I've been using the tool since back when it was Moho and recently upgraded to 9. I've used both smart bones and blend morphs and I know that that they both have their own interfaces (bone controllers vs morph panel) and that smart bones only works on a few things like points. But in the end, they seem pretty similar so I'm wondering about the pros and cons of each or at least maybe any other differences that I may be missing (i'm not looking to see which is "better" ).
To me, the advantage of Blend Morph is that it can cover all the animated channels. Smart bones only covers Point movement, width and curvature.
Now, the main disadvantage of Blend Morph is they created keys for all the affected channels on all the affected layers, so editing an already made animation can be a nightmare. Using Smart bones all the animation is contained in the bone layer, so all the process of animation and tweak is extremely fast.
Anyway, I used to use blend morph a lot, all my rigs contained at least one Blend morph action, but to me, with the arrival of Smart bones, Blend Morph feels "obsolete" for most of the tasks.
Thinking in the future, I think for Blend Morph it would be cool if it would have its own channel, so we wouldn't have to go to every layer and channel to edit or erase the animation. For Smart Bones, it would be great if it could control any animated channel.
For me, both features can be very similar and my prediction is there will be no difference in the future, you gonna have "smart bones" using bones or sliders.
A major difference Selgin doesn't mention is that smart bone actions are multi frame actions. This adds a fourth dimension to them - time (sort of). If you imagine a smart bone being like a jog shuttle on a video where rotation forwards or reverses the action at the speed of the rotation, but it has a finite beginning and end, a defined destination for the points. This makes it ideal for very complex actions that require more than a linear transform ationfrom A to B.
Blend morphs have their uses, for a start they support all channels normal actions do and allow for mixing at levels higher than the original destination pose, but as Selgin says, the complexity of editing and combining them is a serious flaw.
Being able to assign a blend morph action to a bone (what I like to call a 'dumb bone') would result in their instant increase in usefulness as all actions will be controlled on that bones rotation channel without any key frame baking on many channels. It would bridge the wait for more channel support in morph dials.
selgin wrote:
Thinking in the future, I think for Blend Morph it would be cool if it would have its own channel, so we wouldn't have to go to every layer and channel to edit or erase the animation. For Smart Bones, it would be great if it could control any animated channel.
For me, both features can be very similar and my prediction is there will be no difference in the future, you gonna have "smart bones" using bones or sliders.
I totally agree. Smart bones wins hands down for me at the moment for usability even in it's initial state. Having your key frames in one place - on the bone, make animation much easier. Blend morphs and actions where your key the sub layers are a real pain to tweak any animation and when don't you want to do that?
Blend morphs and actions getting their own channel or top level movable 'action' would certainly get my vote.
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