TBS 7.1 bones error, skin coloring

Here’s where I’m at. On more than one project the bones have failed.

I apologize up front for not posting my computer specs, but I’m not a tech head, so I don’t really keep track of that, though it does have 10GB memory and is Windows Vista.

The first problem I had was the bones refusing to work on a character. More specifically the problem was that I had three characters in a scene. the first two had 3 part bones for their arms and legs. On the third character it allowed me to add similar bones to both arms and one of the legs before it wouldn’t apply the last set of bones to the remaining leg. My work around was to animate the old way with that leg.

The second problem has happened twice to me. I had the arm designed, and then added the bones, and when I’d move the bone part of the coloring was gone. I rendered it out to see how it looked, and the coloring wasn’t there, just the outline. Since both times that happened in a short scene I just worked around it by animating the arm with different images.
(in the video it happens with the Cop in the first scene, and the Hells Angel in the last scene)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1B8kizCjQA

This would be very vexing if I were to bump into this kind of error/glitch on a character that needed full arm/extremity motion. Any idea why the skin coloring goes away once a bone is activated?

You don’t provide enough information but my advice would be to not mix transparent colors with transparency effects because the way that the different methods of transparency combine are different in the display (OpenGL) view and in the render. If you do feel the need to do so, always do a test render so you can see what the final result is expected to look like.