Scaling lines.

[Albo]

I am trying to scale down a vector image built in Moho and have the lines scale in proportion.
I toggled the Scaled compensation button in the vector layer options.
Lines are still getting big as I scale down.

I am new to Moho but have worked with AE and Motion.
Software doesn't seem very intuitive or am I mistaken?

[Víctor Paredes]

There are two main ways to scale things in Moho.
One is to scale an entire layer (and everything that layer contains, including the points and line width) with the Transform Layer tool.
The other way is to scale the vector points using the Transform Points tool. This tool is not 'scaling' an object, but changing the position of each individual points you are editing in a proportional way.

Depending on what you want to do, each tool is useful.
If you want to make an entire object bigger, you can use the Transform Layer tool
Now, if you are animating a face and want to make the character mouth bigger to simulate it's wide open, you can use the Transform points tool.
This tool will scale the mouth, but the line width will remain consistent with the rest of the artwork.

I hope this makes sense.

[Greenlaw]

Moho is actually quite intuitive but it is very different from composting programs like Ae. For example, while both Moho and Ae use layers, Moho supports grouping layers like Photoshop but Ae does not. Ae does support precomps but in practice, that's a very different thing from groups...a precomp is more like importing a Reference project in Moho. There are different strengths and weaknesses with each program, and I suggest not expect Moho to work exactly like Ae. (That's a mistake I made back when I started learning Moho.)

Once you understand Moho's UI and workflow, the program works remarkably well with programs like AE. (Most of the Moho animations I create at my workplace are comped in Ae.)

Regarding scale compensation for strokes, there are a couple of ways to deal with this:

In the layer settings, enabling Scale Compensation will scale the lines as the layer or the parent layer scales up and down. This option is on by default. If you're not seeing this effect, be sure to click Apply before closing the window. (It should accept it even when you don't click Apply and close the window, but try this to be sure.)

When the option is disabled, the line weight remain constant as you scale the layers.

Note that enabling the option in a group settings does not affect the child layers. If you want to affect multiple layers, you need to change the settings to each layer. The easy way to do this is the select the layers you want to affect, and make sure Copy All General Settings To Other Selected Layers is enabled before clicking Apply.

The one issue with the above is that if your production has standard style guides for line weights, scaling the art may violate the style guides. In this case, you might consider using Custom Styles instead. This way, you can set or animate the line weight specifically to follow the style guide exactly.

To do this, set up a style that affects only the strokes weights and apply this to shapes using this stroke. Moho allows you to combine multiple styles and it's possible to set this feature so the line weights can be controlled globally though the Style window without affecting fills, line colors, etc.

Sometimes I'll use a custom style to compensate for extreme scaling caused by Scale Compensation. For example, if I scale a character down too much, the lines may become too faint. But if I had setup a custom style for my line weights, I can easily 'grow' all the lines at once. (In other words, compensate for the compensation.)

Hope this helps.

[Greenlaw]

One additional note: Scale Compensation is only in effect when the layer is being scaled. If you're scaling the shapes directly inside the layer, then Scale Compensation has no effect.

So during animation, you should be scaling the layer or the layer's group layer for this effect, not the shapes. If you need this to happen per shape independently of other shapes in that same layer, you should break that shape out into its own layer.

[Albo]

Help is appreciated.
I will start from scratch and see where that leads me following your comments.

And yes, AE not having groups is not very practical. I always find making pre-comps not a good solution.
I color code my sections but it is a workaround.

[Greenlaw]

I color code my sections but it is a workaround.

Yup! That's a good way to work in Ae. I do the same in Moho too. The nice thing in Moho is that you can color code a lot of different areas. For example: layers, groups, bones/dials, timeline markers...it's very useful for organizing your projects and rigs.

Sometimes I'll even make a non-rendering color overlay in the display to designate 'click zones' for Switch Layers that might not be obvious to the animator.