Moho Forum

Toontoonz wrote:I have not tried that, but I would imagine that would be a lot of work to have to add point after point after point on 20+ shapes in a layer. (And everytime one adds a point to shape iin Moho, I have found the the shape changes just a bit.) Try adding points on a round circle in Moho.

there is actually a script in script>draw>split curve that will double(or triple or whatever you wish) without deforming the shape.

ralphrubbish wrote: i've actually SORTOF figured out a way around this...but it makes for alot of setup.
try something like this and see if it suits you.
have you tried using an image texture? they probably don't quite work how you'd like them too either, but at least they wouldn't leave the outline!

Regarding your example drawing, wouldn´t that mean that one would basically have to draw everything point by point?....a real potential nightmare.

Regarding using an image texture, that takes away from the vector drawing style and makes a larger file and a different look than what I would want. And image textures seem to distort in their own strange ways when moved.

Toontoonz wrote:
"...but creating many more points in the large shape, I was able to get things to warp more "realistically". "

I have not tried that, but I would imagine that would be a lot of work to have to add point after point after point on 20+ shapes in a layer. (And everytime one adds a point to shape iin Moho, I have found the the shape changes just a bit.) Try adding points on a round circle in Moho.

I believe there is a script out there (somewhere on this forum) that will allow you to add any number of points to a given segment. That way you should be able to do it in one fell swoop, without having to worry about changing your shape. Of course, I haven't used it, your mileage may vary, etc.

ralphrubbish wrote:
there is actually a script in script>draw>split curve that will double(or triple or whatever you wish) without deforming the shape.

That´s handy to know for adding lots of points at once - thanks!

Toontoonz wrote:Regarding your example drawing, wouldn´t that mean that one would basically have to draw everything point by point?....a real potential nightmare.

no. it means you'd have to play a little bit of connect the dots and then run the script i was talking about. not alot of work honestly.

The problem would seem to be that some of the points in certain dots are being controlled by different bones. One possible solution is to not only layer bind the dress, but to make it in it's own bone layer, as a sublayer inside the main bone layer (which you bind to the main layer). If you set the "dress" bone layer for flexi-binding, you should get a little something like this -





Also, because the 2 half-dots on the bottom of the dress can move slightly differently from the bottom of the dress, I made a copy of the dress shape, made it the very topmost shape in the dress Vector layer, and turned off the fill for the shape (so its only an outline). This makes sure that the flat edges of those dots stays hidden.

So this is one place where flexi-bindidng is pretty much essential. The main bone layer is still region binding. Part of it is setting up the bone strengths in the flexi-bound layer strong enough so that no one bone completely controls any one point. All the overlap in strength gives you a lot smoother deformation.

Here's a .swf of how it moves
and the .moho file

7feet wrote:The problem would seem to be that some of the points in certain dots are being controlled by different bones. One possible solution is to not only layer bind the dress, but to make it in it's own bone layer, as a sublayer inside the main bone layer (which you bind to the main layer). If you set the "dress" bone layer for flexi-binding, you should get a little something like this .

It looks like you have a solution there - I don´t quite understand it yet, but let me play with it and see if I can duplicate what you did.

And then I will create a more complicated situation and see if your method works there, too.

Thanks to everyone for adding to the discussion! I am always trying to learn something new with Moho - push it to the edge and see if somebody can help me with the situations that arise.

I added a link to a .swf and the Moho file above. Hope that makes it a little clearer what's going on.

Thanks! Your swf file of the dress moving looks just how I hoped it would look!

I will carefully analyze your moho file and will post my own effort to see if I can match what you did so well.

I tried your method and it works real good.

I would have never thought of that in a million years - bone layers within bone layers and the different angles and numbers of bones. Lots of tricks and techniques one can experiment and learn new things with the bone layers.

And your trick of putting the black line on the top helps cover up the minor edge problems. I also need to be more careful how I draw things to the edges.

If it was region binding, that's a lot more predictable. And there's probably a lot of different ways to set up the bones, that was just what came to mind when I was trying to make my dupe look like yours. Also one of the keys is that the parent bone (the smallest one) in the dress layer is the parent for all the other bones. If you don't move it, everything works as it should. Without it the whole dress would spin around. Also, that's one of the reasons all the bones in that layer are parented to one bone, so the each have their own individual movement without being affected by the others.

I've had this problem before.

My simple solution was to prerender the dress as a .png, import the .png, then warp the .png with the underlying bones. Be sure to render the .png at a much higher resolution that what you plan to use in your project so you won't get any jaggies.

-Dave

Eureka!
I discovered the perfect solution to my problem. Works everytime and takes no special boning or layering.
I was thinking about my shape layers within a vector layer theory and how could one flatten all the objects into one layer in the vector layer.
Then I remembered: Adobe Illustrator can do that. By using compound paths and shapes one can take all their little pieces in the drawing and puts them in one "flat" drawing (Moho should incorporate something like this in its program).

So I did that, brought it into Moho experimented a bit - was looking good, but not perfect - ecspecially when a shape is near the edge of another shape.
The trick there was to make sure the edges of shapes parallel to each other along the perimeter of the shape had the same number of points in the approximately the same location.
Ta-Dah! It worked.
Here is a sample:

Note how the distance of the shapes near the perimeter of the orange sheet stay nice and uniform - realistic in their distorting. The one white shape is a hole in the main orange background.
I have to play around some more in Adobe Illustrator to see if I can make it better and faster, but so far it looking good!