Moho Forum

Greenlaw wrote:... SBD setup...

Is that short for Smart Bone Dial?

I recently did a test for SBD on 'interlips ' I even had it linked to a ad hock switch selection window of my own creation that sat on the top bone layer .
Yeahh it didn't work properly as if you forced the sbd to step between phonemes, it also forced the interpolation.... which was just bizarre.

But just running interp on existing animation that did not allow it before due to nested masks worked great, with a few holds placed here and there.

Oh a couple of the beziers didn't tween nice but a few small fixups to the switched fixed that. _ of course I was using rigs that weren't planned to used interps as I said.

niroshB wrote:
Hi,
Please tell me how to use it.
thanks.

download the .zip file from the host
read the readme.txt that's in the .zip
you might also like to take a look also at viewtopic.php?f=12&t=31332&hilit=switch ... 15#p178265 for more background

install the script in your custom folders (menu or tool as you prefer)
the .zip contains a .moho that serves as an example of the structure of a file that the tool expects (and you can play with it to see the way the tool works)

chucky wrote:I recently did a test for SBD on 'interlips ' I even had it linked to a ad hock switch selection window of my own creation that sat on the top bone layer .
Yeahh it didn't work properly as if you forced the sbd to step between phonemes, it also forced the interpolation.... which was just bizarre.

Yes, exactly. To make an SBD work in a non-linear manner you need to set up the action in Linear but the SBD itself needs to be in Step with Copy Previous Key enabled but unfortunately, this is incompatible with Group interpolation. Which is a shame because this is the method we normally use for lip-synching in Moho...it's faster and easier to manage because it keeps all the animation keys at the (top) bone level, and not 'hidden' deep inside the rig. This is epecially important when animations need to handed off from one animator to another, and nobody has time to hunt down where all the keyframes are. Also, with SBDs, we can add other featues like 'emotion' and/or mouth transform controls, and keep these keyframes in the bone layer too.

Switch Selection was almost there but the active bone transforms in the window really mess it up. Our character animations can be very active so it's super annoying to have the mouth shapes bounce and flip around inside that Switch Selection window when we what we really want to see the mouth shapes fixed in-place so we can compare the drawings.

I did one scene a while back when Switch Selection first came out where a character was momentarily upside-down or side-ways while talking, and the mouth shapes all appeared upside-down or side-ways in Switch Selection. Seriously, that's not what I want to see when I'm trying to animate lipsync! I recall one time I wound up doing the lipsync in a separate proect with no character animation, and then copying the keys to where the character animation was, just to avoid seeing the transforms in Switch Selection. That worked okay but it's extra work that I shouldn't have to do. I think that's when I gave up on using Switch Selection (except for the recent experiment mentioned earlier.)

I just find it so much more convenient to right click on the Switch layer group and select the layer you want. Although I have to admit I don't have anything with a ton of switch layers so I don't know how that would look on a right mouse menu. I definitely think the switch selection method takes up a lot of resources and can get a little quirky

SuperSGL wrote:I definitely think the switch selection method takes up a lot of resources and can get a little quirky

We use an SBD to control a Switch layer for lipsyncing in almost all of our rigs. It's pretty fast to animate with, and it keeps more of the keyframes on the bones layer, which is super convenient. We haven't noticed this method taking up a lot of resources or misbehaving in any way.

In a recent Boss Baby episode, I briefly switched to using the Switch Selection window for a character. This was because I wanted to take advantage of the new nested Group interpolation feature. The character didn't actually speak but had a lot of very expressive mouth shapes, and this setup worked great for smoothly transitioning from mouth pose to pose. The one downside is the problem Switch Selection has always had: the bone animation affects the artwork in the Switch Selection window, which can make it maddening to work with if the character if moving around a lot. Here's an example I sent the the devs a few years ago:



Unfortunatley, Moho 12.4 still does this. I don't know why we can't disable the animation in this window and just see the artwork in the window as it was drawn. It's too bad because, while I liked using the Switch Selection window, I went back to using an SBD again because of this annoying display issue.

Before I was doing any of that, though, I really liked using the workspace clicking method. To use this, hold ctrl+alt and click directly over the character's mouth. This pops up a list in the workspace that looks like this:



I found this method much faster than digging inside the Layers Window for the Switch Layer and right-clicking on that. Give it a try...it's pretty convenient.

Of course, if you need to go to the layer quickly, you can also shift-alt right-click over the mouth in the workspace, and that will select the Switch in the Layers Window. (You'll still want to do with the above method to edit the keyframes on the timeline.)

The one downside with ctrl-alt right-clicking is that if there's an unrelated hidden shape over the mouth shapes, it might block you from using this technique. I've had that happen with a couple of characters, which was when I switched to using an SBD to control mouth poses.

Hope these tips are useful.