Consistent Outlines for Pixel Art Animations

[DigitalDesignDude]

Currently, Moho does not maintain consistent 1 pixel-thick strokes for low-res pixel art animations. Even with antialiasing disabled from the project settings, sprites often have uneven outlines and missing pixels, as shown below:



I believe adding an option to render strokes at a minimum of 1 pixel thick would not only make Moho more suitable for game development projects, but also potentially help it compete a little with Harmony's gaming focused animation app.

Thank you for your consideration.

[Greenlaw]

Just tossing in my agreement.

I was trying to use this feature a few months ago to render a pixel-art version of my 'Artist Host' character from our tutorial videos, but I wasn't able to get the quality I wanted. The problem I experienced was what you showed above: no matter how I adjusted settings and properties, I kept getting broken lines and uneven details. I think the effect is okay for cheating a general 'pixel art' look, but the details really don't hold up.

This is a feature I'd like to use if the details were more controllable. Hopefully, it will get some attention in the future.

For now, I'm creating my '8-bit' images as real pixel art (not processed) using Aseprite and importing the art and frames to Moho for rigging and animation. This requires more work, and it has its aesthetic imperfections, but it does look better, and I'm much happier with it.

[Greenlaw]

This makes me wonder if the problem is related to how Moho14.x (and maybe 13.5,) renders lines. For example, when I render without anti-aliasing (common practice for compositors working with 2D cartoon animation), I have a lot of trouble rendering thin lines that don't break up. They look fine when I render the lines with anti-aliasing enabled, but not when AA is disabled. That doesn't really make sense, so something is off here.

I think if this were fixed, it would make Moho renders better for compositing artists, and also improve the pixel-art renders. I believe LM is aware of this, but I'll bring it up again. I'm reasonably certain that rendering without AA worked fine in older versions of Moho, but I'm unsure when it broke. I might have to look into this today.

[DigitalDesignDude]

Thank you Greenlaw, I'm glad I'm not the only one who would like this feature or greater control over pixel art details in general.

I use Aesprite as well when I need pixel perfect animation assets. I just wish it and other pixel editors supported tweening and editable shapes like vector animation apps do.

I see great potential in using vectors to quickly design and animate simplistic game assets, so I might have to use another app or somehow tweak Moho to export low res. PNGs without antialiasing or messy outlines. Adobe Animate has these issues as well.

So far the closest solution I've found is to use PixelMash, which did work alright for tweening a vector shape's anchors at a low resolution. But the app is lacking a lot of standard animation features so Moho would likely be a better choice if it could fully retain 1px outlines. Below is an example of the type of effect I would like to achieve in Moho and I hope that someday it may be possible.

[BigBoiiiJones]

Made a similar post here. Its a shame since it breaks compositing workflows that require no AA.

https://lostmarble.com/forum/viewtopic. ... 37#p216337

[DigitalDesignDude]

Thanks for sharing that @BigBoiiJones.

I’ve now found another similar thread which you might recall since you were apart of it:

viewtopic.php?t=36702&sid=b65af7a1410e2 ... 7cb1fab135

I hope we won’t have to wait much longer as there are a number of us that would make great use of this feature.