Moho Animation Forum

hi every body
I rigged a character with seamless arms and legs. my character wants to catch something behind his body, so how can I bring his palm and part of his forearm behind his body? pls notice that his arm is seamless (arm+forearm+palm are in a single layer rigged with 3 separate bones) moho pro 12

Do the arm animation, then duplicate the arm layer, put copy behind body, switch visibility where needed.

it most be a way to move palm points in z axis individually

If you have to do it like that then duplicate the whole layer and redraw it.... Then switch that.
You have to get creative with your workflow if you have specific needs. We can't anticipate these choices.

hamidaminiart wrote:it most be a way to move palm points in z axis individually

No, I'm sorry there's no way to move individual points in Z.
What I normally do in these cases is to split the arm in two parts and then animate the layer order. The arm can look it's made in one layer, but actually be two.
References are also useful here. Take a look at this test:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/iu71okopx3wnr ... .moho?dl=0

I normally do what Victor describes: split the arm at the elbow. If you draw your arm with a path dividing the arm into two shapes, it can still animate and render the arm as a single whole shape. Knock out the upper and lower shapes for each layer respectively and group this set of layers as a single group. Position this group behind the body. Next, duplicate or reference this group and place the copy in front of the body. Now, you can set up an SBD to switch the visibility of the arm into any of four different postions: Shoulder and forearm behind body, shoulder behind and forearm in front, shoulder and forearm in front, and shoulder in front and forearm behind.

Technically, you can do this with a single arm set (without separate near/far versions) using animated layer order but there are two reasons why I avoid that:

1. If I use animated layer order in an SBD action, this will override the ability to use manual layer order animation when I need it.

2. I could just avoid the SBD action entirely and just use animated layer order, but animating the SBD is a lot easier and faster to that drilling into the rig and dragging layers up and down everytime I need to do this.

Setting up duplicates or references and animating visibility may require more setup time but I find it's more reliable and offers the most flexibility. That said, if your animation is simple and I don't plan to reuse the character for many scenes, the single arm method is perfectly fine and quicker to set up.

There are many variations to the above, like turning the groups into masking groups and using animated shapes or animated stroke exposure as masks, but I think the methods described above are appropriate for many typical character designs.

Hope this helps.