Is it bad practice to scale layers at frame 0?

[Daxel]

Hi! I hope you can help me with a decision.
I am working with a complex character rig and I want to make a change in the face design. It involves changing the sizes of its drawings (that are vector layers), but the head turn is already working fine so the simplest solution at this point seems to be to scale the layers or the group layers that contain them. It just works so far, but I am concerned that scaling layers at frame 0 could bite me later for some reason, like tools not working as intended or unpredictable results while animating bones, or points, something like that. I've been avoiding scaling layers since I use Moho because I think that I read somewhere that it is not a good idea. Do those fears make any sense, or should I stop worrying about that?

[synthsin75]

Generally, it's better to save layer transforms for when you really need them during animation. If different layers have different scales, the same line widths will look different. Edit>Normalize Layer Scale usually corrects this, but I wouldn't rely on that to solve all potential problems unless I had to.

Sounds like you may be so far down the road that you may have to. While it's better to make scale changes with the vector points, you may have too many head turn point motion keyframes for it to be worth changing the scale for every key.

[Daxel]

Generally, it's better to save layer transforms for when you really need them during animation. If different layers have different scales, the same line widths will look different. Edit>Normalize Layer Scale usually corrects this, but I wouldn't rely on that to solve all potential problems unless I had to.

Sounds like you may be so far down the road that you may have to. While it's better to make scale changes with the vector points, you may have too many head turn point motion keyframes for it to be worth changing the scale for every key.

Thanks for answering. If that is the only potential problem then I think it is worth it in this case.

[Greenlaw]

I generally leave artwork layers at their original size on frame zero and scale the contained vector artwork instead. By keeping the layers themselves at 100%, animating and modifying the rig is more predictable. Understandably, it may not seem practical to do this for many vector layers. In this case, you may consider if preserving that 1:1 relationship with all the layers is really that important to your project. IMO, it's only important if you anticipate adapting the rig to many different situations by adding new layers and rig modifications. But if it's a one-off rig or only intended to be used in limited ways and you don't anticipate modifying things much during animation, it's probably ok to scale the layers at zero.

The best practice, of course, is to draw everything to scale before you start rigging. It really helps to design your character with final proportions on paper or in a paint program, and then bring that artwork into Moho as a drawing template.

If you just want to scale the entire rig at frame zero, place the entire character (all groups and layers) inside a new group, and scale the group. Since the scale of all the layers inside that group are unchanged, everything will be fine. (I do this all the time for rigs I make at work.)

[Daxel]

I generally leave artwork layers at their original size on frame zero and scale the contained vector artwork instead. By keeping the layers themselves at 100%, animating and modifying the rig is more predictable. Understandably, it may not seem practical to do this for many vector layers. In this case, you may consider if preserving that 1:1 relationship with all the layers is really that important to your project. IMO, it's only important if you anticipate adapting the rig to many different situations by adding new layers and rig modifications. But if it's a one-off rig or only intended to be used in limited ways and you don't anticipate modifying things much during animation, it's probably ok to scale the layers at zero.

The best practice, of course, is to draw everything to scale before you start rigging. It really helps to design your character with final proportions on paper or in a paint program, and then bring that artwork into Moho as a drawing template.

If you just want to scale the entire rig at frame zero, place the entire character (all groups and layers) inside a new group, and scale the group. Since the scale of all the layers inside that group are unchanged, everything will be fine. (I do this all the time for rigs I make at work.)

I see. It was already designed but I constantly change my mind about my drawings. It was going to be a multicharacter complex rig so I am going to try to not scale the layers. I will try to find out if maybe I can use some of the two bake bones scripts to simplify the process.

[Daxel]

Finally I decided to improve my rig setting the modified scales back to 0, and even if my rig is pretty complex I came to a solution that made the process much easier than I thought, so I will explain it here for the ones that may be searching for it.
The key is using the fantastic dkwroot's modified translate points tool, and at the same time the relative animation toggle. Using those two techniques combined, the job of changing the size of a group of drawings that have already made animations but without touching their layer scale is much easier.

This is the modified translate points tool: http://www.lostmarble.com/forum/viewtop ... 12&t=30487
With that tool you can change the origin of the transformations that the translate points tool makes. That origin, as you probably know, is not the same origin of the layer and you can't change it with the default tools (it is automatically positioned on the center of the points selected) but you can change it with this modified tool.
Why is it so useful in this case? because you can set the origin of the translate points tool to be exactly the same as the layer, so you can scale the points and the result will be the same. Using that with relative animation activated, you can apply that scaling to a whole animation, for example you can change the scale of a nose and at the same time the scale of all the keyframes that are in the turn smartaction, that otherwise you would have to scale one by one.

That's it. Thanks Dkwroot.

[Greenlaw]

I see. It was already designed but I constantly change my mind about my drawings. It was going to be a multicharacter complex rig so I am going to try to not scale the layers. I will try to find out if maybe I can use some of the two bake bones scripts to simplify the process.

A few more tips...

When setting up your character art at frame zero, if you need to scale some artwork and you've created vector layers in Moho, it's usually better to scale the artwork using Transform Points rather than Transform Layer. This way, you maintain consistency in the base value of the line weights, which is especially important when using a custom Style to adjust line weights after you've started animating with the rig.

