Moho Forum

First go at ASP after a lifetime of After Effects character work — FBF tools are really exciting, if not without its hiccups. Drawing is great with the Freehand tool, but there''s still quite a few times the line lags and then goes straight, frames take a while to flip through, and for some reason selecting points and especially deleting points with the Freehand Tool and take forever.

Not sure if it's my setup or user error, but the tools are so much fun to animate with I'm powering through.

Wow! That is sweet! (Nice reel too )

That's a very nice use of FBF! Thanks for sharing it.

Thanks for taking a look — it's really been fun exploring the tools in ASP. Do you guys run into lag or delays when you're deleting points with the Freehand Tool? Or have you had the Freehand tool slow down and pause for a bit, only to end up with a straight line instead of your stroke?

I'm not seeing much a lag here--but then again, most of my ASP FBF use up to now has been simpler and with far fewer frames than what you just did.

If you're not using Merge Strokes, you should. What this does it puts all the strokes into a single shape, which can really help with performance.

As for the accuracy of the Freehand tool, it's much better these days in ASP 11 but, yeah, it can still use improvement. About the only thing you can do for now is to turn off Auto-weld and turn down Smoothing to the second or third notch. This will increase the point count but it will also make the pen stroke more stable. For tight details, you can go down to the first notch but you'll probably want to simplify these strokes after you draw them.

I'm sure the devs are working on improving the drawing tools. FBF is a fairly new feature to ASP and they've already improved it greatly during this current release cycle.

Excellent animation and drawing skills!

Hey great to see this Odernod.
There are a few tricks I find to make FBF smoother.
First is to make sure you have merge shapes on.
Take weld points off (until you get to clean up and then only when you need it)
The other is gpu acceleration on.
Too many onion skins can slow stuff down too.

Do you have Moho 12 yet?
You will love that for freehand, especially during cleanup.
Do keeps persisting with it and make any suggestions to the 'help shape the future' topic...
Freehand and FBF is getting better and better all the time.

Yes, Chucky is right: the Freehand tool is significanty better in Moho 12! The biggest improvements are that in Moho, the tool draws peaks properly and it's much smarter about point optimization. Here's a comparison, quickly sketched in each program with minimal cleanup:



The Moho version obviously has fewer points and they're more intelligently placed. Note especially the corner areas.

Also, although it doesn't look like it, I had pen pressure enabled in both programs.

There are a few 'glitchy' things that can occur but I know the developers are continuing to improve the drawing and freehand tools as I write this. For the most part, Moho 12's Freehand tool is far more usable now than it's ever been.