Moho Animation Forum

One rationale for having all the bones (and therefore all the actions) in a top-level skeleton is that you don't have to scuttle around in child layers to animate different parts of the body at a given frame.

But having actions and bones grouped in child bone layers goes a long way to addressing a lot of the bone management issues being voiced here.

so maybe the answer lies in how the top level skeleton layer works -- for example, rather than containing all the bones, it can hold actions that involve bones in multiple child groups, but it primarily acts as the UI into all the child bone layers: as you move around the work area, you get the bones and actions shown / selectable from the relevant child layer(s).

That's a big design change - but maybe an easier option?

hayasidist wrote: ↑Sun Feb 22, 2026 1:25 am One rationale for having all the bones (and therefore all the actions) in a top-level skeleton is that you don't have to scuttle around in child layers to animate different parts of the body at a given frame.

Not a problem for me, as I almost never use more than one Bone layer within a character. In fact, as mentioned, I already have enough trouble managing 100+ bones in a single Bone layer; don't want to complicate this further by including bones from other bone groups. So, NOT seeing bones in the list from other Bone layers is currently a plus for me.

But, yeah, a Bones Window could solve much of this. I was really thinking it should manage one Bones Layer at a time, but if we're going there, may as it well be capable for displaying/organizing the entire project. But, honestly, I'd be extremely happy if it managed bones only for the currently selected Bones Layer.

Regarding "...you don't have to scuttle around in child layers to animate different parts of the body at a given frame." This gets back to what I would really love to see make a comeback: Wes' Layer Shortcuts tool. This tool made it easy to create buttons directly inside the Workspace that sit along with the Smart Bone Dials, so selecting any type of layer--Bones, Vector, Switch, Mesh, Curver, etc.,--was as easy as clicking on a button or graphic. For example, here in this old Moho 12.5 version of Mame-chan, I just used Notes layers for my layer selection buttons...



This system worked amazingly well in the above rig. Unfortunately, there was an unforeseen limitation in Moho 12.5 that would break this system after the rig was imported into another scene. The system was great for a demo, but unusable in a real production environment, thus abandoned.

I would love to see Moho updated so this idea can be revived, or maybe even see a native variation created for Moho.

Note: Currently, I use a combination of Davodice's Select Bone Layer, my mod version Select Switch Layer, Stan's Layer Selection Buttons, as well as the standard layer selection methods. But with Wes' tool, it was so nice to be able to simply click on custom buttons in the Workspace to do the same thing.