Moho Forum

I'm looking for 'any' suggestion that would help me get the effect I'm after. I'm rusty because I've away for so long but this is a project that I 'really' want to do.
You can see in the smartbone cycle animation that the radial gradient glitches. It looks like I can't use onion skins to copy a radial gradient. I'm hoping there are, at least, some keyboard shortcuts that I can use to flip quickly from the first frame to the last frame. I'm using version 9.5.
I 'know' I can use layers or shapes to create a 'spherical' effect.
If the advice, in this case, is to abandon animated gradients I'll move on to creating the spherical effect with layers and shapes. My thanks for any tips.

Just looks like the start and end of the cycle aren't matched. Not sure what you mean by using onionskin, but you should be able to copy/paste the first keyframe to the end.
Hard to tell exactly what else might be going on from just the video.

...but you should be able to copy/paste the first keyframe to the end.
Hard to tell exactly what else might be going on from just the video.

Thank you. At least now I know that I'm not banging my head against a wall.
I didn't say what the project was because it's far from finished. The large oval shape will be a DIY 'turbine' rotated 45 degrees so that the viewer can see the hollow inside the 'cups' that catch the steam to rotate the 'turbine'.

I'd go for a simple approach: do a circle with the gradient and import it as bitmap (masked in the blade), so I can control it's placement very exactly.

slowtiger wrote: ↑Mon Feb 07, 2022 10:13 am I'd go for a simple approach: do a circle with the gradient and import it as bitmap (masked in the blade), so I can control it's placement very exactly.

Excellent idea. I prefer simplicity. I've already started over with a new file. Point translation was a second source of problems. I also want the spherical shape of the blades to remain stable so I decided to switch to layer translation.
I'm working on one bug at a time. I want the light to come from the same direction. After that I'll work on scaling the blades to give a sense of perspective.

Re scaling for perspective: I'm a big fan of guide layers. In this case I'd create a layer with 12 circles in a circle (in a new project), then tilt that layer and play with camera distance and lens angle until I get the perspective I want. Render this, import as image under the turbine, and adjust the blade sizes accordingly.

+1 for the guide layer suggestions...I make guide layers all the time, really speeds up the rigging and animation processes. The suggestion for using an image in place of a grad effect is good too if you're not planning extreme scaling or zooming during animation.

I'm still hoping to see shift-key constrain added for the Gradient and Image Texture Effect widget. It's a pain trying to precisely align the widget for Smart Bone animations, especially in a full body turn. Setting up the wraparound textures in my Puss rig is a good example. This 'simple' setup for the torso took longer than it should have because I didn't have shift-constrain available and had to make a lot of extra trial and error animation renders to check the alignment. (Using a drawn guides layer helps in these situations but with no snapping available, the solution is limited.)

TBH, I'd like to see the effects system reworked in a future version of Moho to make the features more directly interactive with more precise controls.

That's the inherent problem of the vector animation aesthetics: if the lines are so clean and the movement so smooth, you'd expect the same from gradients and everything. Right now I have the job to color something in TVPaint, tedious work, and they want shadows and gradients. I do them by hand, with airbrush, as exact as I can, but of course they always boil a little bit. In this case they want exactly this effect. In fast movements nobody notices, it's only visible in slow movements.

slowtiger wrote: ↑Mon Feb 07, 2022 5:19 pm Re scaling for perspective: I'm a big fan of guide layers. In this case I'd create a layer with 12 circles in a circle (in a new project), then tilt that layer and play with camera distance and lens angle until I get the perspective I want. Render this, import as image under the turbine, and adjust the blade sizes accordingly.

You drew a diagram of a guide layer for me and explained how to use it back when I was a beginner. That taught me how to keep the animated part of a scene properly scaled to the vanishing point in the scene. Regarding what you just wrote, I decided from this point on, to place helpful bits of information like this in a folder so I can refer to them. Thank you.

*blush*
"And when I go, I will go with the warm feeling that somewhere, on someone's computer, there will still be a folder holding my wisdom for futuere generations ..."
Sounds like a last act scene in some cheesy animated feature ... it's not only kung fu moves in a secret scroll.

slowtiger wrote: ↑Tue Feb 08, 2022 10:28 am "And when I go, I will go with the warm feeling that somewhere, on someone's computer, there will still be a folder holding my wisdom for futuere generations ..."

It was key to understanding animation. It is as important as learning a walk cycle. Professional animators understand 'motion'.

I to have had this glitch. My final credits on my name have a scrolling linear gradient; just a thin white line in the middle of a color ( which I saved s a style so I could change the color easily) It scrolls up inside of a text layer. When it repeats the cycle I see the glitch. I was just thinking of revisiting this maybe making the middle color thinner when I saw this post.

The simplest and safest way is:
[Each gradient graphic has a separate layer] + layer binding.

good luck