Starting point for this tutorial.
This tutorial demonstrates Moho's image warping feature. This feature allows you to use a skeleton to distort an image. In this way, you can animate photographs, hand-drawn artwork, or anything you can get into an image file in a flexible way.
For this tutorial, we'll start with a project file that's almost finished. It's named "Tutorial 4.2" and it's located in the "Tutorials/4 - Images" subfolder within the main Moho folder. Open this file in Moho, expand the "Skeleton" layer in the Layers panel, and you should see something like this:
Starting point for this tutorial.
The bone layer contains two sub-layers: an image layer and a vector layer. Try playing back the animation. Notice that only the vector layer moves with the skeleton:
Only the vector layer moves.
The reason that the image layer isn't moving is that it hasn't been connected to the bones yet (as the vector layer has been).
To warp the image layer with the skeleton, double-click the "statue.png" layer, and go to the "Image" tab in the Layer Settings dialog. Turn on the checkbox marked "Warp using bones" and click OK. Also, turn off the visibility for the "vector sample" layer - it was only an example, and we don't want it in the final animation. Play back the animation again, and you should now see the image moving with the skeleton:
Image warping.
Tip: Notice the horizontal bone at the base of the statue. This bone doesn't move at all in the animation, so why is it even there? When using image warping, the image is distorted by all the bones in the skeleton, and the nearest bone to any part of the image has the most influence. We don't really want the base of the statue to move, so an easy way to prevent this is to add a bone in the area we want to remain still, and not animate it. Another trick you might use when warping images is to break up an image into logical parts (for example, make the arms and legs of a person separate images from the main body). Then, use different skeletons to control the various re-assembled parts. This way, a leg bone can't have any influence over an arm.