Problems with drawing/strokes

[I Racer]

Hi all.

I come from an Illustrator/Photoshop background and am really struggling to get my head around the drawing tools in MOHO. I'm using the latest version of Pro.

Below is a problem I need to resolve - if possible. All sorts of horrors will no doubt be obvious to all you seasoned MOHO users, but I was wondering if there is a solution to this:

The top image is what I have.
The middle image is what I have if I add strokes to my messy drawing, which is obviously no good.
The bottom image is what I want to achieve for my animation.

The hands are all rigged and working fine with dials etc. You can probably tell that I made all elements of each hand separately, although I copied the left hand and flipped it to make the right hand.

Is there a tool that will take away unnecessary/'interior' strokes, in order to have the bottom image only for use in my animation, or should I start again and somehow make each hand with one single layer/image that's all joined together?

I have tried to draw a full hand with the Blob tool, but got into all kinds of problems when rigging.
From what I thought I'd learned, it's always best to make every element separately and rig accordingly.

Many thanks.

[slowtiger]

Of course there is! Select a shape, then under Fill find the Hide Edge tool (H). You may need to adjust some point positions or even add some points (A).

[synthsin75]

The easiest way is to create shapes as fill-only, like in your top image, and then select all the curves and create one stroke-only shape for everything. Then just select the stroke-only shape and hit ctrl+down to move it to the bottom. You might need to increase the stroke width, since you'll only see half of it from under the fills.

[slowtiger]

synthsin: yeah, but that's a shape where no part may ever cover another, since no part of that stroke can be hidden.

[I Racer]

Thanks very much for the replies, folks.

The Hide Edge tool is proving to be extremely useful - it worked!

There was a bit of faffing to do, as well as adding new points, but I got there eventually and learned a lot!

Thank you.

[Greenlaw]

The Patch layer might work well for the wrists, depending on how far you need to rotate the wrists. Sometimes I'll use a Patch layer for joints like that because it's so easy to setup. Sometimes I"ll add an overlapping line layer to give the joint some 'folding' depth.

[hayasidist]

put the individual hand components in a group and turn on layer outline?

[Greenlaw]

I thought about mentioning that but it might look weird in the fingers, especially when they curl over each other. I guess it could depend on how you stack and group things.

[I Racer]

put the individual hand components in a group and turn on layer outline?

That worked too - thank you very much.

I didn't even know that was a feature.

Thanks for the replies folks - it's all sorted now.

[hayasidist]

I thought about mentioning that but it might look weird in the fingers, especially when they curl over each other. I guess it could depend on how you stack and group things.

yeah for sure with just the one group outline -- but if, e.g., you create groups for each finger and then put those into a group for whole hand you can get individual fingers with outlines and, if you have "palm" above those, then you get an edge for each finger and for the whole hand -- However, I think there may be a "feature" in the outline function -- because the outline for the whole hand group goes outside (rather than being superimposed on) the outermost outlines for finger groups. And I can see the logic for this - the outline for the outer group doesn't care how the image for the child groups is created - it just goes round whatever's there.

But I can also see that it might be a useful option - even though it feels like a hard task to implement it!! - to suppress a higher-order layer outline where would otherwise go round a system-created outline for a lower-order group; or to superimpose the higher-order group outline

That's to say e.g. in this case where: no shapes have stroke; the four finger groups each have outline on (shown as black); and the whole hand also has outline on (shown as red for clarity) - where there's both red (whole hand) AND black outlines (one for each individual finger) then either: red overwrites black or red is suppressed where there's already black

[I Racer]

That is very interesting, Hayasidist - thanks very much for your input.

I'm learning a lot from failure, success and this forum!