please help with masking? :( im a begginner

[dnn]

Okay so i started using moho on friday and i have to deliver a project in a couple of days so ive been learning how to use this program as soon as possible and i mightve missed something because my masks dont work at all? i groped the layers and eveything... is there any other reason this is not working? what am i doing wrong? https://imgur.com/a/Bee5lDk

[Coffee Cat]

I'm not sure if this will solve your issue, but I had a lot of masking problems until I disabled GPU acceleration. For whatever reason, masking will not display correctly in the viewport unless GPU acceleration is disabled, so you might try going to Display Quality and unchecking GPU acceleration to see if that helps.

[dnn]

yess i already turned it off because it wouldn´t let me use tracing images, so it's already turned off BUT YEAH I JUST TRIED AND IT WAS THE DISPLAY QUALITHY THING THANK YOU SO MUCH!!

[synthsin75]

Only very simple masking will display correctly in the workspace, with GPU acceleration disabled. For masking of any complexity, you can only see the actual results when rendering a frame or exporting the animation.

Just started Moho on Friday and have to deliver in a couple of days? Wow.

[Mattyj]

Do you know if they plan on making more complex masking and animated layer effects visible in the viewport in future iterations synthsin?

[synthsin75]

Do you know if they plan on making more complex masking and animated layer effects visible in the viewport in future iterations synthsin?

Not likely unless they completely rebuild the core of Moho. At some point in the future, that will probably become necessary, but no idea how far in the future.

[Greenlaw]

I imagine Lost Marble plans to improve the preview display for masking and other effects in the future but, yeah, it's probably a ways down the road.

In the meantime, there are ways to trick Moho into displaying advanced masking correctly. For example, I sometimes do this by creating reference or duplicate layers with settings optimized to display correctly in Moho even if they don't render correctly. These layers are set to be seen in the workspace but not render, and the original layers are set to render but not be seen in the workspace. I rarely bother though because most of the time seeing correct masking isn't that necessary when I'm animating.

An example is this Puss in Boots rig I made a few years ago...

https://vimeo.com/269815494

You can see in the rig demo section that Puss' eyes drift out from his head in a turn, but when I animated the rig for the show, I simply ignored this display error. It really didn't matter because I knew the rig would render correctly anyway.

Same with effects...most of the time, you don't need to see the effects while your animating. Just spot render the keyframes to check the effect properties/quality, and you should be fine. This is basically how I work in 3D animation and compositing too. If I need to see the result in full motion, I'll render a low-res version with no antialiasing, and make my effects adjustments based on that.

Hope this helps.

[Greenlaw]

Oh, another thing: You might be tempted to use a single mask to mask a bunch of items inside separate groups. This is the kind of thing that Moho's display cannot handle. It's usually better to break the setup into multiple groups and insert a reference or duplicate mask inside each of those groups. Because this is a simpler setup for each group, it will more likely display correctly and the render result will be the same as when using the single mask for everything.

Having the duplicated mask layers probably won't effect performance in any significant way, so I wouldn't worry to much about that. Try it out and see.

Hope this helps.