To upgrade or not?
Personally, I'm finding Moho 13's new bitmap painting tools are certainly usable. ATM, they may not replace a full paint program like Photoshop or Krita to create bitmap art for Moho, but the native paint tools are a convenient option when I can work within the current feature set. And developers have informed me that other standard paint features (like a selection tool) are coming. As for bugs in this current release, the developers are aware of them and working on a patch to address them. Hopefully, that won't take long.
As for the upgrade requirements, yeah, I agree...Smith-Micro's marketing should have extended the option to ASP users, even if it only for limited time. Maybe ASP 11 users could try petitioning their marketing department?
That said, Moho Pro 12 has been out for a few years and it's been proven in production to be a gigantic improvement over ASP 11. A lot of the 2D animation we created Moho Pro 12 for 'Boss Baby: Back In Business' could not have been done as easily in ASP 11. IMO, just the UI improvements alone made a big difference, let alone new additions like custom meshes and Smart Warp, sub-layer interpolations, clipboard image pasting, etc.
Moho Pro 13 gives you all of these Moho Pro 12's features
plus Bitmap painting and the new Smart Actions window. For me, this latter feature may be even more significant because the rigs I've built can have hundreds of actions to manage.
Further thoughts about Moho Pro 13:
I haven't really played with the new 3D shading features yet. I might find 3D shading in Moho useful at some point in the future but it's not something I really need right now.
TBH, I would much rather see further work done with improving the existing freehand/blob brush vector tools and the new bitmap drawing tools. I also feel they need to address some long standing file management issues, like allowing users to assign an output path in the project. Seriously, there should be a field for this in Project settings...selecting a path from a 'most recently used' list is unreliable and unacceptable. I hope they take care of these
essential things first before adding on too many new features.
Overall, though, I think the fact that we now even have a Moho 13 is a hopeful sign for the future of this software. The new developers seem to have the program figured out and they have some interesting ideas about where to take it.
Upgrade? I think it's worth it. The new features may not be perfect in this first release but they're welcome additions and they will get better.
Ok...back to work now.