Moho Forum

I don't know if this one's been given much thought?

Draw 2 lines on different frames, and morph between them.
(Yes I know Toon Boom does it.)

But I'm interested in discussion about how might it be implemented in AS?
So as I understand it there are 2 key issues to be overcome initially.
- getting around the number of points issue: that they might be different
- point IDs on the two different lines

For the first, could you take the number of points in each line,
work out a common denominator, and then extrapolate new lines
with equal numbers of points? Then just point motion key between,
and we could hand tweak tweens if needed (with scalable area of effect
magnet tool?)

And the second issue, could there be a way worked out so that the point IDs are resolved?
I know it was an issue with Genete's 3d rig where you needed to duplicate the layer so that you had the same point IDs -
if you extrapolate the first line into a higher number of points, could you assign the point IDs then?
Like an instance layer, which then morphs to the 2nd line instance which has the same number of points?

I don't know anything about scripting and so can't put my money where
my mouth is, but to me it seems worth talking about.

With motion tracking we have a powerful new animation toolset,
if we could crack this other nut of hand drawn keys with morphs
between them, that would be pretty cool.

Am I dreaming?

It's alright, Madrobot, I'm not stalking you. It just seems that we think along the same lines.

I would think that morphing one line to another with a different number of points would be fairly straight forward. Macton or Fazek, I forget which, wrote a tool called ReplaceLine which shaped an existing line to a brush stroke. All you would need to do is allow the "brush stroke" to be generated come from another line in a different layer and, voila! In my opinion, the hard bit would be apply this technique to two arbitrary hand-drawn frames. You would have to somehow map each line in one frame to a line in the other frame, and what if you had more lines in one frame than the other? Perhaps if the mapping could be done manually by shape-naming or something, you could use this approach. Otherwise, it would be time to hit the white papers on 2D vector morphing.

with fazek replace line tool you can re-draw a line in time, drawing as you do with freehand tool. But the line will maintain always the same number of points. If you have a tablet, you can make that the line width change too.

PD: Fazek's tools, I think, won't work with AS 6. We urgently need a brave scripter that actualize them

Wow. Thanks Rudiger, stalk away!

ReplaceLine sounds interesting, I'll have to look into that.

OK, shape naming then - what if when you activated the
"draw morphs" tool, the assumption is that the line you are
drawing is the same shape, until you hit a key which toggles
it over to start a new shape.

So if I keep drawing on the same frame, I replace the line,
but when I draw then on another frame, it's the same line,
different morph. Then hit a key, cycles up to next new line.

(Because getting in and labelling by hand would be fiddly.)

Yeah, something like that would probably work, although it might be a bit awkward cycling through the lines while you are drawing the next frame. Highlighting the line on the onion skin view would facilitate this nicely, but I'm pretty sure it's not scriptable.

Whoah
Running a search on Fazek's ReplaceLine I stumbled across Tweenmaker discussion.

Looks interesting. Apparently some trouble with fills and other issues but it's cheap and you could bring the lines in and then do the fills...

...anybody using tweenmaker or know much about where it's at?
Discussion on it is old, as are news updates on the site.

(Imagine tweenmaker in AS!)

madrobot wrote:Whoah
Running a search on Fazek's ReplaceLine I stumbled across Tweenmaker discussion.

Looks interesting. Apparently some trouble with fills and other issues but it's cheap and you could bring the lines in and then do the fills...

...anybody using tweenmaker or know much about where it's at?
Discussion on it is old, as are news updates on the site.

(Imagine tweenmaker in AS!)

Hi Mandrabot,

I purchased Tweenmaker ages ago. While it had great promise, it seems the product has been neglected - it hasnt been updated for good while now!!

Anyway, try the free student edition which, is (DUH) free with some restrictions.

http://www.elecorn.com/tweenmaker/download.html

and the forum seems to be offline now, though the developer looks like he is putting his energy into another product of his called Caster.

Pat

Can't actions do what you're thinking of.

1. Draw a line.
2. Copy the layer and rename it,
3. Manipulate the points of the LINE of the copy layer to the new shape.
4.Place the vector layers in a switch layer.

Now the points in the different layers can be morphed.

F.M. yep you're probably right
By the time you've draw your poses and probably scanned them in,
you might as well do things that way.

I just thought it was worth talking about.