Moho Forum

In the old days when animators wanted to avoid doing too much animation they would sometimes make a cross-dissolve between two frames (for instance, if you had a very detailed character's head turning and you didn't want to draw all the inbetweens, you would cross-dissolve between a drawing of the head in the first position, and a drawing of the head in the second position).

This could be useful in Moho. It makes for a nice, dreamlike effect. Simply adapt the Motion Blur feature so that frame 1 begins to fade out while at the same time frame 2 begins to fade in. AfterEffects has a feature called "Frame Blending" which does pretty much the same thing. If you bring in a video file and stretch it out in time you can have the frames automatically lap dissolve into each other.

In Moho this should probably be a frame interpolation thing, or maybe a layer property that can be turned on and off (like motion blur). In addition, it should be an option in switch layers.

This isn't a major priority for me, just something I think would be neat and not too difficult to add.

absolutely right

You can do this right now. Use the "Fade" script.

1. Create your two layers.
2. Make one of them invisible by turning its Visible checkbox to off in the Layer Settings dialog.
3. Go to the frame where you want the cross-disolve to start.
4. Select the layer you want to fade out.
5. Use the Scripts->Visibility->Fade menu command. Set the duration to whatever you want, and you may want to set the blur radius to 0.
6. Select the layer you want to fade in.
7. Use the Scripts->Visibility->Fade menu command again, but be sure to use the "fade in" option.

I described it with a lot of steps, but it's really quite simple - try it!

thx LM

This sounds like a cool idea. Does anyone have a head drawn in a few positions and can post a quick .mov? I'm at work and don't get to 'play' again until Friday (grumble grumble).

I can see how the fade script would work with two different layers, but what if you wanted the effect applied to two keyframes within the same layer? i.e. you have a character take a step across the screen, but instead of inbetweening the motion you want to cross-fade between keyframes. I guess you would have to duplicate the layer. At first I thought you would have to duplicate it many times to get cross-dissolves between many frames, but now I realize you would only have to do it once (two copies) and then cross dissolve A>B, followed by B>A, then again A>B and so on. You would have to do all your animation first so the two layers moved identically in every way.

It might still be a nice little feature to add if there was time. Not something for the front burner, certainly.