Hello! I don't know if this has been addressed before but I can't find anything about it happening to anyone else, and I don't know any other way to word it (obviously "rotate bones" tends to give unspecific results).

I am doing a simple animation, basically a box opening, using bone animation. Possibly bone animation for this is overkill but I have similar problems when doing character run cycles and the like, so it would be good if I can have this problem solved. Each bone corresponds to one part of the "lid" (which is split into four parts), and I simply rotate them by hand into the "up" position. Easy as pie, right? Check out my animation result, though:

http://www.starquail.com/michael/problembox.avi

The top and bottom bones "wiggle" as they rotate upward, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. And then the ones on the sides don't have this problem, so, really, what the heck! I typically don't bother with any extensive rigging or get into the deep controls of how bones work, but it seems like "rotate straight up" is not a difficult command to do correctly! Any advice?

I'm using 3DS Max v.5.1

Thank you very much!

dont use 3dsmax, but by the sound of it it looks like a "weighing" problem. You should make sure the influence stops 100% at the end of the lid.
But i have no idea how to "weight" your bones in 3dsmax... sry.

I actually just got a solution from someone at the 3DBuzz forum, which I will crosspost here for people in the future who might search for wiggling bones (actually I should have searched for tweening errors, or something, now that I think about it?)



It turns out I don't actually know anything about this zero-out option (and as usual the included documentation is totally vague) and while it does work, I still don't know why the problem occurs at all, or really what this option is doing. If anyone knows, I would like to know, too!

Thanks