Placing things on frame 0

[Nicohk92]

Hey guys,

Something that always bothered me, but maybe I'm missing something, is how to place things on frame 0.

Take for example the DK Firework Particle effects in the library.

At frame 0, everything is just a point at launching position. But I need to correctly scale and position the fireworks at the moment they explode, which is further down the timeline.

For that, I have to go where they explode, make the adjustments on the layers, which creates new keyframes, copy those keyframes to frame 0 and then delete the extra keyframes that were just created.

I'm sure there must be a better way no?

[Greenlaw]

You could try pre-rolling the simulation, that is sliding the layer into the negative frame region using Sequencer. This is the quick and easy solution, but the downside is that Moho doesn't allow you to look at what's going on in the negative frame region. I would do this only for simple setups.

For more complex setups, I prefer to offset my render region. So instead of beginning my render region at frame 1, I set it to begin at frame 101 onward. This allows me to use the visible region of 001-100 to start animations like particles, dynamics, or reference layer offsets, ahead of my rendering, and keeps the frame numbering easier to follow when the footage is brought into a compositing program or video editor.

Hope this helps.

[Nicohk92]

Not a silver bullet but some good tips nonetheless. Thank you!

[Greenlaw]

Yeah, I agree, but these are the same tricks I use in other 2D and 3D animation programs and compositing programs, so it's not just a Moho issue.

That said, one feature in Trapcode Particular for Ae that I like is the ability to set the 'pre-roll' for a simulation from within the tool's control panel. It would be cool to see this added to Moho's Particle controls in the future.

Or it might be even better/easier if we could simply offset the timeline to the right to see and edit what's going on before frame 0. I wish this was an option that advanced users can enable from Preferences.

[Daxel]

I think I remember seeing a script that did that, copying the keyframes to the frame 0 and delete them. I think it was one of the MYND tools and it stopped working on some Moho version but I'm not sure. I liked the idea, it's handy for this cases.