Switch Layers For Poses and Binding Using PSD/Bitmap

[SnugglyCuddleBug]

Hey everyone, I'm new to Moho and animating and have been learning through YouTube, and following several tutorials to help me rig and animate my character using Moho. However, the character I'm animating is a PSD file with bitmap images (not a vector) and I think I'll be mostly using switch layers, smart bones/dials and actions for my character. For the character I created, I created the front facing pose/rig with separated layers for the head, upper torso, legs, feet (two for each foot, one with the heel raised for walking and another for standing still, since I also want my character to walk), and upper and lower arms. I also have separate layers of my character in a right and left side facing pose with their own side-facing head, torso, and arms and legs. For the hands, and facial expressions like eyes, eyebrows, mouths and lip sync, I have about a 100 or more layers of various different eyes, eyebrows, mouths, and hand poses for all kinds of crazy expressions like happy, sad, angry, shocked, confused, smug, evil, etc, that I'll be probably switching to using switch layers and smart bones/dials. I've already sorted and grouped my layers and created switch layers for all the eyes, eyebrows, mouths, and hands. For the head and body, I grouped the front facing, and left and right side view of the head and torso, arms and legs of my character and made them into switch layers, so I can quickly switch the head and body parts to my left and right poses, since I don't want a full 360 rig, and am just using front facing and 1/2 left and right side poses. I started to place the bones and do the rig for my character, but now I'm a little stuck. Most tutorials I've seen mention that anything on the head, like eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth, should be bound to the head bone, however, I've heard that binding layers to a bone means you can't use, or manipulate and bind the layers to other bones. What I'd like to do is bind my various eyes, eyebrows and mouths to the front facing head bone, and the hands to my front facing body so I can easily switch to the different expressions and hand poses, but I also want to be able to use these same eyes, eyebrows, mouths and hands with the left and right side-facing rig and the side pose heads and bodies that I have, when I switch to the side poses/side-rig, so I can animate and switch to the different expressions/poses when I switch to my side facing poses. Sorry, if I'm not good at explaining, but I hope that makes sense.

Is it possible if I can do this by creating actions and smart bones/dials for my front facing rig with the different expressions, when the eyes, mouths and hands are bound to my front facing rig/bones, and then just unbind those layers from that rig and rebind/reparent them to my side-facing rig/bones, and create actions for different expressions for my side poses? Or would that not work? Can I have the eyes, mouths and hands bound or parented to both my front facing character rig, and my side-facing rigs, and just switch between them using switch layers, smart bones or actions? Or would that not work? Right now I have all the layers and groups in one bone/psd file. I know some rigs in Moho have 1/2 turn and 3/4 turn poses as separate bones with their own eyes, mouths and body parts, but I'd like to avoid that, since I know I would probably have to duplicate all my eyes, eyebrows, mouths and hands for each of the right and left side poses. I would like to avoid having to duplicate the 100+ eyes, eyebrows, mouths and hands I have, just to be able to bind them and also use them on my right and left side poses/rigs. Would I need to use vitruvian bones for this? Or maybe use smart dials, or warping or something? I've searched YouTube for any tutorials on this, working with front and side-facing rigs with a PSD/bitmap file. Since I'm just using layers and bitmaps in a PSD file, I can't really morph or reshape my character's face and body to the left and right side like most tutorials do with a vector.

Does anybody know if this is possible, or can maybe let me know how I could go about doing this? If you can offer any advice, I'd really appreciate the help. If you have any questions, please let me know. Thanks!

[Hamedss]

The best method as I know is to first study facial expressions
I recommend the book of Steve Roberts " character animation" .
In facial expressions chapter you can see how to create eight main expressions and much more!
Every part of face have its movements and you can mix all of them to create a lot of expressions
When you have image base character do not try too many forms for mouth ,brows, and eyes. They will not really needed. If you study well you will know how everything moved and change for facial expressions.