How do I set Wind/Physics to play on 'odd' frames only?

[SimianProphet]

I have been working on a short animation where a musician is playing, and wind is blowing his hair and guitar cable.
I decided that the animation would probably look better on 2's (keyframe interval properties set to 2), with the animation playing on 'odd' frames (1,3,5, etc).

The wind physics animation are insisting on playing on 'even' frames (2,4,6, etc) even if I move the starting keyframe ahead 1, or set a 1 frame hold.

I even tried creating a brand new file with only an object being blown by wind. no other art or animation, and I can only get the wind blowing animation to play on 'even' frames.

Is there any way to fix this?

[synthsin75]

What if you move the layer in the sequencer by one frame?

[Greenlaw]

This is one of the reasons I avoid using Frame Intervals in Moho. While it's nice to have the flexibility to adjust Frame Intervals for individual keyframes in every channel and layer, what I really need most of the time is for the Frame Intervals to stay consistent and in sync throughout the project.

I wish there were a global option for Frame Intervals. This would prevent the frame intervals from getting out of sync with other layers or within themselves.

My preference for now is to render everything on ones, then in After Effects, I use the Posterize Time effect to set the desired frame intervals for my Moho footage there. For example, if my footage is animated at 24 fps, setting the Posterize Time Frame Rate to 12 gives me a frame interval of 2 (hold 1 frame, drop 1 frame)...



If I set it to 6, I get a frame interval of 4 (hold 1 frame, drop 3 frames.) The rate is keyframeable too...and all in one place! This is much simpler than tweaking the Frame Interval settings for all the keys in Moho's Timeline.

It's not an ideal solution for every situation, but the result is exactly what I want most of the time.

[Greenlaw]

If something like this existed for Moho, it could theoretically reduce render times significantly, since Moho will only need to render every frame interval and save multiple copies of that frame. So setting it to 2 should reduce the render time by half; 4 will reduce it to 25%, etc. This could be a very powerful feature.

To be clear, this should be an optional feature, and not a replacement for the current Frame Interval system.

[SimianProphet]

Thanks for the insight, Greenlaw. I was going a bit crazy thinking there must be some way to set the wind physics to play on odd frames. The solution I had come up with, and Synthesin75 suggested, was to move the start frame forward by a frame, but I hoped there was a better solution out there.

This feels like such a backwards solution, but I guess it will do for now. Coming from Flash TV animation, I'm used to animating on 2's but being able to do quick actions or scenes with camera moves on ones. Because of this, I don't actually want a standard display rate of playing on 2's, but the freedom to mix it up as needed.

I hope they do update the wind/physics to be able to better set the frame rates for the requirements of a scene.
Things like this are really slowing down my adoption of this software; for everything that works almost magically well, there is something that just doesn't work, for no real reason (or reasons that are hard to find and fix).

[Lukas]

I wish there were a global option for Frame Intervals. This would prevent the frame intervals from getting out of sync with other layers or within themselves.

Oh yes, I would use that! Currently I barely use intervals to animate on doubles because of this sync issue. So I opt for either 25 of 12 fps and just pray there’s no camera movements on the 12fps projects

[Greenlaw]

To be clear, this should be an optional feature, and not a replacement for the current Frame Interval system.

I want to explain a scenario where I would need both. I might use the Timeline's Frame Interval when the Brush's Randomness Interval is set to 0, so the brush changes only when the rig is moving. Then I might also apply the global setting so I can use an overall Frame Interval setting for the whole project that stays in sync. (And maybe speed up render times as described earlier.)

It would be cool if this global setting could be keyframeable as well, like in After Effects' Posterize Time effect. I'm not exactly sure where that would appear in Moho's timeline, though...maybe it would have to be a group channel?

Hmm...that was a bit of a topic tangent, wasn't it?

[Greenlaw]

@SimianProphet, one of the limitations with Moho is that it doesn't allow you to pre-roll physics before frame 0...well, not easily anyway. So, what I will sometimes do when using physics is begin my animation/rendering on frame 101. This gives me 100 frames to pre-roll the simulation before Moho begins rendering, and I'm able to observe how Moho ramps up to that point. This also provides extra flexibility for keyframing exactly when the simulation should begin.

This is a technique I might also use in other 2D/3D animation and compositing programs that have physics engines. For me, it makes working with physics easier and more predictable.

Hope this helps.