Moho Forum

Hey. I've been working with characters who don't have outlines, and that's just the way they like it. However without outlines, when one object of a particular colour, say for example a green arm, overlaps another object of the same colour, like a green torso, you can no longer tell the difference between the two objects. That's just the way life goes. But... I wa wondering if anybody knows how i could achieve an effect like this!



So that when one object overlaps another object of the same colour, an outline appears only where the two objects overlap, you know what I'm saying? Like my friend Jack's sleeve, chin and right thumb in this pic.



I tried this: I made a new layer group with masking set to "hide all", then put the "body" layer in this group and added it to the mask. Then I duplicated my "arm" layer, changed the duplicate so it had an outline and then put it underneath that masking group i just created a few lines ago, above the "body" layer. THIS WORKS, well for that one frame. As soon as I move the original arm around, I can't seem to make the outlined copied arm do the same movements, as I can't copy keyframes from my arm layer onto my copied arm layer.

Hope that made sense. Excuse my poor English, I'm Australian. Any ideas?

Never mind, all I have to do is animate before duplicating layers, so simple.

I'm not exactly sure what you've done to achieve the effect you described, but I'd love to see an example (and Moho file, even).

Just interested in an interesting idea.

He made the body to be a mask,
then animated the arm,
then copied the animated arm layer and moved it into the body mask
Finally he added an outline to the duplicated animated arm layer.

For the samurai above, there would be two right arms-
the regular one and another with an outline that is masked by the body.

Very slick- good thinking gavi dvan!

Heh thanks fellas. Gave me a corker of a headache, this one. I'll try and post exampleness soon

Hey, here's a sample of what I was trying to achieve.
http://media.putfile.com/arthur4


Layer setup is as follows:
---------
Layer "Arm" - Green fill, no outline

Group "Body" - Masking set to "Hide All."
->Layer "Arm Line" - Duplicate of Layer "Arm" (After "Arm" has been animated). No fill, black outline.
->Layer "Body" - The torso shape. Masking set to "Add To Mask."
---------


However, I really don't think it's worth the effort... Its not all that useful and its uses are very limited, especially when using bones. It may serve some purpose down the line, but personally I think I'll just push this technique neatly to the side.

gavi dvan wrote:its uses are very limited, especially when using bones

I've looked a bit deeper into the matter, to check if this is indeed not as useful for bone animation as you claimed. And I don't think there are many limitations for using this effect.


Another solution might be not to use black lines, but a outline color somewhat darker (or lighter if the fill color is rather dark) than the fill color and use an outline width smaller than 1.

I've used the following setup in the above animation:
bone layer with four child layers masking -> hide all
1) arm with dark green 0.25 wide outline and green fill
2) copy of 1, outline removed masking -> don't mask this layer
3) torso with green fill and no outline masking -> + clear mask, then add this layer to it
4) neck masking -> don't mask this layer

So, in essence I rigged the bones as usual (region binding, using child vector layers and bone offset); the arm layer had outlines. Then I copied the arm layer, removed the outline and positioned it underneath the original arm layer in the layers window. Then you set the masking for each layer.

Because of the region binding, both the arm layers will animate exactly the same.

I think the overall effect is much more subtle than with a thick black outline.



The same effect can also be accomplished using image layers, as you can see from the second animation.

So, I don't really see any limitations when using bones. The only limitation I see is that you can't bind layers to bones, because you use two layers on top of eachother instead of a single layer. This could pose problems if you want to bind a switch layer to a bone (e.g. for displaying different hand shapes). However, I'm sure Moho is capable enough to deal with that once you have found a solution to work around that (e.g. group the double layer and switch different group layers).

My problem with bones arose because I was using layers in folders in folders, and once I started sub-grouping like this I found I couldn't attach these deep hidden layers to the skeleton, maybe I just screwed something up but I don't know.

I used the fat black outlines just for demonstration purposes but the darker shade outline does look a lot nicer. I can't see any lines on the second animation though Rasheed, all I'm getting is a black circle with a black blob emerging from the top and sides?

These little embedded scripts
http://www.lostmarble.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2706
might help you with that. They are designed to allow you to control bones buried a few layers deep where Moho normally wouldn't let you.