Is surgery with imported references not good practice?

[EricTheFish]

I'm looking for some guidance here with importing MOHO objects as references.

MOHO has been very reliable until recently when it started to just randomly quit to desktop and vanish. It was one particular file that suffered frequent crashes so I decided to dissect it and look for anomalies.

I found some masked layers in a bone group behaving oddly, such that when selecting a group layer, the bone tools disappeared so you couldn't bind layers or points. Creating new group layers and moving the child layers across corrected the problem, so it looks like the group layers were somehow corrupted.

The "corrupted" layers in question were initially imported from another file as temporary references, but I later decided to break the references on a few selected layers and duplicate them for use in the current file. This is when MOHO became unstable, so I'm now wondering if doing this should be avoided? Once I deleted the reference layers and replaced the corrupted groups, MOHO has been reliable again.

Note: the file used for import has never crashed, so I don't believe it is suspicious, I think this is more to do with the partial breaking of reference layers in bone groups.

Just because software lets you do things doesn't mean you should!

[slowtiger]

For temporary reference I would always use bitmaps. Render that thing from Moho, and import it where needed.

[synthsin75]

Referenced layers, not as reference, Slow.

I've seen reports of files behaving badly until some reference layers are recreated, but I've not run into the problem myself.

[Daxel]

I've had issues with reference layers getting corrupted.

In my case I noticed that Moho was slower than ever, crashed much more frecuently, and the files were way bigger. If animation_1.moho was 300kb, animation_2 could be 1600kb, for example. Eliminating layers one by one I discovered that the problem was solved eliminating a reference layer, that at least in my cases was always a broken reference. It usually happened when I was designing a rig that used references but I was still making a lot of changes in the original vector drawing, breaking the references in a lot of ways.

The solution was simply deleting and creating the reference again. The only annoyance is that sometimes I forgot the changes that that particular reference had to have, so I try to document it, like "this ref is same as original but without fill".

I always try to recomend looking for those corrupted references when people have problems with performance or crashes, and to be honest I'm surprised that so far nobody has ever confirmed having seen those corrupted references, only you and me.

Which version are you using? I haven't worked with many refs since I use M13 so I haven't seen corrupted refs but I guess that the bug is still there.

Referenced layers, not as reference, Slow.

Haha that's a classic for me. I still don't know how to prefix the layers, using REF_ is sometimes confusing.

[Greenlaw]

I've had issues with reference layers getting corrupted.

I have to confess I haven't used reference layers in a while, probably not since 13.0 or 12.5. I'll look into that here and see if they're behaving for me in 13.5.2.

Haha that's a classic for me. I still don't know how to prefix the layers, using REF_ is sometimes confusing.

I do something that and it really helps keep me from editing the wrong layer (original or reference.) The little 'swoosh arrow' just doesn't stand out enough for me. Additionally, I may use a color code to alert me, like red for "don't touch this!"*

Come to think of it, I should be using synthsin75's recently updated Lock Layer script for this.

*When I'm setting up a rig for another animator to work with, I may even name the layer "DON'T TOUCH ME!" They usually listen.

[Daxel]

I have to confess I haven't used reference layers in a while, probably not since 13.0 or 12.5. I'll look into that here and see if they're behaving for me in 13.5.2.

Me neither. I had corrupted references on 12.5 (when I started using Moho) but haven't been using them that much lately so I'm not sure if they still get corrupted on M 13.5 but they probably do.

*When I'm setting up a rig for another animator to work with, I may even name the layer "DON'T TOUCH ME!" They usually listen.

Hahaha well I'm a pretty happy heavy user of the display layer navigation system now that you can block layers from being selected with the alt-right click shortcut. I only miss a modified alt-right click to go to the parent bone layer.

[EricTheFish]

Which version are you using?

Sorry, I thought I put this in the original post. I'm using Win10 Pro with v13.5.2.

After this, if I want to steal things from another file, I copy that file and strip it down to just what I need, then import that version. Not had any further stability issues.

I don't get an Alt-Right-Click option to prevent layer selection. Is this a Mac thing?

Thanks all for the good advice!

[Daxel]

I don't get an Alt-Right-Click option to prevent layer selection. Is this a Mac thing?

You can alt-right click on any visible drawing on the display to select its layer. The new feature with this last version is that on layer settings you can check the option "ignore by layer selector", that is very useful to avoid selecting a reference layer when you wanted to select the original, something very annoying because you may not notice and introduce keyframes on the wrong layer.

[EricTheFish]

Ah! thanks Daxel... understood! Just checked it out, very useful.