Pin Bones

[tosiyori]

In the MOHO introduction it shows a tiger (or some kind of a cat) with the "Pin Bone" effect. I have tried this many times on different images with various luck. Is there a tutorial just for this type of pin bones ?

[Greenlaw]

How well Pin Bones work for deforming a photo image depends on how you prepare your triangulated mesh. In general, you want to draw your shapes around the features you wish to deform with enough points to deform the image smoothly. Note that the curves/lines themselves have no effect on the image--it's all about the points. Points are used to move or anchor the pixels and the Pin bones control the influence on the points. The strength of each Pin bone can be adjusted individually.

Tip: make a duplicate of your vector layer as a back up before you convert it to a triangulated mesh. This way you can easily backtrack to clean version if you want to edit it differently. When I'm not sure what I'm doing, I may make multiple variations.

Tip: remember you can punch holes in a mesh. This is useful for eyes, the mouth, etc. For example, a 'quick and dirty' eyes trick is to outline the eyelids in the image before triangulation, and then after triangulation, delete the shapes inside the eyes. This creates an eyeless character. (I believe you need to be on an animation frame to see the masking effect.) Then, duplicate the original image layer, disable warp from that copy and move it behind the mesh. Now you can easily open and close the eyes. (You can use Pin bones or just animate the points directly.)

There are examples by other animators here in this forum but I'm not sure where to find them at the moment. I'm a little busy this morning but I'll see if I can post an example for setting up a mesh for pin bones later this afternoon.

[tosiyori]

Thanks for the reply, I am having a problem with a vector & Pin Bones: 1st I have a "Group" layer called "Head", it has 3 switch layers ( Mouth, Pupils, Eyebrows) 5 other layers (Nose, Hair,Etc, Etc) To get the "Tool" section up I had to create a "Bone" layer, called "Santa", I added "Pin Bones" to the eyes & adjusted the bone strength to .5, I used the "Bind Layer" in the tool section to bind each pin bones, when using the "Manipulate Bones" tool there was no effect. Where did I go wrong ???

[slowtiger]

Check if you've put the layers inside the bone layer.

[tosiyori]

Yes, they are all in the "Group Layer" which in in the "Bone Layer"

[Greenlaw]

Trying to understand what you're doing. So in this example, are just deforming a vector or are you trying to use a vector mesh to deform an image? If it's the latter, when you say 'it has no effect,' do you mean the Pin bones are not affecting the vectors or that the deforming vectors are not affecting the image?

If you're only working with vectors now (no image layers involved,) can you post an example of your setup. If you're binding correctly, Pin bones work no differently from regular bones.

A few reasons bones may not work with vectors as expected are:

1. Bones strength is set to zero.
2. Points have been released from binding or have been bound using a conflicting binding mode.
3. A nested group (i.e, a Switch Layer) has an incompatible binding mode applied (Layer BInding, for example.)

I can probably think of a few more possibilities but this is all just guessing since you haven't provided any actual examples to troubleshoot.

If you don't wish to post any examples, my usual 'go to' solution is select the 'broken' layers and choose Reset All Bone Rigging. This will reset only the selected layers to use the default Flexi-binding method. From there, it can be quicker and easier to fix the problem since now I know exactly what the current settings are.

Hope this helps.

[tosiyori]

What "Binding" method would you recommend when using a "Group" vector ?

[tosiyori]

I tried the method you mentioned above, the "Head" group layer bone was removed, in the head group I placed 3 pin bones, Eye, Eye. Nose, Flexi binding them, Manipulate bones again, had no effect.

[tosiyori]

How do I Post an Example ?

[Greenlaw]

Many people here use Dropbox or GoogleDrive. You can use a free account. Just make a 'share' folder, upload the file and paste the link here.

Alternatively, there are free file sharing websites you can upload to. This is better if you don't want to host the file yourself. The downside is that it might disappear after a time. I don't have a recommendation but I'm sure somebody here can make one shortly.

If you're just posting a pic, use the TinyPic UI in the post editor. That's usually the easiest way. Occasionally, it goes down though; when that happens I use the TinyPic website or Imgur website.

[Greenlaw]

Regarding Group binding: are you using Layer binding? If so, that binds the group layer as a single item to a single bone. This mean anything inside the group moves with the group, not the bone. This is useful for a lot of little items that you wish to move with the head bone as a single unit without deforming it. (For example, all the parts of a face with the head bone.)

There are many ways to bind items. The method you choose depends on how you intend to animate the rig.

If you want to use multiple bones to deform multiple items, you need to bind each item as layers or points, not as a group. That might sound like a lot of work but it's not. For example, if you want to use Use Selected Bones For Flexi-binding, you can select multiple bones and multiple layers, and bind them all at once. If you're using Point Binding, you can only bind a single layer at a time but you can make a selection of points that you want to bind all at once. You can bind any point to only one bone but any points in a layer can be bound to a different bone.

For some situations, you can even combine different method. For example: Selected Bones for Flexi-binding for a leg and point binding around the ankle joint and knees.

Since you're just learning, I would keep rigging simple and stick with Flexi-binding, which is the default method. Flexi-binding affects everything in the rig as soon as you create or import the item. You can control the deformations by adjusting bone strength. That works okay but eventually, you want more control...for example, you want the arm bones to affect only the arm layers. For this, just select the arm bones and the arm layers, and choose Use Selected Bones For Flexi-binding. Now these layers will be affected only by these bones. The bones will still affect other layers, so you'll probably want to bind the other layers/points to specific bones too. The process can go quickly once you get the hang of it. Also keep Layer Binding in mind for items you want to bind to a single bone...just remember that when you do this with a group, everything inside cannot be bound to bones. (Well, unless you put a sub-layer of bones inside the group. But seriously, don't go there...it's a pain to animate.)

Where it starts to get tricky is when you want to use Smart Bones and have the character move in turnarounds with many layers of animation. There are many hard ways and easy ways to do this, with varying degrees of smoothness, but we're getting into advanced territory now so let's save this discussion for later.

As you can see, there are many, MANY ways to rig items in Moho and it can get overwhelming if you try to learn them all right away. I highly suggest sticking with Flexi-binding. It's mostly predictable and very, um...excuse the pun, flexible. And group binding because it's obviously different from Flexi-binding. After a while, you'll run into limitations with these methods, and then you'll want to look into methods like Point Binding and Smooth Joints.

Good luck!