Moho Forum

Hiya, I want to make a chgaracter turn his head from a frontal view to 3/4 view, and had 2 thoughts on how I might do this. One was to make 3 separate heads, one facing the camera, one facing to the side in 3/4, and an in-between head to show for just a split second in between to make the action look smoother. I also thought maybe I could move the points in the head around and animate them to get the same effect, probabaly a much smoother movement. If anyone has tips or a preferance or other ideas I'd love to know why/how. I'm still a bit of a newbie here and havn't worked the kinks out.

Another trick is to arrange the face parts in 3D space. They're all still 2D vector layers, but by positioning them in 3D, you can rotate the entire set of shapes to make the head turn side-to-side.

Here's a thread that doesn't talk about how to do it step-by-step, but does discuss it some. Look for the pictures showing the head from above:

http://www.lostmarble.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=855

Zaphod writes about using switch layers and point animation for head turns.

Both valid techniques that have been used successfully by others.

There is another technique where you can layer your facial shapes at different depths to partly mimic 3D for limited head turns - it won't work for a frontal to profile turn (all you'll see is the "paper-thin" edge of the layers), but it might work okay for your frontal to 3/4 turn.

While I've been writing this I see Lost Marble has beaten me to it, but I'll post anyway for the extra examples.

Use the Rotate Layer X and Rotate Layer Y tools (down under the Layer Origin tool, looking a little like the perspective tools icons) to rotate the group layer for all the sub-layer features you want to rotate.

Lost Marble posted an example - you can see the animation here and download the moho file.

Squeaky Dave posted an example (Carrot.moho) in the files section of the old Yahoo group for Moho.

Brian (7feet) did something similar but using a base 3D shape to map features onto, rather than a base 2D shape.
See this thread for download links of both the animation and the project files.

Lost Marble also posted an example using a base 3D head shape, see the animation here.

Barry Baker recently used the depth layers trick for a character - unfortunately you can no longer see the animation, but you can see a screenshot of his character showing the 3D layers in this thread.

Regards, Myles.

I have used a simple head design and in a switch layer modified copies (must have exact point placement so work on a copy) in the switch layer dialog last tab, look for interpolate. This will blend modified frames from one to another and be affected by keyframe placement (timing).
PS: right clicking the layer gives manual key frame placement by selecting from the list. I don't have a running copy of Moho on this system so you may have to look around or hit help on this one.
Toddio