Moho Forum

For example, how would I use the "colorize layer" option to put a TRANSPARENT black fill over a character to give the effect that the character is siluetted or in low light, but the black layer colorization is transparent so the characters facial features and stuff are still visible. When I make the color in the "colorize layer" option transparent, the whole layer becomes transparent and the original layer colors don't show through. How do I get the original layer colors to show through?

Haven't played around much with "colorize layer" because of the exact same result you're mentioning. I don't know what kind of situation you're working with, but I'll throw this out as an option as a "quick fix" (though it might require more render time.)

In the past for "near silhouette" where you still want to make out some features, when the animation was done the way I like, I duplicated the character layer and set "layer blending mode " to difference. This will full silhouette your layer, but you can drop down the opacity of the duplicate layer for transparent cover.

Again, you have to make your duplicate AFTER all your keyframing is done, but now you're rendering out 2 layers of much more information than necessary. The thing I liked about this, was you have the option to play around with layer shading on both layers to get some different looks and the opacity can be animated to go from silhouette to lighted...

Here was a test clip employing that technique:

If this isn't what you had in mind, feel free to disregard, but couldn't you just make a layer with nothing but a black rectangle then set that layer's opacity down to the level that shows what you want? Or even set it to something like Add (it's been a while since I messed with those settings so there may or may not actually be an add) to give it a bit of a different look?

I'd prefer not to have to use layer masking

There's no masking involved in danimal's suggestions.

How else would you get the black rectangle to appear only above the shaded layers without messing up the layer order?

If you just want a flat covering color, I suppose you could also try turning Layer shading on with no blur and crank the offset up as high as it will go. Then adjust your shade color transparency.