Moho Forum

Hello everyone,
Okay my issue that I've been dealing with is for some reason my Enable animated layer order has stopped working? I created a character and I'm trying to do a separate Head and Body turn with the character. I was able to accomplish a pretty decent head turn that I'm satisfied with. But after creating another dial, and a new action it seems my layers will no longer move. I want to be able to manipulate the characters body so that when they are turned right or left their shoulders, arms and hands are underneath the body but every time I try and move the layers under the new action, they just stay put and refuse to move.

I was able to do it under the Head Turn action meaning the Left and Right ears will move behind the head when it turns. The way that my characters is set-up is it's upper arms are on a different layer as are the forearms and hands which are both in a switch layer. They are not in a group they are all under the bone layer of my character. I hope I have been able to clearly articulate my issue here, This is my first post so I'm still trying to learn here.

Thank You.

If you use animated layer ordering in your smart actions, they may conflict with one another or with the main timeline. The solution will depend on how your group and bone layers are set up since layer ordering is specific within those parent layers.

Smartbone actions work great for value-based changes like point positions, layer positions, color, etc. When more than one smartbone changes the same value, Moho just sums the value of the changes and applies both.

Layer order is much more discrete. So if smartbone A moves the layer order from it's original state to the 'A' state and smartbone B moves the layer order from its original state to the 'B' state, Moho doesn't necessarily know how to interpret an 'A' + 'B' state, so often one smartbone layer order will lock out changes made by another smartbone layer order.

The popular workaround for this is to use multiple layers and adjust visibility with the smartbone instead. So for your figure's ears you'd have a 'front ear' layer and a 'back ear' layer, then swap their visibility with a smartbone as the head rotates.

I avoid using Animated Layer order inside a Smart Bone Action (SBA). Whatever you set up this way is going to lock you into certain limitations when you start animating. For example, you're going to run into conflicts when you wish to add layers, or when wish to re-order the layers manually because the SBA will take precedence.

Instead, I take one of these two approaches...

1. Just manually drag layers to keyframe them in the Timeline. This is pretty easy to do and setting up a special Smart Bone Dial (SBD) for this isn't necessary most of the time. Tip: set up groups for layer order animation...this is easier than working with a bunch of 'loose' layers. Also, color coding the groups helps quickly identify which groups should be animated this way.

...or...

2. Create duplicate or reference layers for the groups/layers you originally intended to animate with Animated layer Order SBD, and instead keyframe the visibility for these groups in the SBD. For example, duplicate an complex arm set to exist in front of and behind a character, and then animate the visibility in the SBD to switch between the front and rear versions.

#2 is the method I use for more complex character setups. This method is not subject to any of the problems you can run into using Animated Layer Order in an SBD, and the desired result is the same.

For simplicity's sake, most of the time I just use #1 though--it's just easier to set up and animating it is easy enough without SBD controls. I find my time is better spent building SBD's for more complicated tasks.

Hope this helps.

You could use my layerscript LK_SortByZScale.lua to be able to tween layer order. It also works with multiple smartbones. It makes things more complicated, but it's more versatile.