How to animate the jitter noise controls?

[Hugging_Bear]

Hi Guys,

I tried (but failed) to animate the jitter noise values. What does 'Animated Shape Order', 'Gap Filling' and 'Legacy Curves'?
https://youtu.be/Tmr6O5xFsfI

Thanks a lot!

[Greenlaw]

Sorry, no time to watch the video this morning but here are some comments based on your question as written...

You can't animate those settings because they're not keyframeable...Jitter Noise is either on or off. You can change the settings for Jitter Noise and preview what the settings will do in the small preview window. After making the changes, press the Apply button. To see the changes on-screen, you need to disable GPU Acceleration in the Display Options. The effect will render correctly regardless of this option.

The other vector options you mentioned don't have anything to do with Jitter Noise.

Animated Shape Order allows you to keyframe the stacking order of shapes in the same layer. It's like Animated Layer Order but for shapes inside a single layer.

Gap Filling solves an edge offset problem that sometimes appears when two shapes are drawn next to each other with no actual overlap. I think this gap is caused by Moho's AA and is corrected by slightly expanding the distance of edges when this option is enabled. Anyway, if your not seeing this gap problem, don't worry about it.

'Legacy Curves' makes Moho draw curves using an older method. I guess it's used when you want to curves to behave like a really old version of Moho to match old Moho assets or footage. I never use it and IMO, you shouldn't worry about this either.

Hope this helps.

[hayasidist]

the "vectors" tab in layer settings is described in the manual (for 13.5.5) page 233. That explains what 'Animated Shape Order', 'Gap Filling' and 'Legacy Curves' are.
The noise settings are not animatable. (as Greenlaw has just beaten me to explaining!)

The bonus sentence:
However, if (e.g.) you wanted the scale / offset / line count to change - I'd probably got for multiple copies (copy by reference) of the layer and put them in a switch...

[Greenlaw]

Here are some bonus tips related to the Gap option:

Sometimes I'll split a drawing between two layers, for example, I'll draw a single arm and split the curves through the elbow so the arm has an upper shape and a lower shape. Then I'll duplicate this layer and knock out one shape in each layer so I see a complete arm when both layers are visible. This is useful when I'm using Animated Layer Order or animated layer visibility to make it appear the arm is wrapping around the torso.

One problem with this setup is that when I render the arm, I'll see a thin gap where the arm edges should perfectly align. This is caused by Moho's Anti-aliasing. You can see this by disabling AA and then rendering; the gap should now be gone.

How, if this art is going to be used as a mask, just disable AA for both layers and the gap will disappear and everything should be fine.

However, if this art is for the color render, you might think the Gap option will fix this problem. Unfortunately, the Gap option only works between adjacent shapes that exist in the same layer, not two separate layers.

Fortunately, fixing this problem is pretty easy: just add a point to the dividing line in one of the layers and then drag that point a few pixels to make the line overlap the line in the other layer. Because the layers are now overlapping, we've eliminated the possibility for the gap.

If you're compositing in After Effects, another option is to render with no AA at all and then use the free OLM Smoother plugin to add the AA in post. This is a best approach if you intend to use other OLM plugins since these tools work best on hard non-anti-aliased edges. You can find the OLM plugins here: OLM Tools