Animate on 3s without mismatched keys on cycles?

[heyvern]

Tried and tried and can't quite figure it out. There's some sort of weirdness going on. very simple cycle animation. I have all the STEP KEYS on the same frames, and they cycle back to frame 2. All the keys cycle the same. Some are bone keys, some are layer translation/rotation keys. I am animating on 3s and have the markers set up and the timeline set up.

However, it works great on the first run before the cycle repeats. Once it repeats, it is mismatched by one frame. Sadly, it's very noticeable, so I have to fix it by hand or do something else. I tried different multiples of the cycle key, back to 4 or 3 instead of frame 2, still no luck. Every cycle key is mismatched, that little glitchy ka-chunk where one key fires off too soon.

I would LOVE to render straight from Moho, I hate the thought of having to fix this in post. Is there something I'm doing wrong? Should I simply skip cycles completely and paste in keys? I suppose rendering on 2's or 4s might be the ticket. 4s is too much, and 2 might as well just be 1. <sigh>

[synthsin75]

Any way you could strip down a file to a simple example?

[Greenlaw]

I've run into issues like that, too. For me, it's too much trouble to keep the layers in sync, and I wish there were a global option to simply hold-and-drop frames when I render.

Here's what I do instead: render on 1's from Moho, load the image sequence into After Effects, and apply Posterize Time to it. Setting it to a frame rate of 12 effectively converts the footage to play on 2's. Setting it to 8 should make it play on 3's. (6 plays on 4's, etc.)



If you use this method, be sure to set your Moho timeline to mark the intervals so your keyframes fall on the frames accurately. Otherwise, you could potentially lose key poses. On 2's, it's probably not a big deal, but on 3's or 4's, you'll want to be more careful.

Other than that, it's plug-and-play...I use this all the time, and rarely need to think about it much.

[slowtiger]

Ran into that problem recently. Check your cycle key if it's set to 3's as well - that was the solution in my case.

[hayasidist]

Tried and tried and can't quite figure it out. There's some sort of weirdness going on. very simple cycle animation. I have all the STEP KEYS on the same frames, and they cycle back to frame 2. All the keys cycle the same. Some are bone keys, some are layer translation/rotation keys. I am animating on 3s and have the markers set up and the timeline set up.

However, it works great on the first run before the cycle repeats. Once it repeats, it is mismatched by one frame.

assuming I've understood the problem properly - I think I've cracked this.

all to do with the intervals and spacing on keys.

In short: the starting key needs to have the desired interval (here 3);

then to make the cycle work: key the last position NOT as a cycle key on interval 1; and then put the cycle key (also on interval 1) 2 frames further on to cycle back to the starting key


This example works as intended (and, as Slowtiger has noted) I'm sure there will be other combinations of setting intervals and key spacings, but I'm not going to try to find them all.... )

https://www.mediafire.com/file/vre9omp1 ... .moho/file

[heyvern]

Thanks for the help, I tried all of the suggestions but they didn't work. I fiddled and fiddled with start and end of cycles changing where the keys landed. I am pretty sure it is the dagnab switch layer cycle causing the problem. The bone keys cycle fine but the dang switch layer is off by one frame.

GOOD NEWS! Found the solution. I asked... <sigh> I asked an artificial intelligence if it possibly had any answers. It said yes, there is a weird math rounding error in MOHO that causes cycles and intervals to not line up and skip frames. It said something about frame 0 being the start point, and it has influence on frames later, and that there is no frame 1... blah blah. The key result was ACTIONS ACTIONS. The AI says that in Moho, ACTIONS ARE IMMUNE TO THIS OFFSET BUG. It said actions don't LOOK AT FRAME 0. They just "do their thang" and get on with it. And true enough. I put the small repeating sequence into an action, added a reference to the mainline and set a cycle key at the END of the action reference, and BINGO BANGO IT WORKS!

I will say the AI did possibly reference the forums or someplace about Moho as a source, where someone had suggested this. I don't remember now what it was.


This didn't work read the next post

[heyvern]

Oh my GOD! So I fixed it.

Forget my last diatribe. Here's what I did.

The solution was totally counter intuitive. I don't know if this IS a bug or not. All I know is it made no sense but it worked.

In my animation I have a guy thinking he's looking up with his hand on his chin. His arm moves with STEP KEYS. His head turns right to left and left to right with a switch. Also, step not interpolation (also all images but shouldn't be an issue). So the keys are ALL STEP KEYS, no smooth motion. I have other animation going on as well that required setting all keys to 3s.
So far so good. Except for this dang guys head turn back and forth while thinking. His head switch no matter what I did was always one frame too later on the first repeat of the cycle.

