Moho Forum

is there a way to shade only a part of a object??

I have a character with separate limbs, lets take the left arm (as he is facing screen left) thats infront of his body.

I have made a "shoulder" section that is a large area, but its invisible (no outlines) so that i can rotate the characters arm and it wont pose a problem with holes or whatever.

now if I put shading on the arm, that section shows up.....how can i not shade that part of the arm/object?

Make the shading a seperate shape on another layer, but meshinstance it from the "master" shape so it deforms along with it. Use masking on the shading shape, and mesh instance again to make another shape at the top for your outline.

(If you need to you can have a mask layer somewhere in the stack to manually tweak for any cleanup you need to do by hand.)

edit: With the shading shape, set it to shading only, so the background is transparent. You might have aliasing issues with soft edges I don't know, but it's worth a try. Good luck

thanks for the advice!:shock:

No worries, I hope it might be of some help.

One thing which I kind of avoided on my last project but really have to admit would have helped is to seperate out my renders into different layers for comping in post (I use after effects.) I was telling myself that would make more work, but the number of times I made tweaks and had to re-render the whole lot: background, character animation with bones...

I'm still using AS5.5, maybe shading has improved in 6 I dont know. But anyway what if you rendered out your background seperate, and then character "base layer" stuff, shading seperately, outlines only sep for over the top if you need it, and lip sync seperate also. Render time would be a fraction of what it was, and there might be a lot of flexibility there. Also, if your shading still isn't moving and hiding/revealing how and when you want, you can mask in post.

Next project I want to try my hand at shading on characters and things like moving highlights on cars and stuff, we'll see

There's an asian bloke's AS work which is very cute anime style stuff with some cool shading which got me excited, I can't remember the name, but while looking for it I also found this thread by Selgin which is also interesting:
viewtopic.php?t=9332&highlight=sing

Have fun and let us know how you go!

thanks agian 4 the edvice!

errr....ok, that advice just went straight over my head O_O

any chance you could send me an example file?