Bones in overlapping objects

[Hauksbee01]

I just finished these two creatures and it's time to install bones. The critters are bipeds which means that the Right Leg is directly behind the Left leg. The Hip Bone (Root Bone) is directly above the Thigh Bone. Thus, I select the Root Bone and draw the Thigh Bone in place. But, how do I select which leg it will be assigned to? All the parts and Layers are in the Bones Layer. Can I select the Left Thigh Vector Shape, and then draw the bone?

[chucky]

You can only add bones to a bone (group/) layer.
Make sure you put your beast inside that bone group using the layer palette, then select that bone group.
The bone tools will now appear.

[Hauksbee01]

XXX

[Greenlaw]

As Chucky noted, all your bones go in the bone layer at the top of the character's hierarchy in the Layer window, and each character should have it's own bone layer. You can have more than one bone layer per character but I don't normally ever do that, even for very advanced rigs. It's just a lot easier to do all your character animation in a single bone layer for each character.

As for binding, the binding method you choose depends the design of the character on how you want to deform and animate it.

The 'simplest' binding method is Layer Binding, which lets you bind each the layers to the bone it should move with. Note that layer binding does not allow deformation, and if you layer bind a group, that prevents you from using bone binding to layers inside that group. (This is a feature, not a limitation.)

The next 'simplest' is Point Binding This is like Layer Binding but at the point level. It allows you to bind any point to any bone. The advantage this has over Layer Binding is that you can Bind different parts of your drawing to different bones. This method is still pretty 'rigid' but it allows for bone deformation between points in a layer

The default binding method is Flexi-binding. This is technically more advanced in that use use bone weights to deform points and images, resulting in more organic deformations. Being a default, any new layer created in Moho will be affected by Flexi-binding until you apply a different binding method.

But what if you want to use Flexi-binding on some layers using only a few specific bones and not all of bones? Then you want to use Use Selected Bones For Flexi-binding. To do this, select the layers you wish to bind, then select the bones you wish to bind them too, and select this command. Where this is useful is, for example, you have multiple layers for an arm and you want ONLY the arm bones to deform the arm drawings, not the other bones in the rig.

Finally, we have Smooth Joint. This seems to work best with bitmap images and it's what I used for the limbs in the Puss In Boots rig (in the interactive episode on Netflix) and Thighsander Plunderhorse from All Hail King Julien. I'm not exactly sure how it does its magic but it seems to create a smoothly deforming 'circle' joint at the joint between two bones. The catch with this method is that you can use it only between TWO bones, but Victor came up with a clever workaround for involving more bones. (He has a video explaining the workaround elsewhere in this forum.)

I may use any combination of the above in a character. Usually, I apply Use Selected For Flexi-binding for most of layers, with point binding for specific features. I use layer binding for any layer or group where I don't need to deform the contents with bones...a mouth group or hand group is typical. Based on what I'm seeing in your image, I might suggest this combo approach.

I haven't used Smooth Joint since Puss In Boots but that's because most of the artwork we use are Moho vectors these days. Smooth Joint seems to work best for bitmap art.

Hope this helps.

[Hauksbee01]

Thanks, D.R. There's a lot of good information there, and I'll copy it to a Word doc. and archive it. But it doesn't seem to answer the question: When one leg is behind the other, how do you assign a bone to the proper leg?

Second, is there a place in Moho that displays the full bone 'tree'?

[mrc]

You might want to check out
Tutorial 3.4: Character Setup
from the tutorial manual.

Marc

[Greenlaw]

Thanks, D.R. There's a lot of good information there, and I'll copy it to a Word doc. and archive it. But it doesn't seem to answer the question: When one leg is behind the other, how do you assign a bone to the proper leg?

It doesn't matter. Just bind the art to the proper leg bones in the bones layer. If you need to change the stacking order for the legs art layers (i.e., change position in front of or behind the body layers,) use Animated layer order--this will let you keyframe the layer order. (It helps to group your art in logical sections. If you're not using Layer Binding, any of the other bind methods will work through the groups. Naturally, what's 'logical' will vary with the character design.)

If you need to change the art that's bound to the leg bones, you would typically use a Switch Layer (i.e., the inside/outside versions of the legs in your creatures. This is similar to a T-Rex rig I created for the first season of Boss Baby.)

Note that there are many ways to approach this, some more advanced than others, but the method described above is fairly easy and straight forward.

Second, is there a place in Moho that displays the full bone 'tree'?

No, the workspace is pretty much it. When you have the Parent Bone tool selected, it does display the hierarchy. Also, it's highly recommended that you name the bones in the rig as you create them using a logical naming convention. If you find it necessary, you can also display the names of the bones in the workspace by clicking Show Label for each bone. I don't normally do that because the skeleton's structure is usually self-explanatory, but it can be useful for secondary bones where their purpose may not be so obvious.

If the issue is in visually determining left and right side bones (or near and far side bones as the case may be,) during animation, I use color coding: Green for Left and Red for Right. The middle bones (torso, head, tail) are usually Orange. I might use different colors when these colors are difficult to read against the character's colors. (For example, green bones might be hard to see against a lizard's skin, so in this case I'll use blue or purple instead.)

Hope this helps.

[Greenlaw]

BTW, if you choose to use color coded bones the way I do, you'll probably want to completely disable the color bones channels from Timeline Channels. Otherwise, you may wind up with a lot of unnecessary clutter in the Timeline.