masking for beginners

[zoesan]

I've begun on the Actions and Smart bones with a task of setting up a simple head turn exercise, I know it has been covered on the forum ( looking at a YouTube Vid ) still can't get this mask to work, tried em all, so obviously doing/done something wrong, no bone other than the body turn bone, just the animated mask turn, ain't working just now and from the jpegs supplied, I know I've still got to solve the nose, on final side view.

[synthsin75]

The eyes, nose, and mouth need to be on separate layers...above the head layer you wish to mask them to.

[Greenlaw]

I'm assuming you're talking about the eyes?

There are many ways to handle that. However, from what I see in your layers panel, it doesn't appear you've set this up for masking.

The simplest way to do this is to break out the Eyes and Mouth in their own layers, then group the Eyes and Mouth layers with the Head layer, and make sure Head is the lowest layer. Then set the group to Mask with Hide All enabled. Now, for the Head Layer's mask settings, enable Exclude Strokes. That will draw the outlines over the eyes at the edge but keep the hand fill behind the eyes. You should also break out the Nose but set that layet to not be affected by the Head mask.

BTW, I find it easier to bind all the face layers to a single Face bone and just animate the bone rather than animating all the individual parts.

If you have GPU acceleration enabled, it may still draw this incorrectly, especially if you are nesting masking groups, but the scene should still render correctly. Usually, I turn GPU acceleration off so the workspace can more like the rendering.

There are other ways to do this but the above is probably the easiest to explain in a post. Hope that works for you.

[zoesan]

Thanks, will follow the replies, it has worked on some other tasks I've been working on, will now separate into individual layers. I know the character is very simplistic, but suitable for purpose, I'm hoping to give this character a lead role in a short I'm shaping up at the moment. I have GPU turned off, given some of the responses on the forum to software crashes being associated with having it on, unlikely in my case, my content is light on the processing.