Moho Animation Forum

Hello Everyone,

Here's my current problem:
I have 2-3 characters in separate Master files. All layers are set up with styles (8-12 per character).
I imported them into several scenes where they interact.
Everything is fine.
Now I changed the characteristics of a texture layer in each character. All styles have unique names.
When I go to my animation files to update, the first character works without a problem. The second character updates but changes a number of styles (what appears to be random) on the first layer. If I then update the first layer again, it changes styles randomly on the second. From there on, all updating doesn't change anything anymore, but most of my styles are off and basically unusable.

My fix was to update only the first character and then apply the texture changes manually on the others... it's a fix for now but generally unsatisfying. From that point on, I have to make each change manually just because I changed a brush in a texture layer. That's not how I intended to work with the referencing system...

By the way: reimporting works fine to fix it. That's what I did with the characters which had no or only animation on bone layers.

So it's somewhat contained for now, but overall I would love to see improvement in that area.
On quick research, I read that it could have something to do with the original character files stemming from the same file and being made through saving under a new name, etc. That can very well be. I'm not sure if that is the issue. (Is it?) If so, it feels like a bug. Saving under a new name should make the file "unique" in all namespaces.

Resulting Feature requests:

1) If it has in fact something to do with files being the children of the same base file: either automatically make namespaces unique on saving with a new name, or add some option in the menu where this can be done. A "Delete history" for master files used for referencing.

2) An option to block only specific aspects from being updated when updating a reference, or "lock" parameters. That way I could "lock" character B when updating character A and vice versa. Also: in some scenes, I will recolor the characters using the styles in the scene (not the master styles). In those situations, I could still update the rig or features but keep the altered styles through "locking" them.

Hi,

Custom Styles don't care about names; you need to make sure each Style has a unique Style ID. Unfortunately, Moho doesn't display this information within the program, but you can ensure each character gets unique Style IDs when you import them.

To do this, make sure the option Unlink Shared Styles is checked in the Import window (it's in the lower right corner). After importing, you will notice 'duplicate' styles listed in the Styles Window, which can be uniquely changed for each character. This happens because Moho changed the Style ID for these styles but kept the original names. To make this easier to work with, I like to add a short prefix to the style names (usually 3 letters), so I know which characters they belong to.

(Note: if you give the Styles unique names before importing, I believe Moho will keep the new Style names and assign new Style IDs.)

Personally, I hope LM comes up with a better system for managing/editing Style IDs and Names in the future, but for now, the current system works okay if you follow the above instructions.

The first time I ran into this situation was when I needed to animate many dozens of cats for Boss Baby: Back In Business (the footage can be seen on my DreamWorks 2019 demo reel.) Back then, I made 4 duplicate cats, each with unique style names, thinking this would allow me to give each cat unique Styles. For the reasons mentioned above, I immediately ran into trouble when I multiplied the cats, and I could not consistently vary the cat colors.

Once I learned about the Style IDs, I proceeded to edit them directly in the file data for each cat using Notepad++. Later on, I learned that all I really needed to do was switch on the Unlink Shared Styles option in Moho's import window, and create individual 'master' cats this way. This allowed me to keep the variations, and edit their Styles easily if I needed to. And if I had to, I could have added more variations this way.

Hope this info helps.

I would prefer to save styles outside of the project, so all shots of a movie can refer to the same color and changing that color would affect all Moho files of the movie. But I guess that would make animated styles impossible. Anyway, the current system is nice until it breaks. Maybe a 'bake all styles' script would be nice to have as a failsafe