Moho 13.5 is here!

[Palhil]

I'm a bit disappointed with this release. I updated my 12.5 moho to to 13.5 and thought I was getting the bitmap sketching but it turns out that it has been removed.

I believe the reason was that 13 was created by the team at Smith Micro who rewrote a lot of the code. Unfortunately, 13 was quite buggy. So when Moho was sold back to the original developers they returned to the previous stable release and upgraded from there. Bitmap sketching may return at some point in the future but getting a stable release out as quickly as possible would likely have been the priority. I imagine they are now concentrating on fixing bugs that people are reporting.

I never upgraded to 13, but after my short play with the bitmap tools in the trial, they felt like a separate system bolted onto the software and not really integrated nicely with the other tools. More from a GUI point of view than any other.

[Greenlaw]

I believe the reason was that 13 was created by the team at Smith Micro who rewrote a lot of the code. Unfortunately, 13 was quite buggy. So when Moho was sold back to the original developers they returned to the previous stable release and upgraded from there...

Yes, that pretty much sums up why the paint tools and other Moho 13.0-specific features are gone from Moho 13.5. The features that were introduced in Moho 13.0 lacked options to make them genuinely useful, and more significantly there were internal changes made that broke common rigging workflows and techniques. Shortly after 13.0 came out, long time Moho artists, including myself, went back to using Moho 12.5 instead.

To be clear, I would love to see a better version of the paint tools return in a future version of Moho, but right now it's more important that Moho regains the stability and usability we enjoyed with 12.5.

IMO, Lost Marble's decisions for Moho 13.5 have been wise and sensible. Lately, I'm preferring to work in Moho 13.5, and hardly touching 12.5. Considering how much I depended on Moho 12.5, that says a lot. Yes, a few bugs have popped up since the release of 13.5, but so far nothing catastrophic. And the new 13.5-specific features, like Vitruvian Bones, Perspective Quad and Quad meshes, are making this update worthwhile. To put it another way, I will gladly accept replacement features when they are actually useful for real-world production use.

Plus, under Lost Marble, we know Moho is in active development again, and improvements will continue to come. Moho is in a much better position now than it was last year.

[rayamc]

Fantastic! 6 months ago the future of Moho - my main animation tool, looked a bit shaky but thanks the the LostMarble team it's back and looking to have a great future. Which means I get a better work flow and my clients get better animations!

I hoped for Apple Silicon but didn't expect it but my 8GB Macbook Air destroys my 32GB 2015 iMacs. Playback speed has gone from stutter to butter. I mean night and day difference to playback frame rates and rendering a complex scene is down to 7 mins (8 cores finally!) compared to 29 mins.

Can't wait to put it through it paces.

Switching Smith Micro accounts to Lostmarble isn't clear and I only found out today that it was released via the forum. I guess a lot of people won't know what's going on ...

[Animaatiotalo]

I just lost a lot of work because the autosave system is not working. This is the second time... At this time and age I'm not prepared to save manually all the time.... It just says that failer to parse JSOn document or something and cannot recover.... so dissapointed with this. I was hoping that I have less crashes with this than moho 12.5 but it's the same but now even the autosave fails. Huge letdown. Autosave folder has the file but its 0 bytes so it's basically gone. How hard can this be?

[SimplSam]

I just lost a lot of work because the autosave system is not working.

Like many here I don't rely on AutoSave anyway, but rather Cloud or Local Sync/Backups. This has proved priceless for multiple apps & occasions when my 'human error' is the primary factor.

[hayasidist]

I just lost a lot of work because the autosave system is not working. This is the second time... At this time and age I'm not prepared to save manually all the time.... It just says that failer to parse JSOn document or something and cannot recover.... so dissapointed with this. I was hoping that I have less crashes with this than moho 12.5 but it's the same but now even the autosave fails. Huge letdown. Autosave folder has the file but its 0 bytes so it's basically gone. How hard can this be?

may or may not help but ...

in Help / Show Autosave files ... the directory that opens should have a "backup" folder .. open that .. the files in there are named Autosave_<Moho doc name>_<some UUID>.moho

a combination of name / date might get you back to somewhere useful.

