Moho Forum

I have a snake that uses "shading on" using the color white to make a shine effect on the up side.

Here's the problem:
When the snake passes into the shade of a cactus the shine remains and it looks incorrect. I want to mask the "shading on" on the snake but not mask the snake by manipulating shading controls form the bones of the snake or the group.

I did it once by accident and I can't remember how I did it.

I don't get your setup from your description. If you'd post a screenshot of your layer palette and maybe indicate which layer is shadow and which is mask, we could perhaps help.

Here is the anme file:
http://www.mediafire.com/?ndnnjwjuzwo

I cannot find the way to set it up in order to have the shine on the snake to be masked when the snake overlaps with the black cactus.

Hm, I suggest you re-think the concept of your scene.

Snake is in front of cactus, and you want it to pass through the shadow. That means that the light comes from the back and the cactus casts a drop shadow to the front.

What you have right now is a shadow in the shape of the cactus and in the same orientation. But you need it flipped and a bit sheared so you have the cactus drop shadow on the ground. I suggest you create a second shadow shape which follows the volume of the snake. The only masking you need is for this shadow.

See http://www.slowtiger.de/examples/snake2.zip.

Nice! But I was hoping that the shine would disappear in the shade. But it did help me accomplish my goal. Thank you.

http://www.mediafire.com/?vju1hn1znnf

You have to render to see the effect.

If you really need to override the shine on the snake, you would've to create it a different way since AS can't treat a shape and its shade differently. Masking only works on complete shapes. You could create the shine as a shape and then get it affected by the mask.

Using a shape for shine works as long as the art stays in the same direction. If not then I can only conclude that what I did must be the only way.

Is it possible to have an invisible object cast a shadow or have shade on it that's visible?

Since we don't have real light inside an anme file, you can create "shadows" as many as you want - a shadow is just a dark shape.

I'm not explaining myself well...

Is it possible to have an invisible object have a visible effect using layer shading or layer shadow?

No.
If you, say, set a mask layer to invisible, the masking effect on other layers will not happen.