Consolidate tools – reduce the need for tool switching

[JoelMayer]

While i love Moho it's unfortunately also one of the apps that can become tedious and somewhat slow to work in quite quickly when compared to any other animation/art tool i'm using. The main reason for this i found is the overbearing need for switching tools constantly especially with things like drawing or adding vs moving and curving out points, making shapes, etc. etc.

I think it's been said before but i would really love to see most of the tools that Moho has consolidated to like one or two general vector tools (next to all the freehand stuff).

I think speed and usability is really the thing to look out for in 15. (And yes, i know about most functionalities of these tools, i know scripts, i know the shortcuts).

[mgo]

One of the greatest things in Moho is the ability to place Your cursor just in the vicinity of a vertex (and that might be halfway across the canvas) and start dragging in order to move it. You have precision without needing to directly hit tiny targets like vertices, and that is extremely valuable IMO because that makes me work really fast. According to Fitts' law a vertex should be slow to "hit", especially if it's further away. But in Moho the vertex size is huge in comparison, the fewer vertices the larger. With selected groups, the hit area is effectively the whole canvas. That is really smart and works in our favour.

Ever since I started editing shapes in Moho I dread the much worse experience in Illustrator and/or After Effects. I realise that building a wireframe and then visible shapes on top of it might seem longer, but IMO the unique geo possible in Moho more than makes up for that.

Having said that, I don't wanna oppose a consolidation, where possible. I just want to keep Mohos forgiving and fast editing style, because that is one of the unique things that set it apart. I'd rather keep one more tool option / mode / however we wanna call it than have anything close to how After Effects or Motion work, vector-wise.

[doodleDaze]

if you use a mouse a 12 button gaming mouse can have quite a few shortcuts assigned to them so the main tools can be switched really easy and layer selecting also (i asigned alt to one of the buttons so alt right clicking)

[happycrazywild]

I 100% agree, Joel!
The subject also reminded me of this topic where you suggested some good ideas:

Recently came across a post by a Toon Boom User trying out Moho. I'm not saying that makes anything this person sais automatically right but it's good to sometimes see things with objective eyes.

Here's a quote from said post:

Compared to Toon Boom, Moho's outdated, strangely unintuitive UX makes it clunky to animate and manage your shapes and keyframes. For example, Moho has three separate tools that all replicate Toon Boom's select tool, and unnecessarily switching tools adds mental load. You need external (free and open source) Moho scripts to make animating in Moho feel less tedious. Managing styles and color palettes is also a pain.

I actually very much agree with this. Moho's drawing tools are spread across too many sub-tools. Imo, you should consolidate it all down to a white arrow (individual nodes), black arrow (shapes), Pen tool Freehand stuff and then maybe something like Line Width and Stroke exposure. I think some of the tools could be changed to tool properties. It might be worth thinking about a vertical property panel which you can easily open and close in the long run.

I remember this old thread since I was actually the person who made that post on the toon boom discord (to be clear, I wasn't mad or anything, it was just funny to see my post show up here lol)

I like the idea of easily selecting AND MOVING whole shapes rather than just points. Toon Boom's arrow tools are a good inspiration to draw from. They also have an incredibly helpful behavior: drag anywhere to do a "lasso select" of any objects that are contained within or intersect your lasso. Black arrow selects the whole object and white arrow selects individual points. You can access this feature in any tool by holding Ctrl, and I do this ALL the TIME when drawing in Toon Boom. Being able to draw strokes and then quickly move them is huge.

I'd love-love-love for Moho to implement the same thing (and one-up them by letting you customize the Ctrl shortcut )

Combined with this, the fact that Moho already includes a vector liquify tool and toon boom doesn't, would give Moho a leg up for sketching. When I use bitmap-based programs, I use liquify constantly.