Duplicated references

[vanleth]

Lets say you have 100 birds flying around. Then you want to change the design of the birds. Wouldn't it be nice then, if all the birds were referenced to 1 single image vector of the bird. instead of altering all 100.

The same would be usefull when animating a walking person. When altering the left leg's colors or vectors, the same would happend to the right leg.

Best regards
Van Leth

[kdiddy13]

I understand your question but I'll throw this out there anyway:

In reguards to the birds you could use the partcle layer. Altering the source for that layer would change all of the birds being "particled". Wouldn't work for the leg though.

[Lost Marble]

For the leg, you would use Styles. In Moho 5, styles are used when you want to use the same shape properties over and over again.

[sang820]

[/quote]if all the birds were referenced to 1 single image vector of the bird. instead of altering all 100.

You can do : (A bird + particle =99 birds) + (a bird) ?

[HumbleEgo]

Although I've very new to Moho. It seems to blow any "2D" app away when it comes to things like bones, parenting (or layer hierchy) and drawing tools. My one big beef is it doesn't appear to have any symbol use.

I do alot of webtoons with a combination of Flash and Toonboom, mostly marionette style, which Moho is superior. But with out the use of symbols or instances in certain cases, I just see my file size grow and grow.

Any plans to implement some kind of system for reusing artwork? This program could be make Flash or ToonBoom completely obsolete in a arena of webtoons with adding a few of their conventions. I'd love to see this incorporated into the next version, so that I can through away my copy or Flash and ToonBoom.

[vanleth]

Thanks for the all the suggestions.

To get a second leg match the original, "copy/paste layer" is still my best friend. I just thought that this task could be avoided with having a feature that used "vector references/symbols" instead.

And using styles do help on trivial tasks.

As HumbleEgo mentions, "symbols" could also have other benefits. It could also be a way to reuse your work in other projects, make libraries of images, ect.

But I do understand that the feature I'm asking for, is a very big addition, and may be out of scope with MoHo, wich is great allready

[7feet]

I understand what you are saying about using references, but I believe you have to consider the number of things you can do to a vector in Moho, especially when animating. If you've done any point animation on a vector, or they are attached to bones with different bone strengths, etc, you could get some wierd results. It would seem it would need to be limited to both work on frame zero and vectors that had not been point manipulated at all. Or LM would have to write some pretty dang intelligent software to figure out your intent.

I reuse previous artwork all the time. After a file has been saved, you can use File>Import>Moho Object to bring in specific layers from a Moho file. The objects existing animation is also imported. The importation seems to only show the layers at the "root" level. Any sublayers of the selected object will also be imported, as well as any Styles that are associated with them. This was one of my favorite things about the new version. I've built a a few library files, mostly buildings or other easily recyleable objects, and also draw and rig all my characters and then import them into the piece I'm working on.

As a concrete example, I set up a number of 3D buildings, as well as street sections (straight, corners, intersection, dead ends, etc.) with curbs and grates for drains and stuff, all in Moho. I'd never want to have to redraw all of those elements. But using the import I can quickly import the street sections I want, arrange them in 3D space, and drop buildings on them. Once I had all the initial elements built it took me less than half an hour to set up a 16 square block section of city to use as a 3D environment for the characters (again, all in Moho).

For that matter, I'm gonna use it for something I was just about to do. I've worked out a fairly standard way of rigging my characters, and they tend to be built with a lot of sub layers, so I'm going to set up pre-rigged bone layers with all the vector layers (blank) there, labeled, and in their proper layer order, for a number of different views for basic bodies. I figured this might save me a lot of "stupid" work. Might also do it for heads, as I tend to use a lot of bones to control facial features and expressions, along with masking for the eyes and mouth, so even though the faces tend to be the most idiosyncratic part having a basic setup might not hurt.

I certainly wouldn't mind at all if the Moho Object Import was made into a dedicated library window. I'm using it an awful lot, and it can get to be a ton ok mouseclicks to get everything in there. So that's my specific feature request here. When I saw how the Object import worked I thought it was just an interim bit in the first betas. Guess I should have spoken up before now, LM, but if you could still do it it would, I think, make the workflow with objects much, much faster. Just to be able to browse through the contents of files would help. If you initially pick the wrong file, you have to start all over again at the File pulldown, and that slows things down. Even if you left the code that's there, a proper Library window would be great. While I'm at it (sorry) the ability to import multiple objects at one time wouldn't hurt at all. Thanks.

--Brian

[spasmodic_cheese]

i agree 7feet, having a moho object import window would be very cool.
I cant see how it would be too hard to implement.

apart from being a pain in the ass to setup a new window.

[myles]

I do alot of webtoons with a combination of Flash and Toonboom, mostly marionette style, which Moho is superior. But with out the use of symbols or instances in certain cases, I just see my file size grow and grow.

I suspect Moho 5 (beta) now uses "symbols" or "instances" for "optimized" layers (the red dot), although Lost Marble hasn't used the s-word - possibly because this can be used for keeping filesize down where the same object is animated marionette style, but not for multiple uses of the same object in the same frame (except as particles), so it doesn't completely correspond to the Flash "symbol".

Keeping the layer optimized (as a symbol ?) requires a little more work in setup and a few limitations, but nothing too bad - you can't have multiple objects on one layer controlled by bones, each marionette piece needs to be on a separate layer (assigning layers, rather than drawing objects, to bones); you can't use point animation or image warping, only layer animation. As far as I can see, you can control everything with a single set of bones, and you can use Switch layers (no interpolation though).

However, keep an eye on those red dots - Moho doesn't enforce this optimization (symbols), and if you aren't careful it's easy to use an animation technique that negates it. For instance, to shear a vector layer, you need to shear a parent layer - a group layer, perhaps - to avoid introducing point animation caused by shearing the layer directly.

Well, that's my understanding after the limited experimentation I've done so far.

Regards, Myles.