How to find the morphs that alter a bone's transform value, for a given frame?

Snuggins

Here's the context: Parameters pane. This is probably more relevant to animators but not necessarily, because I'm just trying to track down what's going on for a given frame.

Quick example for dial twirlers: Eyelids Lower Up-Down. You set it to a modest negative value in frame 0. Later on you want to wink the right eye so you prepare to twirl down Eyelids Lower Up-Down Right. It is already at the negative value set by the changes-them-both dial you set at frame 0. Some higher-up morph has changed this dependent morph. In this case you know which one it is, but it isn't always that simple.

What if you are twirling a dial or want to zero something,  but suddenly you hear behind you: "Um? I'm controlling that value? But go ahead on this frame if you want. Good luck." Hey where did that voice come from? You spin around. It's gone! Who said that?? That's the quest in this question.

A common experience I would think is when you'd like to zero a parameter. You can set the value to zero, but you don't get a nice black 0.00, you get a white 0.0000 meaning some morph is affecting the value. Or at least that's how I interpret that situation.

Besides the white 0.0000 (your theme might color it differently anyway), another way to see what's going on is to bring up GraphMate or the new Timeline Advanced View, settable by right-clicking on the Timeline tab and choosing View Mode -> Advanced View. I'm using 4.12.2.6 beta, but the new Timeline was added in the first release of 4.12 I believe.

Let's say you are trying to zero out the Y translation from Something -> Properties -> General -> Transforms -> Translation -> Y Translate. Don't forget to breathe!

In both GraphMate and the new Timeline you can see that the actual value over time is not an interpolated curve through the center of the keyframe boxes (GraphMate) or circles (Timeline), but rather that same interpolated curve translated up by about two units. Let's find out what morphs are causing this to happen, shall we?

Well, the only way I've ever been able to find out has been to keep track of the primary dials I have twirled via Favorites. Often I don't have those when loading older scenes or perhaps even my Favorites don't account for everything. What about  "Currently Used?" Well, it shows all the second-order values so it looks like theres more to remember than there really is. A single facial expression can cause 10 to 20 face morphs to go non-default, and they show up in Currently Used. You should be able to zero out your Favorites and get a nice clean nothing for Currently Used. Again, the hierarchy is not shown, just a flat set in the Currently Used list. So unless you've done the Favorites thing or written down what you changed, you can't reverse engineer the prime dial movers. Or can you? That's the broader question. The zoomed in version is hopefully more concrete and task-based: what set of morphs are contributing to a given value, for a given bone, on a given frame?