Masking improvements?

[madrobot]

So Im drawing character on a tablet PC:




And it is a lot of fun, but I have some questions and ideas.

First, I am using and love farek's meshinstance script (I'm in 5.6 for now) but appear to have the old version. Does anyone have the update where you could change the name?

Eg I have
- skin.dup
- shading
- skin.dup
- skin

when I'd LIKE to have
- outlines.dup
- shading
- mask.dup
- skin

My other thought is about masking.
In the image above, I would love to have seperate mask for the whole face, then beanie only, hair only. But I cant, because the .dup layers have to all be within the same folder, as does masking. so unless I break it up and have hair and beanie in their own groups, it wont work.

Can you guys think of a way to have a finer level of control over masks? Eg a mask only effects the layer above it? Or else mesh instance which can reach into sub-groups?

[slowtiger]

Can't you just describe what you want to achieve or how the character should look like? I don't see any necessity for a mask right now.

[madrobot]

The highlights are bigger and I crop them with masks.
Could do it a slower more fiddly way, but this suits me better.

[fracturedray]

I did this too on a project but for shadows. The way you mentioned (separate groups) is pretty much the only way short of cutting the highlights into the shapes.

I will say this.
I needed the shadows to all be the same value when rendered and many of them overlapped. This was fixed by moving them all to the same layer. It didn't look right on screen but it rendered great.

Do you think you could live with all the highlights on one layer? That way using the whole head shape as a mask will be fine. I know there's a way to ignore the mask on lines strokes as well should you not want the highlight to line up perfectly you can zoom in and tweak the highlight edge right onto the line stroke.

To see how I made the shadows and how they rendered watch the movie link at the top of this post and then scroll down half way to see how I made the shadows for the trees and hills.
viewtopic.php?t=17023

[funksmaname]

I'm with tiger... surely splitting over multiple layers with masking and duplication scripts is more trouble than just having shapes defined? *shrug*

edit: in hindsight, it depends what you plan to do with it - if you have a lot of highlights flying past for example, like he's on a train, then masking makes sense... i guess the technique should depend on the goal...

[slowtiger]

I suppose with "highlights" you mean the lighter line inside the dark outline here?

In that case I'd just create two shapes for each area. The bottom one has an outline and a light fill, the other one is smaller with no outline and a darker fill. In movement both can be controlled by the same bones, and if it's necessary to animate the highlight itself, do it in point motion.

The overall style shouldn't need any soft shadows like you have in the eye and hair right now. And don't bother to give each strand of hair its own shadow. Be broader. Simplify. Think of doing the same character with a broad brush on a big canvas.

[slowtiger]

This got me. After I wrote that post, I thought I should test what I've written. Here's the result:

http://slowtiger.de/examples/shane_test.mov

The file is here:
http://slowtiger.de/examples/shane_test.anme.zip (AS 6.2)

All lighter rims were done the way I wrote, without masking. Masking was only used for the eye, but I lost the option of interpolation then. This drawing style asks for not-so-smooth movements IMO, so having no interpolation in switch layers is OK. At closer inspection you'll see that I often hide one line on top of another until it's needed, or just to avoid the hassle with welding or masking (as with the cap). A broad outline like this is ideal for that approach, however, it might not work as well with thin outlines.

On second thought masking wasn't really necessary for the eyes, I could've as well made completely new eyes for each switch.

Madrobot: Hope you're not upset about me playing around with your character ...