3D character rig, smartbones not affecting animated layer effects

[LeviEnton]

Hello fellow Moho animators,

a few days ago I started experimenting with using 3d models on certain characters, starting with replacing their heads which works pretty well. To keep control over how the lines will look and avoid the automatic toon lines moho adds to 3d objects, i used the animated layer function "stroke (animated)". It looks incredible convincing when not in movement and blends very well with the 2d body. One problem with that approach though, is that as soon as you zoom in or zoom out the strokes will not have the appropiate width and will either look thicker or thinner than the 2d lines from the body.

To temporarily fix that issue, I just created a smartbone called "strokes" which changes the thickness of the animated strokes of "mouthsimple.obj" and "headsimple.obj". If you check what the smartbone does in the actions window, it will work just fine switching the thickness in intervalls of 1. However, when trying out using the smartbone normally, nothing will happen for some reason. Not sure if this is a bug or something.

I hope someone can help me, because i think 3d-rigging in Moho is heavily underrated and is something that could be a trend in the future!

Here is the project folder with the character rig: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

[Daxel]

That could be interesting!

I will try playing with that rig again tomorrow, I didn't manage to test it well.

But I have a feeling that your problem may be caused by having nested bone layers, they can block the effect of smartbones that are on parent bone layers but try to control layers that are children of the nested bone layer. Sounds confusing but it's simple: if you have a Main Bone layer and inside it you have a Head bone layer, to control the layers inside the head bone layer with a smarbone you should create that smartbone on the Head bone layer and not the Main one.

[LeviEnton]

Hello, thanks for your reply!
I just looked into it some more, and after some testing i realized that it changing the thickness of the layer applied strokes does not work at all with smartbones, not even with a simple vector layer inside a bone layer.... so this problem is not about the 3d part of the rig but appears to be some sort of bug

[synthsin75]

There are some features that have never been made to work with smart bones.

[LeviEnton]

There are some features that have never been made to work with smart bones.

Ah thats really sad... but still strange, cus it will work if you edit the smartbone in the actions panel, just not when doing it on the main timeline which is odd to me, because it shows that the program "technically" could do it right? And other layer effects don't pose much of an issue as far as i know... i hope that smartbone support for strokes and fills will be added in the future, along with better 3d support! Just imagine having 3d bones to rig your 3d model with a sick toon shader that looks like artwork (and yeah you can technically do this in Blender, but who likes to use Blender...)

[Daxel]

Yeah, it doesn't seem to work when activated by a smartbone. I wonder why, it doesn't make much sense.

[synthsin75]

That's how all features that have never been set up to work with smart bones act...seeming to work in the smart bone action (while you're on a timeline with the actual animation keyframes) but not on the mainline.