Moho Forum

I've been building a character rig, and using the layer flip tool to create opposing views of a character (making a character facing left, then flipping to get a character facing right). The views themselves are group layers consisting of many vector layers.

I've found though that layer flip isn't working quite how I would have expected. The sublayers within the group are flipped, but it appears that their xy axis has also been flipped. That is to say, the flip is simply visual. This doesn't interfere with manual animation (though it can be a bit weird if you're adjusting numerical values by hand), but it's having odd effects on some scripts I'd written which expected a consistent coordinate space.

Is there anyway to, for lack of a better word, bake a flip around an axis? That is, to have the effect you would get if you manually went into each layer, selected all the points then flipped the points around the axis, then flipped the bones, etc.

My thanks for your time.

I don't think so, but if you're scripting anyway, you can always just check the layer FlipH/FlipV values and invert the coordinates: http://mohoscripting.com/classes/MohoLayer#fFlipH

It sounds like you're more advanced than I am, so this is probably going to be obvious, but...

I've been dealing with turning characters by adding a smart dial for left and right. Then in the action implementation I flip the main bone and then use the bone transform + layer manipulate tools to get things lined up correctly. (Would be much more convenient if the offset bone tool could be used away from frame zero, not sure why it is unavailable.) I think that this is basically what you described doing above, but if you do it in a smart bone action you only need to do it once.

Is that relevant?

I have no problem with flipping complete characters or just body parts, inside or outside group or bone layers. The key is to set the origin point to where you want the flip axis to be.

Fair point. I've just had some trouble finding the magic point, and decided it was less work to add the smart bone.