Moho Forum

1. I would really really really like it if the spacebar did NOT control so many things! When I am creating characters and panning around I end up triggering the play/pause the animation. This happens without me knowing but cause I minimize the timeline. This means I end up with a bunch of keyframes on point moves while trying to create the character! It is a BIG nuisance and makes me angry.

2. Either infinite style Effects layers or at least allow for 3-4 rather than the 2 we are limited to. One would think you could create a style that has 2 effects, load it onto a shape as a style and still have available the two effects for the shape but this can not be done, they will be ignored. For instance, I would like to have two shadows (one for a highlight and one for shadow) and an image texture.

3. When you load a .anme file into a new one, it does not work correctly, it forgets any set effects and styles.


On the positive side, I really like the Add Point tool. Coming from Illustrator I thought I would miss bezier curves, but I don't!

It would be great if you could choose the color for the shading on the "Auto shading radius" feature.

Also nice if there was an option to keep Noisy Lines and Fills still. So when you translate the shape the noisy doesn't change, it stays the same as frame 0. This way you can have a "sketchy" look without having to manually put in a ton of points.

Blue wrote:I would really really really like it if the spacebar did NOT control so many things! When I am creating characters and panning around I end up triggering the play/pause the animation. This happens without me knowing but cause I minimize the timeline. This means I end up with a bunch of keyframes on point moves while trying to create the character! It is a BIG nuisance and makes me angry.

I optimistically bought V6 without having mastered V5, and now that I'm encountering this horrific bug, I haven't learned how to work around it.

What am I supposed to do, just to get started creating with the simplest goddam shapes?

I thought that there was a Edit/Preference that was supposed to lock creation mode to Frame 0.

It certainly doesn't help!

Here's the thing about thing about it. If you go to Edit/Preferences and enable drawing tools only on frame 0 you get the following scenario:

1. If you using the Add Point or Translate tools, you're golden, if you hit spacebar the timeline won't start playing.

2. If you are using any other tool you are screwed.

But my beef goes beyond this bug (or feature?). In my opinion the spacebar should not be used at all for controlling the timeline, it should be the return key. I never hit the return key by accident.

And the real kicker is...

I like to do point animation. So even if the preference setting above was changed to lock the timeline when using tools, it wouldn't help me when I have to disable this for point animation.

My biggest beef with ASP6 is the issue above and the program slowing when textures are added to a shape using styles.

We hold these truths to be self-evident:

(a) You need to create shapes.
(b) You need to play the timeline.

(a) does not equal (b). In fact, they don't have anything to do with each other, at all. Therefore, (a) and (b) should not have crosstalk.

Nothing should be allowed to interfere, without dang good cause, with either function. It makes me feel creepy merely to have to point this out.

This makes as much sense as building a nuclear control center and hooking the light switches to the control rods, either because you don't want to clutter up the walls with all those switches, or, you have something better to do with your time.

PS Thanks, blue, for your help on trying to work around this.

This is so ironic...

First off I have no problems with the space bar and the tools. I don't know why. I never gave it a thought.

The irony is, I am fixing up some old scripted tools for AS 6 and the space bar is "locked out" for creating shapes, binding points etc for custom tools. The only way to use the space bar for those tools is making them the DEFAULT tools... replacing the old tools which is very limiting. I keep the old tools around. I actually WANT that space bar action back for custom tools.

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In a different direction... I am thinking now I could use a different key instead of the space bar for these custom scripts to "create shapes, bind points etc". I could try and make duplicates of the standard tools that use the return key or something else... have to check for "conflicts" though.

Thanks for the inspiration!!!

p.s. The space bar is used for play back in bunches of applications I use for animation. Only ONE program uses return and that is my ancient copy of AE on my old Mac OS 9 machine.

-vern

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to come across as an A-hole.

Mike is doing a great job with the software. It is amazingly cool that we can tweak the tools to our liking and I will have to look into this when I have time.

I realize the software isn't being made solely for me, but I'm sticking to my guns on this...LUA, looks like you an me got a date.

wiggly lines don't need to be animated blue, just check the layer palette, there are some options for the lines and fills animation there.

You are sort of right, and sort of wrong. It's a matter of interpretation...Here's what I mean:

1. Check noisy outlines.
2. Leave animated lines off.
3. Animate your shape going from one side of the screen to the other. Voila, the lines move! Zut alor!

If the shape doesn't move, the lines don't move. But if your shape moves, the lines go wild.

Blue wrote:But if your shape moves, the lines go wild.

That reminds me of the last Flash preview video. Do you still have the link Chuck?