Also, second guessing can be avoided by planning out the character's design and proportions in a sketch before you start creating the artwork inside Moho. I typically do this either on paper or in a paint program. Only after I've finalized this static design, will I bring it into Moho to more-or-less trace from. I may still wind up doing design tweaks in Moho but the changes are generally minor at that point. (Edit: Oops! I just realized I already wrote this in an earlier post. Oh, well...it's still important. )

A little extra planning up front can make life much easier later on.

[Greenlaw]

Re: DKW Root's Translate Points mod, yeah, that's a great tool! It definitely saves me a lot of time when I need it.

I wish it was easier to disable the modified anchor point behavior when I don't want that though because sometimes I prefer the original behavior. To work around this, I will disable DKW Root's version in my Custom Content folder by changing the script's extension from '.lua' to '.luaX'. This minor change prevents this version of the tool from loading into Moho. Then, I can reload the original script by pressing the keys Ctrl+Alt+Shift+L in Moho 12.5 (or Ctrl+Alt+Shift+R in Moho 13). This command reloads all available lua scripts including the original scripts from the program folder. When I need to switch back, I just open my Custom Content folder (File>Open Custom Content Folder) and rename '.luaX' back to .lua', press the reload keys, and we're back to using DKW Root's version.

It's a small hassle but I don't need to do this very often.

[Daxel]

Re: DKW Root's Translate Points mod, yeah, that's a great tool! It definitely saves me a lot of time when I need it.

I wish it was easier to disable the modified anchor point behavior when I don't want that though because sometimes I prefer the original behavior. To work around this, I will disable DKW Root's version in my Custom Content folder by changing the script's extension from '.lua' to '.luaX'. This minor change prevents this version of the tool from loading into Moho. Then, I can reload the original script by pressing the keys Ctrl+Alt+Shift+L in Moho 12.5 (or Ctrl+Alt+Shift+R in Moho 13). This command reloads all available lua scripts including the original scripts from the program folder. When I need to switch back, I just open my Custom Content folder (File>Open Custom Content Folder) and rename '.luaX' back to .lua', press the reload keys, and we're back to using DKW Root's version.

It's a small hassle but I don't need to do this very often.

Yes, I also think it would be very useful to have the option to toggle the original behabiour on and off.
And now that I am actually trying to apply the method I described to scale the drawing using this tool, I see that it doesn't use the custom origin point when you write the scale values, only if you do it with the mouse like dragging the corner to scale the drawing. Sadly, dragging the mouse I cant upscale all the drawings precisely so I can't do what I wanted to do and I may keep scaling a group layer until I find another way to scale the points of a group of drawings and its animations.

[Greenlaw]

Yeah, I ran into that situation a few years ago and know exactly what you mean. I chalked it up to experiences and, now I just try to avoid getting into that predicament again.

Sorry, I know that's not particularly helpful for your current situation, but I hope you get it solved.

If I think of anything more useful, I'll let you know.

[Greenlaw]

I seem to recall a third party script for transforming points in multiple layers at once. Or that might be wishful thinking...will look into it later tonight.

[Greenlaw]

Did a quick search in the forums and it looks like I asked about this myself a few years ago.

The best option I could find for editing points in multiple layers at once was a Multilayer Magnet tool discussed here:

http://www.lostmarble.com/forum/viewtop ... 73#p176246

It's not really what we're discussing here but this tool could be useful for applying similar transforms to multiple layers of 'organic' elements like different mouth shapes. Not sure I ever tried it out...will look into it.

[Daxel]

I tried that magnet tool, because that's a very good idea, but it didn't work very well for me. It was moving the points of some layers noticeably more than the points of other layers, but I needed it to apply the same distortion to all the drawings. Maybe it was something related to my rig, like different scaling values or something like that that was preventing the tool to work as intended. I want to try it again.

A tool to use the transform points tool on multiple layers would be very useful. I always wondered why it's not a built in feature. And taking into account that nobody here has made a script for it, it may be really hard to code for some reason.

Right now the best method that I know to scale the points of a group of drawings is using the bake frame script. You can actually apply the script on a scaled up group layer, like "Head", that has many other layers inside, and you will get another "Head" with all its children drawings point-scaled up (yeah it's a new word haha) and without any layer scaled. The problem is that I also have a lot of animations so I should do that with every keyframe. That's what I was trying to solve with the method I described previously, with the moded transform points tool and the relative animation on, but the scaling with values only worked with the not custom origin.

I can imagine a begginer reading this topic and his head exploding, so: the scripts I mention are in this forum and you can find explanations about them in their respective posts.

[Greenlaw]

Yeah, that's what I meant when I said it's not really what we're discussing. As much as I like using the Magnet tool, it's completely different from using the Transform tool. I'm almost sure the issue you're running into now has to do with the type of fall-off used by the Magnet tool. But, as you noted, it could very well be caused by different layer scaling you might have in your rig too. (Actually, your explanation sounds more likely to me. This is one reason why I try to keep all drawing layers at 100% scale at frame 0. If I scale anything at frame 0, it's usually a group layer and not a drawing layer.)

FWIW, I'm using a modified Magnet tool that lets me change the type of fall-off it has.



It doesn't work across multiple layers like the other Magnet mod we're talking about but I wonder if the two scripts can be combined? I'm not able to do that myself so just putting it out there. However, even if there were combined, I'm not sure it would help at all if the layers have different scale settings.

The DKW Root version with the additional fall-off is here: http://www.lostmarble.com/forum/viewtop ... od#p173486

[Daxel]

Thanks! I will try it, it may be useful, as I use the magnet a lot.