I'm Blackwing and new to the forum. I'm a newbie to animation, took my first steps in Moho Pro. First tries I did in frame-by-frame and tried now the regular Vector-Animation by default.
Playing around with a ball to get familiar with the program something strange happened. I stretched my ball in height and moved and Moho stretched the form sideways. I'm sure this can be a helpful tool, but can I turn it someway off?
If you want to take a look, I loaded it up to YouTube:
First, welcome aboard! Moho is a fun program, and it's easy to use and quite powerful once you master the workflow. Frame-By-Frame is one of Moho's features but it's not this program's main focus or strong point (at least, not yet.) Moho's true strength comes in its puppet rigging and animation tools. In this area, Moho's vector drawing tools, bones and Smart Bone Actions are probably the most useful things to learn, followed by mesh warping. Be sure to read through the manual or at least get familiar with the features. You can always go back to it later and read the details when you need it.
Second, the video you posted is set for private viewing only so nobody here can see it.
Third, based on what you wrote, I can only guess what may be going on but here a few ideas you can check for.
1. If I can assume your transforming a layer, Moho keyframes scale and position in separate channels. Is it possible that you have different scale keyframes? In any case, moving the layer should not change the scale.
Also keep in mind that when the layer's origin is offset from the content, the transform tool can have a very different effect on artwork, so make sure you draw around that origin, or move your drawing to the origin, or move the origin to the drawing. Exactly where depends on how you intend to transform the drawing, so you may want to experiment with this.
Also note that, while you cannot animate the origin, you can nest the artwork in multiple groups and give each group a different origin point. So, depending on how you set this up, you can make the ball stretch on its center by stretching the layer, and then squash the ball where it contact's the ground by transforming a parent group layer with the origin set on the ground.
2. Depending on where you click and drag on the Layer Transform widget, Moho will switch modes. For example, when you click and drag on a corner, Moho scales proportionately, and clicking/dragging on a side will scale it in that direction. (Additionally, inside the border will rotate the layer, and anywhere else will move it.)
BTW, here's more cool option for the widget: Hold down Shift while scaling with 'squash and stretch' the layer, making it appear to preserve its volume.
3. If you're animating the drawing inside a vector layer and not the layer itself, it can get more complicated because now you're keyframing individual points in the drawing. Unless you have a good reason to do this (i.e., you want animate the ball as an irregular shape,) I would avoid this and use layer transform or bones to scale the shape.
4. Alternatively, you can use bones to squash and stretch the ball. Binding a ball to a bone or multiple bones is another good way to animate when you have some special requirements for the animation. This can get pretty advanced, so I'd stick with Layer animation for now when animating a ball.
Hope this helps and that this isn't too much info. Just wanted to show Moho is quite flexible so when asking questions, you'll need to be specific because there may be many answers. Posting the video is a good idea (when it's not set to private,) and posting screen caps or GIFs works well too.
Good luck!
Last edited by Greenlaw on Fri Nov 05, 2021 6:01 pm, edited 2 times in total.
thank you so much for your fast reply and interesting explanations.
I changed the settings for the YT-Video.
Yes, this was at first sight a lot of stuff and I see I have to complete the whole tutorial section at first, I did only the first Tutorial-section, the Quick-Start.
As I changed the form of the ball I selected all it's points, used the transform points-tool and dragged it with Shift upwards. Next I moved it (also with SHIFT) along the way.
Don't know if this is specific enough...I'll go to end the whole tutorial at first to be able to talk about the same things as you do
Thanks in every way by now!
I tried a similar test and figured out, that the layer behaves correct as long as I don't change the figure, when I modify the shape by simply transforming points it changes the behavior in the whole animation...
I have found a possibility to move it without distortion: I move the whole layer, so the form stays in shape!
Here a precise description what I did:
New
Reset all Tools
On frame 0:
Drawing shape (oval)
using SHIFT for drawing a circle
positioned it far left
dragged to frame 6 and moved my circle with SHIFT out of the window on the right
on frame 7 I drag my circle with all 4 points activated and with pressed SHIFT in a 0-form
on frame 12 I dragged my long shape to the other side of the window
The easiest fix is to change your keyframes to linear interpolation or use layer translation for the horizontal motion. This happens because smooth interpolation tries to smooth the motion curve between both the last and the next keyframe.
If you really need the smooth interpolation for point motion, you can isolate the smooth motion curves. To do this you just need two identical keyframes where the circle stops moving and two identical keyframes where the oval starts moving. So at frame zero the circle starts moving, frame 7 it stops, frame eight is a copy of frame 7, frame 8 the circle is stretched into an oval, frame 9 a copy of frame eight, and frame 12 the oval is moved back.
You're right. This is the solution.
I don't understand it in whole why this works in this way, I think it's the lack of knowledge and experience to get it, but it fascinates me, it will come with time.
Thank you so much, synthsin.
