Moho Forum

For example while creating a 3d rigging the arm was behind the character body so when am animating while turning the character, i realise the arm behind isnt coming to the front because of the action already done on it.


What can I do to override this

When a Smart Bone Action is active, some things can be over-ridden during animation. For example: Point animation and bone/layer transforms. Unfortunately layer order is not one of them.

It's for this reason I often recommended against animating layer order inside a Smart Bone Action. It's better to use multiple copies or instances of an arm or leg layer and then use visibility keys in a Smart Bone Action to change the visibility of their order. This also leaves you the opportunity to (manually) use Animated Layer order in addition to the visibility sorting when you really need it.

Personally, I would not put the stacking order animation in a body turn. It's better to make this a separate control (I usually call this z-pos,) so you can move the upper and lower arm sections individually as you need them. This is useful when a character needs to reach in front of or behind their body while standing in any angle. To see an example of this, look at my old Puss In Boots rig at the beginning of this video: Puss In Book

BTW, the Puss rig uses yet another method for changing the stacking order. It still uses multiple layers for each arm region but I use mask to reveal the arm sections in each layer. The mask is a curve that follows the length of the arm with a thick stroke applied, and then I use Stroke Exposure in a Smart Bone Dial to reveal/hide different sections of the arm. This worked well for this rig but in practice I decided it was over-engineered because simply hiding and revealing fixed layer sections worked just as well.

A couple more tips: You can create a separate Smart Bone Dial for each arm, and each arm dial can control up to 4 possible stacking positions (FF, FB, BF, BB.) Sometimes I like to use just one dial for both arms because there really aren't a lot of of stacking possibilities to dial through (maybe 16?,) and a single dial takes up less screen space. Be sure to use step keys on the dial and enable Use Previous Key as your Default Interpolation.

For simpler rigs or when I'm just in hurry or feeling lazy, I don't bother with any of the above. It's easy enough to just enable Animated Layer Order and move layers up and down in the Layers Window as needed. IMO, why complicate something that's already so easy to animate?

I hope this gives you some ideas.

Greenlaw wrote: ↑Wed Mar 22, 2023 5:44 pm When a Smart Bone Action is active, some things can be over-ridden during animation. For example: Point animation and bone/layer transforms. Unfortunately layer order is not one of them.

It's for this reason I often recommended against animating layer order inside a Smart Bone Action. It's better to use multiple copies or instances of an arm or leg layer and then use visibility keys in a Smart Bone Action to change the visibility of their order.

Personally, I would not put the stacking order animation in a body turn. It's better to make this a separate control (I usually call this z-pos,) so you can move the upper and lower arm sections individually as you need them. This is useful when a character needs to reach in front of or behind their body while standing in any angle. To see an example of this, look at my old Puss In Boots rig at the beginning of this video: Puss In Book

BTW, the Puss rig uses yet another method for changing the stacking order. It still uses multiple layers for each arm region but I use mask to reveal the arm sections in each layer. The mask is a curve that follows the length of the arm with a thick stroke applied, and then I use Stroke Exposure in a Smart Bone Dial to reveal/hide different sections of the arm. This worked well for this rig but in practice I decided it was over-engineered because simply hiding and revealing fixed layer sections worked just as well.

A couple more tips: You can create a separate Smart Bone Dial for each arm, and each arm dial can control up to 8 possible stacking positions (FF, FB, BF, BB.) Nowadays I like to use just one dial for both arms because there are really very stacking possibilities to dial through, and a single dial takes up less screen space. Be sure to use step keys on the dial and enable Use Previous Key as your Default Interpolation.

For simpler rigs or when I'm just in hurry or feeling lazy, I don't bother with any of the above. It's easy enough to just enable Animated Layer Order and move layers up and down in the Layers Window as needed. IMO, why complicate something that's already so easy to animate?

I hope this gives you some ideas.

Yup it does, thanks, still would have been better to have a way to over ride it but thanks anyway

nowreelworld wrote: ↑Wed Mar 22, 2023 5:47 pm Yup it does, thanks, still would have been better to have a way to over ride it but thanks anyway

I think this is prevented because, in practice, it wouldn't work well.

For example, if you manually changed the layer order on the mainline after using the Smart Bone to change the layer order, this now breaks what the Smart Bone was doing for arm layer sorting, and now when you want to use the turn again, you'll need to re-sort the layers to get the Smart bone to work correctly again. IMO, that will quickly become really painful to animate and not worth the headache.

With the Smart Bone controlling visibility instead, it's not an issue because the physical layer order never actually changes (until you want it to,) and the operation of the Smart Bone and result is the same as when you used Animated Layer (better actually because your rig has more flexibility to adapt for new situations.)

That's been my experience so far, but I've been using Moho long enough to know it really depends on what works best for a particular production.