They draw two bones, one moves, and the whole place goes beserk. It's like a freaking riot. People are screaming like a gold-plated flying saucer has crashed through the ceiling, showering them in cash.

Quite hilarious really. Flash. Pew.

HAHAHAHAHA, I would love to see that if you can find the link!

Sadly there is no way to over ride the space bar for play back within AS. You can't change it. Only the AS default tools can use the space bar to do anything besides play and this is "built in" and not accessible through lua.

We can't change the play back key to something else with lua but we could change the "action" key (bind points, creating shapes etc) from space to something else. At least then you won't accidentally start playing the animation when you intended to do something else.

For some reason I think the space bar "play" is correct... but would prefer "RETURN" to do other things like creating shapes and binding points. That seems more logical to me... you hit return to "complete" an action. You hit space to play.

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The REAL feature request and the most logical for all the different preferences we have should be Let the user change the playback key and other action keys!

-vern

I don't have time to learn LUA anyway...

How about we compromise Vern, "control+P"

My Not So Short List

In addition to the above...here are some additions I'd like. Some of these were lifted from the AS6 wishlist.

Render out with a frame counter. So if I render a test it will have a running frame clock so on playback I can see, “oh he should have jumped into the air at frame 230 instead of what it's at now.”

Frame by Frame
Switch layers are cumbersome although Fazek's Xsheet helps, Synthsin's script is a good workaround, but we desperately need a quick efficient workflow for fbf. I still think Flash has one of the best methods, draw, scrub to next frame, draw...To improve performance I think their has to be some way frame drawings are handled differently in the cache memory.

More robust Key frame controls
Edit multiple or all layers at once
Copy/Paste motion path
“Flag” and name Flagged timeline position, like a bookmark on the timeline.
Draw motion path
Easier way to animate on twos, threes...etc. So the master timeline, but ability to have vectors/bones move at independent speeds. Or, easier way to create "holds" on a group/switch/bone the will effect all keys on itself and all subgroups including bones.

Perspective Tool for Group/Bone/Switch/Image Layers. Yes I could just do a 3D rotate but I'd also like to have the same 2d Perspective Tool for layers.

Transparency, blur and visibility layer control always available
viewtopic.php?t=13635

Shape morphs independent of point count.
Raster morphs in switch layers like http://www.revisionfx.com/products/reflex/ or maybe just a simple dissolve.

Brush Tool (and ability to save brush presets like size and color)
viewtopic.php?p=78197&highlight=#78197

Editable Text Tool (right now they immediately become vector shapes, should be option to turn to shape)

Import Styles from .anme files
Import .anme files with their styles
Style Library

Customizable line caps and corners. It would nice if you could specify sharp or rounded line caps and corners.

Ability to copy/paste/mirror bones
Robust bone controls, for instance the Rotation of one bone can affect the Scale of another bone.

Auto backup of the .anme file. Selectable time for autosave.

Copy/Paste Moho objects from one open file to another open file, if I have 2 Moho programs running simultaneously.

Option to let Image layers be untouched in quality/smoothness on animation export and current frame render.

Click to lock/unlock selected layer, or multiple selected layers. I'm clumsy and sometime accidentally move them.

Darken/Lighten, Hue shift, a layer (including sub-layers). This would save a lot of work instead of needing to create separate character files for night shots or really bright shots, or weird lighting shots. Some of this is possible with using layering modes, but you have to take the time to create masks.


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Things I'd like, but can wait for:

True Motion Blur, like:
http://www.revisionfx.com/products/rsmb/

Something like, Puppeteer in Daz studio:
viewtopic.php?t=12378&highlight=puppeteer

What if there was some way to do animation live, runtime? In other words, press play; manipulate translation, rotation...and it sets the keyframes in real-time. Yes it sort of can do it, but it doesn't record all the keyframes.

This gets me thinking though. What if you could shoot video from a webcam or firewire connected camcorder and use the tracking tools and the “bone point at” script to quickly mock up an animation...all within AS...

Oh for the love of God and country please change AS so that relative paths can be used instead of absolute paths. Audio, images, and 3D objects are saved as absolute paths, starting with the drive letter!

Well, that might be fine for folks who never change computers and save to there operating system drive. But it infuriates people like me who keep projects on external drives and who wish to be mobile, maybe I wanna work on my workstation, maybe I need to move to my laptop--nope your screwed.

The structure needs to allow for relative paths. Relative to the .anme file itself, just like when you build web pages that reference images. You'll typically see file paths like:
God forbid I decide to change a directory that's upstream of my project...

If I had a choice, this would come before all the above on the todo list above.

...then frame by frame improvements...