Step keys.... <sigh> freaking step keys? They do NOT have to run on 3's they are freaking STEP KEYS. That's the issue. I set all the STEP KEYS BACK TO 1 on the interval and BOOM NOW IT WORKS!!!!!!

Oh my lord, my brain hurts. Spent way more time down this rabbit hole than I should have. I have a deadline so tight I ran out of notches on my belt.

p.s. The action trick did not work AT ALL. It was an illusion. Yes there was some minor improvement but the main culprit was the inverval set on step keys.

[synthsin75]

On threes, a cycle key shouldn't be on threes, because you usually want the cycle to restart on threes. So the cycle key needs to be one frame earlier.
And it seems to help if you can start your cycle on frame 3, 6, etc. instead of frame zero. This way you can cycle back to the very start of the cycle, instead of frame one from a cycle starting from frame zero.
At least this keeps perfect on threes timing for me, out to over a million frames.
https://gofile.io/d/9zSIJg

[slowtiger]

I never have a cycle start at #0, always on #1 or later.

[Greenlaw]

In general, I don't start anything on frame 0. I almost always use Freeze Visible on frame 1 to make sure of this.

By default (in Moho 14.x anyway,) Cycle loops back to the second frame of the animation. So, when frame 1 is keyframed, Cycle will loop back to frame 2 (unless you change it.) This assumes the animator is copying the first frame to the cycle keyframe at the end.

[heyvern]

Well, whatever the answer is, none of those solutions (I tried everything, even random starts and stops cycles keys interpolation etc) nothing worked correctly with my very simple file until I simply set my step keys to intervals of 1. There was a mix of step and linear interpolations BOTH WITH CYCLES. The non-step keys worked perfectly with a cycle no skipping no misalignment no early keys, it just worked, no issues. It was only the mix of step keys not aligned with switch keys Once set to interval of 1 it worked as expected. It had absolutely zero nada zip, nothing, not at all zero, to do with when or where or how the cycle started, on frame 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 0. Everything lined up on the inerval grid etc. Tried them all nothing worked. It had nothing to do with that just step keys set to 3's was misaligned, which kind of makes sense.

[heyvern]

Well, I forgot who suggested it originally (Synthsin?), and I complained about it and didn't want to bother with it in post, blah blah blah, well, it turns out way easier to get exactly the look I need consistently by doing it in post. I was hoping to do it all straight out of Moho, but ended up having to do some post stuff after render, and yes, much easier and better to do it in post. So much more control, don't have to worry about keys and settings. It just works.

[synthsin75]

Greenlaw mentioned using posterize time in AE.

[Greenlaw]

Yeah, it's a native effects plugin in Ae, and it works great. We used it all the time at DreamWorks, and I use it most of the time for my channel content. Super-stoopid-easy.

In a future version of Moho, I would love to see this feature added as a Render Window option. Not as a replacement for the current feature, but as an alternative.

One gotcha: The only time it could be an issue is when it drops a key pose from the final render, but when you animate pose-to-pose, this should never happen when rendering on twos. It's probably when you render on fours or sixes, that you'll need to pay closer attention to where you're setting your key poses. That's not a big deal, really, when you set the Moho timeline to the matching interval.

[Greenlaw]

This reminds me of an anime-style short film I worked on for Nissan back in 2001. The 3D program we used had options for rendering with different frame steps, as well as arbitrary frames, both of which I wish Moho supported. Anyway, we set the Frame Step to two, which instructed the renderer to ignore every other frame. This meant we only needed to render half the number of frames for a shot, which was a HUGE timesaver. Additionally, the renderer retained the real frame numbers in the filenames for the full duration of the shot, which was critical for our compositor. (Unlike Moho's Half Frame Rate option, which renumbers everything on ones.)

Then, we imported the rendered layers to our compositing program Eyeon Fusion (now BlackMagic Design Fusion). Fusion has the option to hold an existing frame whenever it encounters a 'missing' frame, so this automatically duplicated our frames in comp. (This is why the frame numbering is important.) And because Fusion only needed to cache half as many frames for the shot, previewing our timeline was super fast.

It would be great to see a similar frame-step and arbitrary-frames options in Moho's Render Window. (I really could have used the second option last week!)