Moho Animation Forum

Hi all, I'm a fairly new Moho user. I'm running it through my process to see if it'll fit my workflow. I've done puppet work in AE and worked with deforming characters in DCC applications for a few years, so I'm familiar with rigging concepts, binding, all that jazz.

But I'm really frustrated by an issue with layering deformations that I just can't solve by myself. I have a torso (image) that's supposed to be deformed by a spine, which I've created. That works just fine. But I also wanted to be able to do a partial turn of the torso, so I've created a vector layer, meshed it, and applied it as a Smart Warp layer on the torso. I created the action, yada yada, and the torso turn looks good.

Problem is, I simply cannot get any flexi binding in this scenario, and for the life of me I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong! The image and the mesh are both in a Bone layer with the spine. I'm not on frame 0 (I figured that "gotcha" out recently) . I have "Flexible Binding" enabled in the Bone layer settings. I have "Warp using bones" enabled on the torso image. I've gone to frame 0, selected the torso image and then the spine bones, and run "Use Selected Bones for Flexi-Binding". Nothing. Same thing for the mesh. I can do point binding on the mesh, and that "works", but it looks too rigid and that's not what I want.

What do I do??

Is your smart warp layer bending with the bones?

It is not :\

Edit: I should say, it is not being "deformed" by the bones. If (on frame 0, of course) I enable Flexi Bind Layer for the mesh layer, run the "Use Selected Bones for Flexi Binding" command with the spine bones selected, then it will *move* with the spine bones. But it's not a deformation, it's more like it's parented. That movement doesn't affect the image layer at all though.

Are you sure you selected more than one bone for "Use Selected Bones for Flexi Binding"? Otherwise it just acts like layer binding.

If you smart warp doesn't affect your image layer, you haven't set it up right.

Blargh. I don't know what I did (or undid), but I must have broken something under the hood. I cut my losses and created a new mesh for the torso, recreated the actions, and all is right with my rig again. I'm bummed I couldn't solve it, but I'm glad the configuration technically "works" after recreating it from the ground up.