Moho Pro 12 getting slow on much polygons?

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Franky1966
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Moho Pro 12 getting slow on much polygons?

Post by Franky1966 »

Hello there,

I'm Frank, from the Netherlands (Europe, so pardon my English sometimes) and new here.
I just started to discover Moho Pro 12 and learning fast cause I have some payed jobs to handle with the program.

Right now I'm on the job of making a whiteboardanimation with Moho. I doing this in a Frame-by-frame setting. Starting the illustration on frame 1 with the Freehandtool making an outline for the illustration, drawing just a little bit. Then copying the lines just drawn, creating a new frame (2 steps in forward) paste the outlines and draw a little more, etc. etc.

After some 20 steps I starting a new FBF-leayer underneath and colouring the outlines inside with the blobbrush to build up an whitebaord effct. Also some 20 steps. Very nice build up effect if I may say so.

Then I keep on drawing a new illustration with oulines in the background of this animation, some 40 steps. Dito with the colouringsteps (50 steps).

Now, I've arrived around frame 260 the program acts extremely slow. I get the spinning beach(wait)ball a lot and it means every time I want to do something, I have to wait 10 tot 20 seconds. That's becomes irritating.

I suspecting the overload of polygons created by the blob brush as prime suspect of this behavior. It has created a zillion of points in the vectorshapes. The reduce points tool also doesn't do much.

So, now I thinking of splitting the project in three or four sections to reduce the overload in total.
Unless someone has a great solution to save the project, cause it was a lot of work so far. Maybe I started this project the hard way and is there a much easier way to tackle this.
You can watch some of the animation here: [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqbR78H ... e=youtu.be[/youtube]

I'm working on a late 2012 iMac, 8 Gb ram. Maybe a ram expansion helps?
Hope to hear some solutions.
Thanks in advance.

Frank
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Greenlaw
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Re: Moho Pro 12 getting slow on much polygons?

Post by Greenlaw »

It sounds like you're using Moho primarily as a frame-by-frame program. Unfortunately, even though Moho has FBF capabilities, this type of animation is not one of its strengths. The main reason to use Moho is for its powerful puppet rigging and puppet animation tools.

I've used Moho's FBF tools to create 'bridge' sequences or 'in-between poses that my rigs cannot achieve (for example, a 3/4 view somersault or extreme perspective angle) or to create short effects sequences like splashes, spraying sweat, smoke, fire, etc. Usually these sequences are only a few frames long and rendered on two's or more. Moho's FBF tools work great for that but I can't imagine using Moho for FBF sequences running hundreds of frames. There are better tools available for animating long FBF sequences, even free ones.

I would recommend using another program designed for FBF to render the sequence. If the sequence needs to 'interact' with a Moho puppet, you can import the sequence to Moho and animate the puppet to the FBF sequence, or you can import a Moho sequence to the FBF program. Or you can combine the sequences in a compositing program like After Effects.

I've used Harmony with Moho this way at work, and TVPaint with Moho at home. To do this, render to a PNG sequence from the program and load this as an image sequence layer in Moho. For footage meant to be used purely as 'reference' to animate to, I like use JPEG because it streams faster over my slow-ish network at home and helps Moho's responsiveness. But of course I switch to PNG for the final renders.

If you're looking for a free FBF program, I like Krita. However, for me one downside with Krita is that it cannot display audio wave forms in its timeline. Otherwise, Krita's FBF tools work reasonably well. You might also look into OpenToonz. I haven't used OpenToonz yet but it's free and seems very robust. You might want to look at some YouTube videos about these programs to see what might be right for your needs, and then download the program to try it out.

I hope this helps.
Franky1966
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Re: Moho Pro 12 getting slow on much polygons?

Post by Franky1966 »

Thank you for taking some time Greenlaw.
Thanks for your suggestions on some FBF-programs but I definitively wanted to do this in Moho; it took me some learning curve and I wanted to test it in real life. And I paid for it! :D And sometimes you make mistakes and you learn from it. In addition to that, a new program will also take some learning(time). Time that wasn't available to me in this situation.

But I think I solved it in the way I already suggested: cut it into parts. It's not ideal but it's workable. The computer runs smooth now! :P
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Greenlaw
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Re: Moho Pro 12 getting slow on much polygons?

Post by Greenlaw »

That's cool.

And, I agree, even if what you have is a single continuous shot, sometimes it makes sense to break out parts into multiple segments and edit or comp it together in post.

The HLF titles animation on my vimeo channel has a good Moho example in the shot that travels from a street view with the 'heart people' to the inside of the apartment with Dr. X. I split that into two separate projects because having multiple sets and characters, plus some dynamics, was too much to handle for the tiny laptop I was using at the time. (The edit comes during the camera move towards the window, when it's least noticeable.)

This can true with other animation programs too, on much bigger projects. Years ago, I worked on a 'Call Of Duty' TV commercial which had to look like one continuous POV shot, but we actually broke it out into about 80 separate animated 'scenes', which all had to be composited in post. This was done for many reasons but one big reason was that our computers at the time simply could not handle a scene this big and complex all at once.
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