Learning Moho Pro 12 (Anime Studio Pro) - Part 7, Pro Only Videos 14-21

After a little bit of a break it's time to continue working my way through Moho's Pro Video Tutorials (which were actually created for Anime Studio Pro 11). After watching the next batch of video tutorials I've done a bit reorganization to my initial order of the videos, as my initial guess, based on the video titles, wasn't quite right.


This week the videos I watched include:

14. 
    Pro - Nested Layer Controls
15. Pro - Patch Layers
16. Pro - Advanced Bone Rigging
17. Pro - Bone Constraints
18. Pro - Bone Enhancements
19. Pro - Smart Bones
20. Pro - Smart Bone Enhancements
21. Pro - Smart Bones Update

Nested layer Controls shows how to turn on the Nested Layer Control so that Bone and image layers can properly talk to each other  correctly. For example if you have a character rig where all the image components are buried in sub folders, turning this setting on will make sure they behave as you would expect and not become detached from the bones.

Patch layers demonstrates a special kind of mask layer that can hide unwanted lines around your characters joint rigs and more.

Advanced bone rigging walks you through the basic steps of adding a bone rig to a simple, single image, character or a more complex character made from many layers. Almost everything in this video has been covered before, except for Smart Bones - which are a way of making adjustments to a bone rig to fix problems with image distortion.

Bone Constraints runs through all the different types of bone constraints, that allow you to limit bone movement in all kinds of ways for different effects, such as restricting the angle of a bone's rotation so that it can't' be moved beyond certain angles. 

For example, say you have a bone rig of a knee joint. You can add constraints to the joint so that the knee cannot be bent forward into an unnatural motion. There's also options to incorporate 'squash and stretch' into bone manipulation.

Bone Enhancements demonstrates how bone layers can be nested within bone layers, as well as being able to color code individual bones and give them labels that can be displayed in the stage area.

Smart Bones demonstrates the entire concept of Smart bones in more detail (since we've already seen a brief introduction in Advanced Bone Rigging) using a demonstration of adding a bone dial to a character mouth.

Smart Bone Enhancement is just making a note of a new feature, where the initial smart bone actions are already created, allowing you to bypass this step and get on with setting up your bone action.

Smart Bone Update is a run through of different ways you can use smart bone dials to manipulate and animate styles of lines, fills and 3D objects.

I must admit I'm a bit over learning Moho Pro 12 at this point. There are just so many videos to get through, with another 24 in the Pro series to go followed by a further 18 on just the new features added into Moho 12.

It feels like I've had a good tour through all the features but I'm really starting to forget what I've learned so far. I do hope to continue on and blog my progress but I have other projects I need to work on and this is now taking me away from that.

It's great that Moho Pro 12 has so many features... but at some point it does become far too much. You'll find the next post here.