Tutorial 7 - Switch Layers

Introduction

This tutorial provides a brief introduction to Moho's Switch Layers. In this tutorial you will set up a simple lip-sync animation.

A switch layer contains multiple sub-layers, but only one of the sub-layers can be displayed at a time. This makes it very useful for lip-sync animation: each sub-layer can be a mouth shape for a different sound.

Start With a Sample File

For this tutorial, we'll start with a project file that's almost finished. It's named Tutorial7 and it's located in the Tutorials subfolder within the main Moho folder. Open this file in Moho, and expand the "Head" layer in the Layers palette, and you should see something like this:

This project is virtually complete. The only thing apparently missing is the character's mouth. Switch to Animation mode and play back the animation. The mouth is actually there (it's a switch layer), but no animation data has yet been assigned to it, so it appears invisible.

Double-click the "Mouth" layer. The layer properties dialog will open:

Click the "Source Data..." button to select the switch data file that will control this switch layer. In the file dialog that appears, select the file "vista.dat" located in the Tutorials subfolder within the main Moho folder.

The vista.dat file was created by a program called Magpie. Magpie is a tool designed to help you synchronize animation to audio tracks. It works great for lip-sync, but can also be used for timing the animation of eyes, visual effects, etc. This particular file is based on the example file included with Magpie, and is an animation of a mouth speaking, "Hasta la vista, baby." The original audio file is included with Magpie.

The Mouth layer contains all the mouth shapes needed to speak any phrase. Just create a different animation data file in Magpie, and select it into the mouth layer as we just did for the vista.dat example.

That's it! Play back the animation and watch the head speak a phrase. Moho doesn't offer integrated sound support, so you won't actually hear the soundtrack. For the final animation, you would need to use a video editing product such as Adobe Premiere or ABC VideoRoll to combine the video file and the audio track.