hi png binding is Killing me

[synthsin75]

Bone>Create Smooth Joint For Bone Pair
Victor has a thread somewhere here on making more than one smooth joint on the same limb.

You can also use pin bones and bone strength to fine tune things, or go all out and create a warp mesh, allowing you to control the image deformation with vectors and make action corrections.

[Víctor Paredes]

Bone>Create Smooth Joint For Bone Pair
Victor has a thread somewhere here on making more than one smooth joint on the same limb.

Here

[Greenlaw]

Without seeing any examples of what you're dealing with, it's hard to suggest anything appropriate. But, FWIW, with the exception of Boss Baby, most of the Moho 12 animations I've done for TV use png images and I've been able to get nice deformations. Here are some tips:

If you only want to deform the joint, use Smooth Joint. I used this for the Puss In Boots Interactive animations, and one fun thing about this technique is that I could 'spin' the joints without breaking the rig or artwork. You can see this happening in the elbows here: Puss-In-Boots Interactive.

For the wrists, I just used a separate piece of art layer bound to the paw bone. The trick there is the make sure the joint area in each layer is circular so it aligns perfectly when rotating the bone. You can do set up a guide in a paint program by drawing an unfilled circle at the joint position, and then duplicating that circle layer and scaling it down to a point and give that point a different color. Now, when you paint the part, use the outer circle as a guide, and when you import the art to Moho, used the smaller circle as a positioner for the bone.

Alternatively, you can use Victor's technique shown above and make a second Smooth Joint.

I recommend Smooth Joint for beginners because it's easy to do, but there are some caveats. The obvious one is that it works between only one pair of bones. But if you need to use it on another joint, luckily we have Victor's workaround technique. The other caveat is that Smooth Joint works best on a fairly straight limb, so it might not work so well on a 'muscular' character. An example is Norge Grendelfist's arms from the King Julien animations in my 2017 reel. I was able to make Smooth Joint work for Thighsander Plunderhorse's narrow arms, but Norge's bulky arms were too irregular in shape for the technique to work properly.

The other thing to watch for is how Smooth Joint affects texture details. For Puss and Thighsander, it worked surprisingly well, but your mileage may vary.

Another method is to simply Layer bind the layers to bones. For this, you need to use the circular joint alignment technique described above. This is what I wound up using for Norge's arms. This technique may seem easier but setting it up correctly takes a little more work than using Smooth Joint, so try Smooth Joint first.

If you really need to deform the png at the joint, and the deformations look bad, this might happen for various reasons. Most likely it's caused by improper bone strength settings. I find it helps to use the Use Selected Bones for Flexi-binding method for each limb because this removes the influence of all other bones in the rig, and makes the deformations at each joint much more predictable.

Another trick is the use 'holder' bones that help maintain the shape and volume of the limb as it bends. You can parent these holder bones to the limb bone itself.

If the edges are looking 'chunky' and not very smooth, there are two causes:

1. To improve display performance, Moho may render the geometry at lower res, which can make edges look faceted. Do a render and see if this is the case. If the render looks smooth, don't worry about this and move on.

2. If the rendered image also looks faceted, this means Moho's 'autogenerated' mesh is inadequate for what you want. To correct this, you will need to create your own Mesh warp layers and bind that to the bones instead. The nice thing about this is that you're essentially working with vectors so you can use point binding or point animations using a Smart Bone Action.

With custom meshes, we're getting into more advanced techniques but in some situations, this produces the best results. Getting back to my example, this is what I'm using in Thighsander's tail to make it curl and smoothly. (I'm also using Sketch Bones to animate it.)

That's a lot to think about but I hope this helps. I suggest trying the simple stuff and getting it work well with simpler characters first. Once you have a good understanding of the basics and what the limitations are, you may then want look into the more complex techniques.

[Greenlaw]

You asked specifically about shoulder joints so here are a couple of tips for that.

Some users like to use the body turn Smart Bone to control the arm positions, but I personally avoid doing that because too often I find myself counter animating against where the action wants to move the arms, and it becomes a big hassle to work with. I find it's easier to leave that out of the turn Smart Bone, and to just move the upper arm bones where I need them to be during animation. IMO, this looks better too--more natural and not so mechanical.

If your character has 'realistic' shoulders, consider adding collar bones that you can raise and lower along with the arms. This feature can look more natural for some characters, and it allows you to do fun gestures like shrugging.