Too many bones??

[Nicohk92]

I created a few bones on an object and Moho is already starting to seriously lag. I have a beefed up M1 mac with 32G of Ram, don't tell me those tentacles have hit Moho's capacities. I'm supposed to have two of those in the scenes, which is to become more complex.

I'm a bit scared of this very poor performance. Any strategies, to unburden Moho?

[Greenlaw]

Personally, I haven't had a problem when using multiple bone chains and Sketch Bones, but for your project, you might consider using Curver instead.

Curver gives you greater flexibility than a bone chain--perfect for tentacles!

To me, the only 'downside' with Curver is that it's not as easy to pose as a bone chain using Sketch Bones, but if you need to use Sketch Bones, it's easy to combine Sketch Bones with Curver, and you can use far fewer bones for this too.

If you don't need Sketch Bones, you can bind the Curver curve to a single base-bone and pose it like a regular Bezier curve.

[hayasidist]

ok - I know laggy editing and slow renders are a pain but if that's the price you have to pay for a good quality finished video ...

[Daxel]

What we see is all there is in the scene right now? If I had poor perfomance just with that I would be looking for some specific cause or problem that causes the lag, because in my experience that scene shouldn't have bad performance so I think something is wrong with it.

You had problems with masked gradients previously, which is a known bug in the latest versions. Does this scene have gradients or any other masked effect?

Color points (I don't remember if masked or not) had a problem that affected performance too. It was improved for the latest version but it's not totally solved so I would avoid them.

Aside from those two, negative keyframes and the corrupted references I mentioned to you here (viewtopic.php?p=218662#p218662) I haven't seen any other bugs that affect performance so far.

When I had performance problems and made a little investigation about the different Moho features and their impact, bones were surprisingly performant: adding or deleting 30 of them barely had an impact on the performance of the project. Bones only had a serious impact when combined with the masked gradient bug, and just one bone was enough to cause the bug and affect performance.

Try a similar approach. Make a copy of your project and play with it, delete things one by one and see the impact. You can measure perfomance in different ways. The time to copy-paste keyframes is a good indicator of editing performance, while the FPS playing the scene in the workspace is a good indicator of rendering performance. Each one can be affected separately by different things, so is good to know what kind of bad performance you actually have.

If you want to share the file, I can take a look at it.

[Nicohk92]

Thanks guys for looking into it.

Greenlaw I don't really want to use curver cause I need to bind some group layers to bones in those tentacles (although maybe it's possible with curvers, I may need to redo the tutorial).

Daxel I took your suggestion, played around some more with the file and I think I found the culpitr. It's that blueish nanoparticle you see attached to a tentacle on the lower left. It's a relatively heavy group referenced from another file, and apparently it doesn't like to be influenced by bone movements. I now gave it its own bone sticking out of the tentacle rig and bound it to it. No more issue.

Pfiooo!

Since I have many such nanoparticles to place around the bigger shape, I may just go the PNG route instead of referencing multiple times. It may make the whole thing lighter, and It'll be just as easy to update if needed.

Thanks again

[slowtiger]

If I use something like your particle item I usually render it as image and import this to Moho. Much faster, less stress. I'd only use the Moho vector version if I need to zoom in significantly.

[Daxel]

It's a relatively heavy group referenced from another file, and apparently it doesn't like to be influenced by bone movements. I now gave it its own bone sticking out of the tentacle rig and bound it to it. No more issue.

I'm glad you got that solved! With Moho is almost always a specific problem that causes very bad performance.

Just so I can make a note about this, because this is the first time I see it:

The slowdown happened when the externally referenced group was automatically being affected by the tentacle bones via flexibinding? It wasn't manually binded in any way (layer binded, point binded or whatever) to the bones?

And to fix it you just binded the referenced group via layer binding to a new bone?

So maybe the problem was not the referenced group not having it's own bone but the fact that it was being affected by flexibinding? Then I guess it would have worked the same if you layer binded the group to one of the tentacle bones, right?

[Nicohk92]

I think it was the flexibinding. At first I had it layer bound to a dedicated bone cause I wanted it to move but not be deformed. I may have deleted that dedicated bone by accident and the group defaulted to flexibinding from the other bones I guess. Since it's a group made out of several layers and shapes, there's no wonder it didn't like being abused all of a sudden.

[Nicohk92]

Curver gives you greater flexibility than a bone chain--perfect for tentacles!

I just tried using curvers instead of tentacles but it looks like I can't have multiple curvers over the same shape. As far as I can tell there's no way to have multiple curver lines in the same wrap layer, or stack multiple wrap layers together. Therefore I can't rig multiple tentacles, only one.

It'll have to be bones

[Greenlaw]

I was pretty sure I've used multiple curves in a Curver layer before, so I threw together a quick test...



A Curver layer is basically a Vector layer, so you can draw as many curves as you need in it. I believe they have to be open curves, but I've never tested for that.

Sorry for the crappy quality of the test, but this example is two curves in a Curver layer and a single vector art layer. If I was doing this for actual production work, I'd probably use a hybrid Bones-Curver setup, with a single bone to hold the central blob shape a little better, and maybe a bone at the base of each curve.

Bones alone will work fine, too. I tend to use Sketch Bones tool to animate this sort of thing because it's easier for posing and animating. Sometimes, adding Curver to the bones setup can give you smoother deformations, so you can have the best of both worlds.

[Greenlaw]

I believe they have to be open curves, but I've never tested for that.

Well, today I discovered that a Curver curve can be a closed curve...



Learn something new every day!

[Greenlaw]

Soooo.....I wondered what would happen if I added the closed Curver curve to the open 'tentacles' curves...



The closed curve is holding the central blob shape a bit better. That's pretty cool! This result is not perfect, but a little tweaking should improve stability.

So, in this example, I have three curves inside the Curver layer deforming a single vector art layer.

Ok, having too much fun...need to get back to work.

Note: A bone layer was added because I wanted to see if a Pin bone would help hold the central blob, but that didn't work very well and I deleted the bone. The setup above with the three Curver curves works much better for this example.

[Nicohk92]

Looks like you're right. Apologies. Don't know what I did wrong in my first tests. I'm lucky that you like playing around with those.

Still I've advanced with my bone rig, which gives me a bit more control with binding etc... Thanks a lot tho.

[Víctor Paredes]

if this is any help at this point, all this is covered in the Curvers tutorial:

[Greenlaw]

Hi Victor,

Now I know why I felt a sense of déjà vu!

I watched your video last year but had forgotten the 'duopus' example at the end. I'm glad I watched it again because I'd also forgotten I could animate the scale of the knots. Cool beans!

Thanks for joining the discussion and re-sharing the video.