Hybrid Bones - or something like that ...

[bupaje]

Not sure if this will make sense but here goes. I was thinking of how bone animation cannot be exported to flash, but layer animation can. It made me wonder if it might be possible to create a bone+layer hybrid that would allow you to use certain bone tools to create your animation which would move a married vector layer. Then when you save to swf have an option to strip the bone info but the translations and movements of the attached layer will be preserved normally.

There would be some bone features that wouldn't have a layer counterpart of course but still might be able to get some of the benefits of bone animation this way.

Hope this makes sense.

[heyvern]

Hey this sounds interesting...

... could this be done with a script somehow?

For example.. if a layer is "bound" to a bone for rotation, translation etc... could a script somehow take that bone "info" and apply it to layer keyframes?

It could set the origin point of the layer to match the "base" of the bone then convert the key frames of the bone to layer key frames.

You could run the script before export to flash... or something like that.

This could actually give us that feature "right now" instead of waiting for it to be added to moho.

Actually... this would be the same "conversion" as a hybrid bone/layer thingy.

Just to be clear... I have sort of "taken a break" from any complicated LUA scripting... seems to be a lot more talented people in that area...

-Vern

[jorgy]

On the surface, it does seem "doable". After all, the bones when attached to a vector layer are just morphing the points in the vector layer based on the position of the bone. So taking that info one frame at a time and putting the hybrid vector layer that has taken it's points from the bone morphing, and then putting that layer into the flash export should/could/would work. Maybe?

jorgy

[Fazek]

I am afraid converting bones into layer movement is working only if all of the layer's points are modified only by one single bone. Usually a skeleton moves the points with a weighted combination of bones and that means every point has its own transformation matrix.

[bupaje]

I'm not a programmer so explain this to me. Does this mean that the points on a bone layer are stored based on what transformations made from the original position? In other words if the point is a '1' and the bone moves it to '10' in a given frame is it saved as '1 +9'? Is that what that transformation means in simplest terms?

Visually I was just envisioning that the bone layer would have a matched vector layer and if you moved the point from location '1' to '10' that the matching point on the vector layer could be moved to '10' - so this vector layer would not have a transformation matrix?

Anyway that was what I pictured but it isn't based on any programming knowledge.

[Bones3D]

I know in the 3D apps I use that support IK, they usually have an option to convert bone-based animations to vertex (shape point) morphs. I imagine a similar thing could be done by creating a conversion tool to keyframe each shape's point movements throughout a bone-animation, then discarding the bone rig controlling each shape's points.

Near as I can tell, this shouldn't be that difficult to pull off, since Moho already has to do the calculations for tweening to begin with.

Obviously though, this would have to be a user-initiated function, as the effect would be permanent once the conversion was made. I'd also guess that every change to each shape's points would probably have to be keyframed at every frame, in order to preserve the animation exactly as it was when it was bone-driven.