Render an animation with the bones ?

[Lychee]

Hi.

As the title says, is there a way to render an animation with the bones?

[Stan]

Yes. There's a script for that, made by simplsam: https://mohoscripts.com/script/ss-virtual-bones

[Lychee]

Thanks Stan for your reply, but I admit I would have liked something native to the program.
I think the Moho developers should consider those who would like to demonstrate the mechanics of one of their creations, for example, in a tutorial.
This would avoid having to use external screen capture software, but oh well, I'll do that with the script.

[synthsin75]

Preview animation shows the bones, but it also shows everything else visible in the workspace.

[Lychee]

Yes I know, but unfortunately I can't have a high quality image, and choose the format.

[synthsin75]

For demonstration, I'd just do screen capture.

[Greenlaw]

One trick is to simply hit Play. Bone Labels will disappear, but bones will remain visible, and playback should be reasonably accurate for many situations.

What I typically do during our tutorial videos is scrub the timeline by hand. The big advantage to this method is that it keeps the bone labels visible. This method takes practice to be able to do this smoothly, but if you don't need to hear the audio, it works fine. Tip: If you have a pen, use that to scrub instead of a mouse. I find it's a lot easier to scrub smoothly with a pen.

The above does require a screen recorder, though. I use Camtasia to record our tutorials, but OBS works great for many users.

If you need a fully rendered animation with visible bones, I highly recommend using SimplSam's script. I wish I had this option whenever I had to do presentations at DreamWorks for my rigs. The result looks very professional.

But, I agree, it would be great if we had the option to keep bones and bone labels visible all the time in preview mode. I also wish we had the option to lock the alignment of the bone labels. In some situations, it's very distracting to see the text jump around the way it currently does.

[Greenlaw]

Oh! I almost forgot to mention the best method:

Press and hold the right arrow key. This keeps the bones AND labels visible, and, if the scene isn't too complicated, the playback is smooth and reasonably 'realtime'.

If playback sounds weird, try enabling Allow Frame Skipping. This may drop frames, but it should perform better.

This is actually the method I use in our tutorials unless I'm playing with the playback as part of the demo. (Scrubbing backward and forward, for example.)

[Greenlaw]

More tips...

- Experiment with GPU cache on and off...depending on the content and rigging technique used, Moho's playback can be improved when it is on or off.

- If Physics is involved, bake the motion and disable physics for smoother playback.