Moho Animation Forum

Im copying my animated character, shifting it to the side, then setting the layer to be colored transparent grey in layer properties. This gives me a great shadow that acts the same as the animated character, but how can I make the shadow "flicker" as if it were being created with candlelight?

You could try a noisy keyframe to the shadow layer opacity or the fill opacity or color. Adjust or fiddle with the settings to get the effect you want.

Ah thanks, that's helpful. I set it to use layer translation and layer scaling, the only thing is the noise it too much, even at the lowest setting. Amplitude is 0.10, scale is 0.50, which are default. If I reduce the scale, the amplitude goes to 0, and I get no effect. I would rather not do it by hand but that may be necessary. Any advice?

(also, how to I get Youtube to display right? I forgot. Here is where I at right now with the effect:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYO0A6oP4EM

Well, here is a quick manual cersion, much better I think, but more work obviously. I wish that noisy interpolation could be way more subtle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBNBoclI064

Noisy interpolation can be a bit tricky to figure out, but you can get exactly what you want with the right numbers. Took me a bit of time to figure out exactly what was going on.

Amplitude: How much it moves
Scale: How long it takes or the "speed" of the change in amplitude.

Amplitude controls how much or how far the item moves or changes. A larger value moves more, a lower value less.
Scale is how "fast" the change takes place. The speed of the "jitter". A higher value is slower, a lower value is faster.

Play with these values and even change them over time by adding additional noisy keys later in the timeline with different settings.

To get a better "flickering" effect I would add noise to the opacity and maybe the brightness of the light source. Part of the flicker is the change in brightness of the light source.

If you have the EXACT same settings for a noisy keyframe it will match up. If you have two different layers with a noisy keyframe and the settings are the same values they will jitter in sync with each other. You could match up opacity and light brightness with the same noisy value so they match.

But the problem is I can't get the settings low enough. At the lowest they jitter too much.

You can go as low as you need. The numbers can be decimal values well below 0 well above 1 if needed.

Amplitude: 0.0010
Scale: 25

Those values... there is barely any noticeable movement at all.
The Amplitude value is so small the movement is subtle.
The scale of 25 spaces out the movement so much that you barely see it.

The values are limitless. Find the values that work for you by experimenting.

heyvern wrote:You can go as low as you need. The numbers can be decimal values well below 0 well above 1 if needed.

Amplitude: 0.0010
Scale: 25

Unfortunately that isn't what is happening on my system, as soon as I change amplitude and click into the Scale box, amplitude changes to zero.

I'm on Windows 8.1 64 bit version if that matters. To make sure it isn't the file I created a new file with a circle on the default layer with the same behavior.

What version of Anime Studio?

10.1, just checked today for an update too.

An update on my issue: i can only enter whole numbers, no decimal except what is populated by default, as soon as I attempt to change it to anything else.

I tried again on my other system, same version, same behavior. It is Win 7.

Hmm...

Don't know what's going on. Sounds strange. I suppose it's some kind of bug. It might be a keyboard issue? Numloc? Just guessing. You could try pasting values in from another application.

I just tried pasting, nope, doesn't help. I tried 9.5 and can set any value. Are you running 10.1? Since it is constant across two machines, and also I tested 32 bit mode, no dice, I think it must be a bug. Manually setting the shadow looks like my best option, which incidentally does give me a more predictable result. I never tried using noisy interpolation before btw.
Oh, num lock also wasn't it.

that's a known issue with noisy keyframes:

here's a temp fix ...

http://lostmarble.com/misc/Noisy%20Keys.zip

No problems here but I use Mac.