Newb Masking confusion

[Jkoseattle]

I am sitting down to confront masking head-on. Making some progress. A few questions:

1. I created a group of vector layers of basic shapes. I chose "Hide all" for the group. The tutorials ALL show me this technique, and I feel like I'm going crazy because they all say "As you can see, I chose Hide All and now all my layers are hidden" --- but... they aren't hidden, I see some of them still. WTF??!!!?!! OK, anyway, that's not my question. So, I choose Hide All for the group, and then some of the child layers switch to "Mask this layer" with a little half moon icon thing next to the layer name, and some of them switch to "Add to mask", with a little plus sign. How does Moho decide which layers get which setting? I tried the Z order of the layers, but that seems to have no effect. What is the logic here?

2. This question is just trying to understand the terminology so I don't get continually tripped up, because it seems backwards from how I understand it. To me, a "mask" is something that covers something up. Like I'll put a (real life) mask in front of my face and my face is covered. OK, then there is the phrase "add to mask". Now, in the real world, if I add something to my mask, then my mask covers up MORE of my face, because I added something (such as a whimsical feather) to my mask. Say I cut an eye hole out of my mask. I have now REMOVED something from my mask, and so my eye shows through. In Moho it's backwards; Adding something to the mask means what I think of as removing something from the mask, namely, cutting a hole in my mask so something shows through. And vice versa. I'll buy that it's counter-intuitive, but my question is How should I think of this terminology so that it makes sense to me? I can totally see myself constantly being tripped up by thinking of it backwards.

3. What's the difference between "reveal all" and "no masking in this group"?

So combining the confusion of the terminology with the fact that Moho seems to decide at random which layers are "Add to Mask" and which layers are not, makes it frustrating.

Lastly, if I were in the meeting where they talked about this, I would have insisted they don't use the term "mask" both as a noun and verb simultaneously. Then they also use the words "hide" and "reveal",. So confusing!

[synthsin75]

1. The bottom layer becomes added (or subtracted for show all mask) and the rest masked.
2. A show all mask works more like you expect, but the hide all mask is just more flexible in many cases.
3. No masking just shows all the layers in that group.