Moho Forum

neeters_guy wrote:

neeters_guy wrote:

braj wrote:Does anyone else have some weird issues if you try and change point curvature when creating the smartbone dials for the headturn? I have to go into the .dup layer to change the point curves manually in these instances, and I'm not sure but it may be responsible for some preview display issues.

The meshinstance script currently doesn't support duplicating point curvature (or point widths for that matter), just point motion.

Synthsin mentioned this elsewhere, but reference layers (v11) can be used as a new-and-improved replacement for the meshinstance script. For this head turn technique, you simply replace the dup layers with a reference layer. Now you can change curvature and line width as well as point motion in mouth and face layers. Super cool!

Ah yes, of course. This head turn technique is the perfect candidate for layer referencing.
It's great that the technique can now be used with everything being internal and not needing to rely on external scripts anymore.

What the hell am I doing wrong? I have a hit and miss relationship with this technique, it seems I have all my layers set up correctly, but the mouth only comes through as an outline, it doesn't remove the inside. The mouth shape has no fill. I am so confused. Ho you have to burn a chicken heart or something to get this to work? I had it the other day, but today, nope, doesn't work. Grrrr.....

What is the little red dot above some layer icons? The one thing that is different between my layer list and the example is all my layers have that red dot, even brand new layers unrelated to the mask group.

Here is my basic attempt, I can't see what is wrong here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/n8np46jms9ys7 ... anime?dl=0

You just need to enable the fill on the reference mouth shape.

synthsin75 wrote:You just need to enable the fill on the reference mouth shape.

Oh THANK YOU. I will have to not forget this, man what frustration over a simple little thing!

Synth beat me to it, but here's a graphic I made to remind me how the layers are supposed to look.



Also, note this useful fix if the reference layers break: Broken Layer references Cure

braj wrote:

synthsin75 wrote:You just need to enable the fill on the reference mouth shape.

Oh THANK YOU. I will have to not forget this, man what frustration over a simple little thing!

You probably did what I did at first. Just reference the layers and delete the .dup ones.

synthsin75 wrote:

braj wrote:

synthsin75 wrote:You just need to enable the fill on the reference mouth shape.

Oh THANK YOU. I will have to not forget this, man what frustration over a simple little thing!

You probably did what I did at first. Just reference the layers and delete the .dup ones.

Na, I was not filling the reference layer, that wasn't clear to me. The times it HAS worked for me I must have filled the original, made the references, then removed the fill from the originals. Now I finally get it. Neeter's graphic is a definite improvement on the first in the thread

How do you guys handle mouth shapes? Just smartbone actions? I think this setup is more appropriate for very simple mouths, but if I'm wrong about that, please show me what is possible.

braj wrote:How do you guys handle mouth shapes? Just smartbone actions? I think this setup is more appropriate for very simple mouths, but if I'm wrong about that, please show me what is possible.

This technique would work with switch layers too. Just depends on what you need and how you like to animate.

synthsin75 wrote:

braj wrote:How do you guys handle mouth shapes? Just smartbone actions? I think this setup is more appropriate for very simple mouths, but if I'm wrong about that, please show me what is possible.

This technique would work with switch layers too. Just depends on what you need and how you like to animate.

Oh cool, I'm having a hard time trying to do that right now, kind of a disaster really but I think I see how it can work. Thanks synthsin75 for your continuing help, it is appreciated.

braj wrote:

synthsin75 wrote:This technique would work with switch layers too. Just depends on what you need and how you like to animate.

Oh cool, I'm having a hard time trying to do that right now, kind of a disaster really but I think I see how it can work. Thanks synthsin75 for your continuing help, it is appreciated.

Just make sure you reference the whole switch layer instead of the individual vector layers, but in the turn, you'll need to animate all the phonemes in the source switch.

Happy to help when I can.

synthsin75 wrote:

braj wrote:

synthsin75 wrote:This technique would work with switch layers too. Just depends on what you need and how you like to animate.

Oh cool, I'm having a hard time trying to do that right now, kind of a disaster really but I think I see how it can work. Thanks synthsin75 for your continuing help, it is appreciated.

Just make sure you reference the whole switch layer instead of the individual vector layers, but in the turn, you'll need to animate all the phonemes in the source switch.

Happy to help when I can.

I got that much, my issue right now is how to build the phonemes so that they look good yet I can't build them like I am used to, I have to alter my technique or I'll have issues like this:



There doesn't seem to be any way around this issue:

You'll notice on Selgin's gif, on the first page of this thread, that the teeth never leave or even touch the edge of the masked area.

Here's how to do what you want:
http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?fi ... 5531860776

Yeah, that is cool, I finally reproduced what you did. That said, wow, that is like a game of Jenga to get all that to work right. It makes me want to give up smooth head turns altogether Adding a new phoneme seems daunting. I think you do need to give something up to get something else here, I don't know if using switch layers gives you enough for the extra complexity that goes into making this work. Thanks for you patience with this, the trick with the extra two layers (add invisible and extra mask) will come in handy I think. I've learned a lot today.

Ideally, you'd make all your phonemes and animate their turn actions before making references, but yeah, there's still quite a bit of shape editing involved.

Hey! Say you wanted to smart bone this action and make a mouth closed in the front view and side view? How would you do that without it distorting? So it stays closed and open accurately?