Moho Forum

When I use a smart warp layer with a vector layer to animate a triangulated mesh of a face image, the mouth I cut out has hard edges, making the mouth edges look very "cut out" from the face as if by scissors. Is there a way to feather the alpha of the cut out so it softens the edges? In After Effects, for example, you can feather masks to make the edges softer.

You should search the forum since there were some writings about tMesh which are in fact shapes and can be further edited.

Maestral wrote:You should search the forum since there were some writings about tMesh which are in fact shapes and can be further edited.

If I knew what exactly to search for I would not need to post the question

The mesh edge is always going to be 'hard' but there are a couple of things you can do to address your needs:

If you want a feathered edge for the image:

1. Feather the edges of the artwork itself in a paint program. You can do this by giving the image with a transparent background and saving it as a 32-bit PNG file.

...or...

2. Create a vector layer mask in Moho and use one of the edge blur options (i.e., Layer or style FX.) Then apply the mesh warp to this layer. (Multiple layers, vector or image, can share the same mesh warp.) naturally, the mask should have an appropriate number and placement of points for good deformation by the mesh.

If you want the mesh to have 'smooth' edges, you need to increase the polygon density. This is because the triangulated mesh cannot use smooth edges the way a normal vector path does, but increasing the polygon count will make it look less faceted. But if you decided to feather the edges of the image/mask as described above, you can disregard this part; just make sure the mesh is larger than the image/mask.

Hope this helps.

Thanks, I figured out the feathering method using Photoshop. Thanks for confirming edges will always be hard.