Moho Forum

Hi,

I've never really been a big fan of masking but at the moment I'm using it to get a cel shaded look to my characters.
I'm now even less of a fan of masking!

My problem is that I'm making a 'shadow layer' with 30% opacity that sits on top of each vector layer. It was getting the desired effect until I placed a shadow layer on top of the eyes and got this.


The eyes are in a bone layer to control blinking and eye movement but when I try and mask this group I cannot view the eyes.

The file is here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?o2qmmy2cwjy

and since I've been swearing at my screen all morning with no effect I wondered if anyone here could tell me what I'm doing wrong.

Some general tips:

- You can only have one mask active in any given group/bone layer. The mask can consist of several layers, and it can mask several layers at once, but it's only one such group in any group/bone layer.

- Check every layer inside the group/bone layer. Each must have a mask setting, either making it a mask, getting masked, or excepted from masking.

- Any mask layer needs to be under any layer which gets masked.

When you define the mask type on several layers it's like if you "reset" the mask. AS takes the layer order as reference to mask. So "head" is only masking "head shadow". Then "static mouth" is masking only "mouth shadow" and "eyes". Then "hair" is masking only "hair shadow". "Left ear" is a mask, but actually it's not masking any layer, because there are no one layer over it on layer order.

On your original file, you have defined the mask type (+clear the mask, then add this layer to it) on every layer you want to be a mask. That's the problem with the eyes, they are being masked by "static mouth" layer, but not by head layer. Try translating the eyes bone layer down over the mouth and render. You'll see what I'm talking about.

There are two solutions I see:

The easy one with this file is take the eyes bone layer and put it between "static mouth" and "head shadow" on layer order. If you render now the eyes will be masked by "head" layer and not by "static mouth" layer.

Now, the other solution is to re-think the way you are masking (I recommend this one for your future files). I have a example file for that you can download here. I put all shadows on a single layer, then put this layer over all the others on layer order.

To keep things simple, when you are masking, you define the type of mask on only one layer ("head" in this case), then on the others you don't re define the mask type, you just select "add to mask". This way you create a single mask made by all your masks layers together. So in this case "head", "static mouth", "hair" and "left ear" are being the single mask for "eyes" and "all shadows" (I prefered to let "eyes" bone layer masked too because if you want to do a little head turn it will be easier if the eyes don't go out beyond the head limits).

So, as resume, a mask layer only masks the layers which are over her on layer order. If you define a new mask type (or re-define the same) on a layer which is in any place over the previous mask, the first mask will lose his powers for the layers which are over that new mask. To avoid this, instead of define a new mask, you must select "add to mask".

I hope to be clear. At first masking is a tricky technique, but once you understand how it works it's pretty easy to create complex maskings.

Ouch, sorry Slowtiger, It took a lot of time to write my post (I'm very slow writing on english), I didn't see you answered first

No excuse necessary, you took the time to actually look into his file, which I skipped.

Thank you very much for that explanation!

Mediafire chose today to go down for site maintenance so I wasn't able to look at your example Selgin but the instructions you gave really explained what I was doing wrong.

I've now just drawn 1 layer for the shadow and set everything in this way:

Group (Hide All and Mask This Layer)
--Shadow (Mask This Layer)
--Hair (+ Add To Mask)
--Features (+ Add To Mask)
--Head (+ Add To Mask)

Which now looks like this:


Thanks again for the help.