There's something about Moho that I never could make work in a right way until today. The ability to have different "sets" of bones inside of the same character.
I think the most evident case can be seen in the arms. Many times, one single drawing for an arm is not enough. Even with the inclusion of smart bones -that finally made easy to have joints behaving exactly the way you want-, the problem is you are still bending one drawing to create all the range of movements you want. And that decreases the expressiveness of the characters.
Switch layers can help in these cases, but they have limits, because you are mostly forced to use the same set of bones to bend drawings that can be very different each other. For instance, one arm pose could be extended and another could have a short bent pose. There's no way you can easily animate that using the same bones.
Check how different are the arms in the image (which is Roz, from Monsters inc, by the way). Animate that character in Moho would present a lot of difficulties.
Now, the "Switch Bones" technique allows to switch between different drawings and sets of bones quickly while you are animating. It's a pretty simple idea and not hard to setup once you understand the basis:
Every arm layer is outside the screen and has its own bones (in this case, rigged with "Use selected bones for Flexi-Binding). All the arm layers are inside a switch layer.
Then a Smart bone is used to show the arms one by one. This Smart bone also move the bone of the arm to be close to the character.
Once you have this setup, the animation process is very simple and feels very natural. You just forget about all the bones flying around (because you never see them)
I recorded a demonstration/tutorial you can watch below. I will create a shorter and more didactic one in the future.
And here is the .moho file, if you want to play with it:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jmvulvizd2o85 ... .moho?dl=0
I hope you enjoy it!
