gmarcc wrote: ↑Fri Oct 06, 2023 4:39 am
Thanks for your fast replies! The character is quite complex and I'm not only modifying the isolated mouth shape, but also some other parts of the face, like the jaw and shadows. That's why I chose not to use a switch layer which would have certainly be easier.
Oh, yeah, I can see how you might want to take another approach for a more realistic effect. Here are a few suggestions...
Some Moho animators will combine Switch Layers with separate controls for the jaw and cheeks. In an advanced setup, Switch Selection is used to choose specific mouth shapes, and the jaw control can dial in the strength of that mouth shape. I usually keep this simpler, though, with the control only reshaping the bottom part of the mouth and cheeks as needed. To me, a very complicated control can be hard to modify later when I inevitably need to, so keep that in mind.
As mentioned earlier, Switch layer drawings can be made morphable, automatically blending into each other. To make Moho art morphable in a Switch, you must enable Interpolate Sub-layers from the Switch properties. Also, you must use the same base drawing for each mouth shape so Moho can track the point order in each layer. Because of this, it's important to make sure you have all the points you need to create all or most of your mouth shapes from that base shape because adding or deleting points will break this connection. I like to make an extra copy of my base drawing and hide it...this is my backup in case I really mess something up. Tip: Not all mouth shapes need to be morphable, and you can have alternative mouth shapes with a different point count structure for different types of morphing. There are many ways to go about it, and the best one depends on your character design and animation style.
What's extra nice about using a Switch Layer for mouths is that you can switch between groups of drawings, so my mouth shapes are usually made of multiple layers, i.e., mouth, teeth, and tongue. I don't normally make all of these morphable because it's extra work, but I've done it occasionally, and it works great.
Practically speaking, morphing mouth shapes can look kind kinda mushy in a cartoon character, so instead, I keep the mouths non-morphing and insert my transitional 'shapes' by transforming the Switch group itself. This helps the animation look smooth and not so 'poppy', and it's easier to setup and animate. All the Moho mouth animations on my two DWA demo reels had been animated using this method.
Re: Shadows: Lip shadows may be drawn into the art layer and can be morphable along with the rest of the mouth. For the jaw shadow, I use a Style effect, or I'll add this as a post-effect in comp. If I need the Moho-rendered shadow to be more complex than an offset-matte trick, I'll rig a masked shape for the shadow. The Po rig near the beginning of my 2019 demo reel is an example of that.
Hope this helps.