Moho Forum

Hi,

I'm pretty new to Moho 12 and I'm currently in the process of learning it. I kinda have an understanding of it's workflow and I have made a few test animations using vectors, but I wanted to try animating some painted images, so I took a basic, very simple lizard-like monster head and put 3 bones on it, one for the neck and 1 for each jaws. It worked much better than expected and since animating painted images would produce a more artsy result I might want to explore this further, however I ran into a problem.
The bone for the upper jaw seems to be behind the bone for the lower jaw. So when I close the monster's mouth it's tongue which is moved by the lower jawbone moves over the upper jaw, effectively hiding it, which is the opposite of what I want.
I couldn't find a way to solve this, the usual shape ordering shortcuts don't seem to work on bones and since the whole thing is just one image I can't do any ordering on the image layer (I don't want to break it up, unless it would be somehow possible to keep the smoothly joined effect the bones have on the image). I've even tried to recreate the skeleton, creating the upper jawbone first and the lower second, then vice versa, but both ways yield the same result.

So is there a way to tell Moho which bones' affected areas should go behind another bones' areas?

Ther's no "behind" with bones, they all exist on the very same level. Only the stuff you attach to a bone can be in front or behind other stuff. In your case, only one complete image layer could be behind another image layer, so you have to split your artwork accordingly.

If you use Smart Warp, you can actually animate the order of the parts of a single image (but I'm not sure if I recommend you to take that direction).

You can animate layer order, which does mean splitting up the artwork, and putting it all in a Group Layer. Here's a tutorial that may help you:
Animating Pastel Drawings
Hope this helps,
J

Hi,

thanks for the replies.

I've attached two screenshots, so you can see the problem. It's pretty obvious the parts controlled by the upper bone go behind the other one and it seems to be the case no matter how I set it up. I didn't expect to get such good deformations when I decided to test this at first, so I'm still impressed, but also a bit disappointed that it seems to miss just that tiny last step to be usable. If I could just tell it which part to put in front, it would be perfect. Also, this is not art, just some doodling I did while watching Star Trek .

Anyway, since you all seem to suggest I have to break this up, how would I be able to do that while preserving the smooth deformations it produces when it's just one image?

I would separate it in two or three layers: tongue, neck and all the rest.
Then I would use Smart Warp (this character is really asking for it )

Thanks, that gave me an idea, I added a bone just for the tongue, and with a bit of tweaking I was able to make it descend into the lower jaw pretty well, but than another idea came to me and I actually was able to turn this perceived weakness into a strength. I simply made a copy of the image layer and cropped out everything besides the non-deforming parts of the upper jaw, so I could place that above the original layer. Result:


It can be turned into a strength if I prepared the duplicate layer in an image editor and removed everything from it that I wanted to pass behind the original layer, this way I could have teeth that would go in front and teeth that would be hidden behind the lower jaw. And now that i know this it literary takes seconds to rig it. Of course it could be tweaked to make those weird deformations better, but IMHO it's very impressive as it is, just 5 bones quickly added, a bit of cropping and it already doesn't look bad, especially if I don't want to hide the cutout nature of the animation. Probably this is what you guys meant by cutting it into parts, but it took me a while to get there. Thanks again!

Cool Monster I am a noob too. : )