both of them once fixes it, but there's no way to test untill in game, so might as well make sure you overdo it). The end resulting "stretch factor" should end at 1.0; it probably was on something different then 1.0 at the 0th keyframe.

And now it should be fixed.

 

In my experience this happens because at some point in your animation you animated a bone to it's maximum limit (for humans e.g: put the thumb controls to 10.0) I'm not really sure why this should cause a problem but I have encountered this problem a lot of times and also fixed it a lot of times with the solution I've written.

 

Good luck

 

47 minutes ago, Billyy said:

I don't pretend to understand why this stuff happens, but humanoid creatures do this frequently with their fingers. Draugr, Falmer, Riekling, Giant being the common offenders. I know during export if I'm going to see this behaviour because on export the log will complain about invalid skew/scale in orange. (Warning : Animation for bone NPC L Finger32 [LF32] has invalid skew/scale). I fix it by doing what Nibbles has suggested with the Selecting affected bones (error tells you which bones are having issues) Animations > Bone tools > reset/scale+reset stretch. Then attempt to export again and see if you get an errors.

 

Sometimes works first time, sometimes only some bones stop giving errors and sometimes it doesn't do shit. Then you just brute force keep doing it until it works. Sometimes smashing them multiple times is the way to go. On rare occasions it makes it worse, or if it just doesn't seem to work ever and then you can try starting export with another fresh copy of the animation, or trying to box more bones attached to them (IE if finger bones giving issues maybe you try resetting resetting scale/stretch of the wrist/arm bones. Basically it's an art, but often just resetting scale/stretch both once, then trying export, will eventually get them all working. Also I think resetting scale first then stretch is more reliable...

 

 

 

You can see in this behaviour in my screenshot here for a draugr (worst offender). In this case there are so many, but they're all arm nodes, so I'd just box all the bones in both arms instead of trying to pick out each one.

 

 

It took me 3 attempts but now I've lowered the error bones down to these, which is where I'd pick out each bone and continue the process until their are no skew/scale errors. After which there should be no more cowboy fingers. Any bone that has a skew/scale error will dot that jerky shit, so in my case both draugr arms would be wacky inflatable armsing about if I didn't fix errors.

 

This is the stupidest process Ive ever heard...but it works :_D Thank you guys, you saved me so much

[Billyy]

25 minutes ago, Cavalorn13 said:

 

This is the stupidest process Ive ever heard...but it works :_D Thank you guys, you saved me so much

Story of my life. Todd finds a way no matter what. It just works.

[MadMansGun]

1 hour ago, Billyy said:

invalid skew/scale

for that i just select all nodes and go to the bone tools window to change the stretch from "scale" to "none", do it before animating and that "invalid" stuff will never show up in the first place.