folders for styles, referencing issues

[mattmos]

Hi! I've just started along the moho road coming from a maya/softimage background.

I'm using referenced master files for a bunch of football players, who are all similar build, but need different kit colours. I think I have it working using the 'unlink shared styles' option, but it does mean that the styles drop down list becomes fairly huge as each character has their own list of styles and it is harder to locate the right style to alter. Is there a way to add groups/folders to the styles list? It would be great if each character's styles appeared under a folder named after the character. I guess I'm thinking along the lines of maya's namespaces?

If I've missed an easy way to pick the right style please let me know too

One issue I'm getting - if I update the layer reference pointing to the master file, the styles revert back to the default colors, so if I need to change the rigging I have to start over with the color alterations in the animation file. That kind of breaks the setup - is there a way to update the layer reference while keeping the local color updates?

[Greenlaw]

Using Unlink Shared Styles is correct. This creates new Style IDs for the included styles so they don't conflict with the same styles used by other instances of the shapes. As you've discovered, this increases the number of styles used.

Unfortunately, Moho doesn't currently have a good system for managing a bunch of Styles. It's often requested though so hopefully we'll see it in the near future.

FWIW, when I'm using Styles to create variations of a character, I try to minimize the number of styles that change. I had to do this for the many cats from Boss Baby as seen on my 2019 demo reel.

To do this, i created one cat rig and imported it into my master projects multiple times with Unlink Shared Styles enabled so I could change the coloring for each cat. From what I recall, I created the variations in small batches (maybe up to four cats) so I wouldn't have to sort out too many custom styles. Then these batches were saved as my Master projects. (I think maybe I had 4 Master cat projects each with 4 variations? I don't know...that was quite a while back.)

For the final animation projects, I just referenced in these master files with Unlink Shared Styles disabled. Since the master projects all had unique styles at this point, there was no need to unlink them again.

[amanandink]

It depends Mattmos, how complex your characters are, but Victor, for my fathers dragon, made a bunch of small characters, of different colours using a smart bone to change them with in scenes.
You can see if very briefly in his first video here, 56 secs in (it helps if you play tte video at .25 speed)
https://www.lostmarble.com/forum/viewto ... on#p207976

[mattmos]

Thank yout both for the replies! Good to know I've not missed anything obvious, but the smart bone color change looks like a great solution, I'll have a play around and see if I can find a way to replicate that here.

[Greenlaw]

That Victor...he's so clever!

Thanks for sharing the tip Jeremy.

[synthsin75]

Damn, I was thinking of an animated color, but it didn't dawn on me to do it with a smart bone that you set and forget.
Victor's a genius.