Moho Forum

It would be great if we be able to have color ramp in shaded effect. This way we can create a 3D look surface more easily.

MehdiZangenehBar wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 10:00 pm It would be great if we be able to have color ramp in shaded effect. This way we can create a 3D look surface more easily.

I use the Shaded and Gradient Effects in the Styles window. Shaded allow me to use shape-based shading, and Gradient lets me use linear and radial color ramps. For example...



Here, I was going for a soft 'airbrush' 3D look with this character, and I think it worked out nicely. The effects can even be animated for 'interactive' lighting effects.

There is also the Color Points tool, which can colorize a shape with gradients based on point color.

Hope this helps.

Oh, wait...sorry, I misunderstood what you were asking. Some clarification...

The Shaded effect is only meant to simulate lighting (Shadow or Highlight, or both when using two instances), and it does this by offsetting and processing the alpha. You can colorize, blur, and adjust the transparent shading (I did some of that in the above example.) That's all you normally want in a Shaded effect. A color ramp is more of a surface effect than a lighting effect.

Gradient, on the other hand, does allow you to use multicolor-ramps, and you can combine Shaded with Gradient and Color Points. If you stack reference layers, you can use a blend mode to further enhance the effect. But of course this effect doesn't conform to the shape edges like Shaded does.

If you need a multi-color gradient that falls off from one side of a shape, like a shadow or highlight, yeah, that's a bit trickier in Moho. Normally, I do this type of effect in a composting package like After Effects or Fusion.

Here is kind of a dumb way to do it...



I'm using Liquid Shapes with a Soft Edge effect and a mask. Actually, since I'm using a mask anyway (to mask the Soft Edge effect), the Liquid Shapes masking really isn't necessary.

This would still be easier to do as a post-effect in compositing.

Greenlaw wrote: ↑Thu Feb 08, 2024 6:25 pm I'm using Liquid Shapes with a Soft Edge effect and a mask.

Nifty idea!

A simpler method just occurred to me: activate Blur for the entire layer containing the stacked shapes, and then mask it with a copy of the base shape. No need to apply Soft Edge or use Liquid Shapes.

This is very easy to set up, and in 14.1, adjusting the Blur effect is interactive, too!

But after all that, I still think doing this in comp can result in more realistic lighting effects because the lighting direction can be fixed. I don't think the above example will do that in animation. Well, maybe there's a way to do that using bone constraints to control the offsets, but now we're getting complicated again.

So, yeah, a color ramp for the Shaded effect might still be needed if you're not planning to do this in comp.

Or, I guess you can do something similar to what I do in comp by rendering in two passes, but using Moho as the compositing app.

So many options!

Well, I know we can create that using combination of several tricks, But actually I'm programmer and undrstand this could be possible for developers to implement that. That's why I described as feature request. However thank you for your tricks!