Moho Animation Forum

Perhaps it is a technique know for veterans, but for me as novate was recently discovered by my self and want to share with all of you, speccially with newbe to AS/Moho.

Switch layers can hold bones. Perhaps you didn't know. (selgin put the ear ). It is described int AS/Moho help but so few people read completely te tutorial or the help. Taken from Moho help:

More accurately, a switch layer is a bone layer, just a specialized one. If you add bones to a switch layer, you can use them (for example) to change the shape of a mouth as it speaks, bending it into a smile or a frown.

Sometime switch layers hold vector layers controlled by bones from the swtich layers.
Sometime (more often than you can imagine) verctors layers inside switch layers are quite different between them. Not only the shape, also the movement.

So ¿How can we switch ALSO the bones in a swtich layer to make them consistent with just the new vetor layer selected?

The main example are legs. Legs facing right and facing left.

Solution: Duplicate the sekeleton as many times as you need.

In the example I have two pairs of legs for each position. One looking right and other looking left. You can select them in any combination and can be animated by their own bones.

There is only a precaution. The links of every bone must be correct. I mean that in this example when you create the femur for the second leg you have to be sure that no bone is selected. Then it is like a new skeleton just created in that switch layer. Anyway you can always reparent the bones after. But remind to have two independent sub- skeletons for each orientation.
Hope it helps you.

Genete.

Hah!

I never thought to try that!

I have this character I am trying to build in a whole body turn, so I want to use switch layer interpolation, but as you describe I ran into trouble with bones in my switch layer not always staying aligned.

Yeehaa!

I just played around with this for about 5 minutes real quick. It is cool. I see lots of potential for this idea.

Thanks!


Another tip to add to this one...

If you use region binding and bone "offset" you can avoid the extra bones possibly interfering with other meshes in the other switch layers.

You can move them far enough away from each other and offset them back using bone offset (check about bone offset in the manual).

I wasn't sure if bone offset would work the way I thought with switch layers but it does.

-vern

You are right heyvern!
I used offset bones for my first animation as well as I used region binding after following the tutorial. But for exrtremities (limbs), and after have readed (and learned a lot) the topic "Joints" in this forum I prefer to use Bind Ponits tool instead of Region Binding or Region Flexible. In this way I have more control of the leg or arm. So there is no problem with bone binding to points because I do it manually in that case. But great addition to my tip anyway!!
The example is made with this technique.
I'm happy that the tip is useful for someone more than me!!

Genete

PD: Here is my setup file if you want to have a look and/or comment.
http://es.geocities.com/genetita/moho/d ... 6.moho.zip

Hey, I never saw this tip before. Thanks, it's really useful, genete