Moho Forum

Hello, I'm just curious if the Moho developers are planning on incorporating bitmap drawing tools into a future update?

This would be a huge benefit for frame by frame sketching, and seems like a natural next step in Moho's direction of making things feel more painterly and hand-drawn.

Drawing sketches or a rough pass of frame by frame animation with the vector based free hand tool is a bit laggy and doesn't feel as smooth and natural as other bitmap based animation software.

Just curious. You guys are doing awesome stuff!

I've been wondering the same thing. It would be great to at least have a bitmap pencil for sketching and FBF.

I may be mistaking, but I think that the bitmap drawing tools were giving lots of trouble, so they took them out, so maybe a live link between Photoshop/Krita could be a good compromise !!!

The Paint Tools in Moho 13 were developed by a completely different team at Smith Micro. It felt very rushed, had incomplete features, and it simply didn't work very well.

When Lost Marble bought back Moho, the program was re-booted using their Moho 12.5 code because Smith Micro's Moho 13.0 code had too many problems, the flawed Paint Tools being one of the less serious ones. That was a wise decision because the latest Moho 14 is as solid as 12.5 was, and it's the best and most powerful version of Moho yet. The reboot meant we lost some Moho 13.0 features, but I can't think of any that worked well enough to miss it.

This is my opinion, of course, but I don't doubt the Lost Marble team has considered developing their own version of 'Paint Tools' for a future Moho, and will take their time to do it right.

PS. In fairness to the SM Moho 13.0 team, they did get Interpolate Sub-layers to work with nested group layers, but that happened at the tail end of 12.5. I'm glad we still have this feature in Moho 14.

I meant to add that I agree with GCharb: When I need to paint bitmap images for stills or FBF, I use an external program. The latest PSD support in Moho is excellent, much better than in previous versions of Moho, and Moho (usually) updates any changes I make in the paint program when I press Ctrl-S. Moho also supports image sequences, so when I use an external program for FBF, I can import animations from them.

I've used Photoshop, Krita, Adobe Animate, TV Paint, ToonSquid, Procreate, and Harmony to create bitmap FBF, and they all work well with Moho. If cost is an issue, check out Krita; it's free, and its paint tools are very good. (My only gripe: it supports audio imports but can't display waveforms...very annoying.)

These days, I mainly use Moho to create FBF for Moho, which works well for me. Admittedly, my FBF animations are fairly simple, and Moho's FBF workflow is limited compared to a dedicated FBF program. However, when I need to create more complicated FBF elements or sequences, I can always switch to a dedicated FBF program and bring these FBF bits into Moho or a compositing program to merge them with my Moho footage.

As for FBF performance in Moho, I try to avoid vector drawing techniques that generate too many points. These techniques are fine for a single image that will be animated using bones, but if hundreds of unique frames are drawn this way, it can be a bit much for creating and editing FBF animation in any program.

I'd love to see painting tools in Moho, too, and if they worked well, I'd certainly use them. But the lack of painting tools in Moho hasn't slowed me down.

I’m hoping so! I wouldn’t use it for drawing, but mainly for filling. When bitmap comes back, I really hope it can detect vector lines like CSP/Toon Boom and use them as fill references. The current fill tool has improved, but it still struggles with frame-by-frame hair motion and some clothing animations. I mostly work in an anime style, and Moho doesn’t always work well for that in certain cases.

I am not a fan of the fill bucket tool TBH, as it can give very unpredictable results, it can even create entirely new shapes when used on more complex shapes, I prefer the Draw Shape(U)/Create Shape(ENTER) Tools workflow, as the results are way more predictable IMHO !!!

Lostmarble video showing how to use the fill tools, which is part of the "Learning Moho from beginner to expert" full course.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv9szTh ... -exwJ3UJ3T