FWIW this autosave problem has been reported...

[Greenlaw]

I just lost a lot of work because the autosave system is not working....

I haven't run into this yet, but I have seen other users reporting the same problem. I suggest disabling Auto-Save for now. (I turned my off just out of caution.) FWIW, Moho 12.x experienced a similar problem with Auto-Save in the earliest releases, but it got fixed by the time 12.5 came out. Maybe the problem creeped back into 13.5?

Auto-save is only one way to backup your data, so I suggest leaving it off for now.

I normally make incremental saves of my projects about every 15 minutes or whenever I've made a significant change to a project, so I keep many versions of backups in case something goes wrong. I do this manually, and I practice this habit with pretty much every program I create content with. At work, I additionally rely on Windows Previous Versions feature...this has saved my butt a number of times. In short, when it comes to important work, you can never have too many ways to back up your data.

There is also a script somewhere that saves incremental versions for you at regular intervals. A search should turn it up. I haven't used it in a long time though and not sure if it still works correctly, so use with caution.

[oik976]

I'm getting to the party a little late, but a big congratulations to Mike and Victor... seeing the new trailer almost brought a tear to my eye. So thrilled that the product is back in your hands, and hope that I can contribute even a small fraction of the great experience I've gotten over the years.

[synthsin75]

Yeah, my auto-save tool script still works. https://drive.google.com/uc?export=down ... xX5gh9TCkC
For those who don't know it, this will auto-save every number of minutes and over the number of incremented files you set in its options.

[Greenlaw]

Thanks for confirming that it still works, and for proving the link Wes!

I thought you had created this script, and indeed this is the one I tried a while back. Last night I found a different script by another user, and that confused me because I was so sure you had done the one I used.

Don't know why I'm not using it now...I probably just missed bringing it into a previous Moho upgrade, and then forgot about it. Downloading and installing for 13.5 today.

[synthsin75]

There is an incremental save script here: https://www.animestudiotutor.com/lua_sc ... ps_script/
But it doesn't auto-save and you can't set how many increments to save.

[Greenlaw]

Interesting...I don't think this is what I saw last night.* It should be useful, but I'm used to just clicking on the previous file and incrementing a version number manually. One 3D program I use has a built-in incremental save command, but I still do this manually in that program. It's an old habit, but I rarely lose any work because of it.

Your incremental auto-save script should be good for those days when I'm feeling lazy or forgetful.

*Update: My mistake, this Jeremy Jones script is the I came across last night, but I saw it here in the LM forums, not on AnimeStudioTutors.

So many good choices!

[yotsuba]

Yeah, my auto-save tool script still works. https://sites.google.com/site/synthsin/ ... ects=0&d=1
For those who don't know it, this will auto-save every number of minutes and over the number of incremented files you set in its options.

Hi synth, I'm trying to use your handy auto-save script but it keeps giving me this error message:

Got any clue what is this about? I noticed that most people here use windows, and I'm working on a mac. Also my custom contents folder and the folder I'm saving this project are inside a "google drive" directory, that auto syncs with the cloud. Don't know if this could be the cause of the problem.

[synthsin75]

https://drive.google.com/uc?export=down ... xX5gh9TCkC

Try the updated version.

[yotsuba]

Thanks. I tested it and I get somewhat the same error message, although the number is different:



In the previous version I activated the auto-save and incremental save, and the error occurred every time I executed an action (like going in and out of frame zero), so every time the script tried to save. In this last version after I activate the auto-save and incremental save, no error occurred, but also no saving was done. When I try to save manually, clicking on the script icon and then on "save" at the dialogue box, the error occurs.

Edit: I take it back, partially. The incremental saves is working, and it already help me recover from a crash.