drawing features: will they be back (and really work?)

[Reindeer]

Will the drawing features we got back in 2019, with Moho 13, be reintroduced in future releases?
I never used 13 because there were serious visualisation problems on Macs (or at least on my Mac) owing to some GPU business.
So I paid for an upgrade which was unusable, and then 13.5 did away with the main feature altogether.
To make this work in my head and wallet, I'm guessing we would have been asked to pay for the Vitruvian Bones feature - which I haven't tried yet but it looks very nice - and I'm telling myself that 13's drawing feature was never good enough to really compete with external apps.
Fox and grapes. But I still wonder about what happened.

[Greenlaw]

Will the drawing features we got back in 2019, with Moho 13, be reintroduced in future releases?

...I'm telling myself that 13's drawing feature was never good enough to really compete with external apps.

Fox and grapes. But I still wonder about what happened.

Hi Reindeer,

I understand how you feel, but I think it's all good and going to get better. Here's my understanding of the situation...

Lost Marble is evaluating the idea of new paint tool and may re-introduce a better version of them in the future. It's a huge deal though and it's probably not going to happen in the 13.x cycle. In the meantime Lost Marble has added several excellent new features and optimizations to Moho.

Back when Smith Micro owned Moho, they released Moho 13.0 prematurely and the paint tools (among other 13.x features) were never properly completed. After Lost Marble acquired Moho early this year, Moho's new owners decided it would be better for everyone to regress to Moho 12.5 (the last stable version) and build a new Moho 13.5.x from there.

As a long time Moho user, I couldn't agree more with their decision, and the just released 13.5.2 (out this morning!) is definitely more practical and usable than 13.0 was.

For now, you will need to continue using a 3rd party paint program for Moho, but Moho 13.5.2 adds multiple new ways to warp and animate bitmap images (as well as vector art,) and adds the ground-breaking Vitruvian Bones system, Wind dynamics, improved PSD layers support (a major deal!), Copy Deep Frame, and several UI and performance improvements. IMO, the full list of new features goes a long way toward making up for the broken features Lost Marble 'removed' from Moho.

After a year of stagnation under Smith Micro in 2020, I'm very pleased with the exciting direction Lost Marble has taken Moho during 2021.

I'm looking forward to whatever cool stuff the Lost Marble team is planning for Moho 14!

[Greenlaw]

Personally, I'd rather see better Freehand vector drawing tools before they add new paint tools. But if we can get both, even better. (I can dream can't I?)

[chucky]

Lost Marble did say in some public statement somewhere, that drawing tools will be a priority, moving forward.

Bitmap painting can't come back soon enough.
The V13 feature could have done with aliasing improvement and additional tools, but they worked great and are being used in feature production right now.
The reason they were dropped is because this ( awesome) dev team didn't write the code, I can fully appreciate that.

All the drawing tools are due for some kind of refactor IMO , which is probably something that is deep in the code and needs some serious foundational changes.
For any of the freehand vector or bitmap drawing tools to work as well as users are demanding ( I think we're all guilty of that ) it'll take a huge effort, I imagine.

In the meantime I keep a version of 13 at the ready to use bitmap features, they are super useful, I'm just careful not to step on the landmines ( not related to the bitmap feature btw) that came with that release.
Then I bring that into 13.2

Have you tried the new Smart Mesh in 13.2?
IT IS FREAKN AMAZING!
This update's super useful and stable features should provide good compensation while Mike works on what I expect to redeem all in v14,

[Greenlaw]

+1 to everything Chucky wrote!

[Reindeer]

Hi @greenlaw, thank you for mapping out the situation so clearly!

Yes, I remember paint and draw in 13.0 to be puzzling: it looked like it could be useful but - as you noted - it also didn't look complete. It was neither nor... I figured it could have been a help on a number of small tasks.
It maybe would have been if it hadn't been aggravated, in my case, by the fact that the GPU problem on Macs (or on some Macs, don't know) made it impossible to wrk with 13.0 altogether, even without using the bitmap. As I reported here and with tech support at the time, the overall visualisation of lines in 13.0 was pixellated, broken, shoddy. So I just went on using 12 and moved 13 to the attic.

I installed 13.5 only a couple of days ago, so I haven't had a chance to try any of the novelties (can't wait to!), but I happily can already see that the visualisation bug is gone. Out of curiosity, I also launched 13.0 and now it just just shows a big bright red screen - I guess owing to the fact I've upgraded the Mac's OpSys.
I suppose it's safe to say at this point I can just uninstall and forget about 13.0. It's a brick.
I'll keep good old Moho 12 (which still runs, also on MacOS Monterey) just as a safety backup until I'm supersure I have 13.5 well under my fingers.

If a better paint and draw were ever to be reintroduced I think it would make Moho look very attractive to a much larger community of artists. I have animator friends who are afraid of tackling Moho because - as happened to me for years before I decided I had to look into it - they are alienated by not being able to draw properly. Which takes me to the other thing you said with which I agree very much: yes, better vector tools would be fantastic, more so than better bitmap tools.
So far Harmony is the only app I know of with true, natural feeling, reliable vector pens and brushes. But Harmony is also a very baroque and fussy app, which demands a lot of detailed attention, which is why personally I don't use it if i need to work fast on low budgets.
Moho with Harmony-esque drawing freehand tools would be an absolute killer.

So, yes, for two good years I did feel like Moho was almost dead and that users had sort of been given a bad last hand. The feeling it's back is really good!


cheers!

[Reindeer]

Hi Chucky, yes as I mentioned to Greenlaw I can (nay: could) see the Bitmap feature being useful. But in my case (I still don't know how extended the problem was) 13.0 was unusable due to problems with Mac's GPU's-something. It was so bad that if you were animating a character at medium size you couldn't tell what the expression on the face was owing to the raggediness of the lines. Had it worked, I would have no doubt found ways to interact with the bitmap layers - though as not completely functional as they were. My point of view is skewed by the mentioned GPU problem.

I too, you see, am guilty of nagging about "better drawing tools", as if it were a given. I realise it's all very complicated. It's like when clients look at our work and say "Uh... nice, but I want the character do run and juggle, too! NOW."

But, as said, if the paint and draw feature is to come back improved, then it'll be well worth the wait!

Lost Marble did say in some public statement somewhere, that drawing tools will be a priority, moving forward.

Bitmap painting can't come back soon enough.
The V13 feature could have done with aliasing improvement and additional tools, but they worked great and are being used in feature production right now.
The reason they were dropped is because this ( awesome) dev team didn't write the code, I can fully appreciate that.

All the drawing tools are due for some kind of refactor IMO , which is probably something that is deep in the code and needs some serious foundational changes.
For any of the freehand vector or bitmap drawing tools to work as well as users are demanding ( I think we're all guilty of that ) it'll take a huge effort, I imagine.

In the meantime I keep a version of 13 at the ready to use bitmap features, they are super useful, I'm just careful not to step on the landmines ( not related to the bitmap feature btw) that came with that release.
Then I bring that into 13.2

Have you tried the new Smart Mesh in 13.2?
IT IS FREAKN AMAZING!
This update's super useful and stable features should provide good compensation while Mike works on what I expect to redeem all in v14,

[chucky]

I'm sorry to hear your problems with the Mac, such a common story.
I try not to touch the things, although I do have to go and troubleshoot for my parents more than I'd like, they do tend to brick a lot of software retrospectively.

A playlist of how the feature actually does work.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD5o ... ad9NqpZKJF