alanthebox wrote: ↑Thu Jun 20, 2019 10:40 pm...I'm curious about the bitmap drawing tools. Would creating bitmap graphics lead to better overall performance?
I would imagine that, for many people, drawing an element with bitmap painting can be a lot quicker than drawing them with Moho's vector tools, but currently (in Moho 12.5) it's a bit of a pain to have to jump out of Moho and switch to Photoshop (or whichever paint program you use,) and then import the bitmap back into Moho, only to discover that the art is the wrong scale or resolution, or doesn't align perfectly with other elements there.
More specifically, having paint tools inside Moho could make creating variations of mouths and hands for switch layers go a lot more quickly. For example, sometimes I don't want to spend a lot of time tweaking a lot of points in a group of multi-layered vector shapes to create a custom mouth or hand shape that may only be seen once. In this situation, I just want to draw that element quickly and and move on to the next thing. Personally, if the paint tools save me a lot of time in this situation alone, then it's a very big deal.
Note that, by the above comments, I don't mean to suggest working with bitmaps will be better than working with vector shapes. Choosing one over the other should depend on the requirements of a project.
Vector art will have many advantages over bitmap art in that vector shapes are resolution independent (fully scaleable without losing quality,) can be deformed precisely, and require a lot less RAM to process. By nature, vector artwork, can also look very clean and modern.
Bitmap art, on the other hand, is more suitable for getting textural 'hand-drawn' looks that are difficult-to-impossible to get with vector art alone. I also think painting with bitmap tools will be easier to grasp for beginning Moho artists. Beginners who already know how to use paint tools can start rigging and animating right away, and learn more about working with vectors later as they gradually discover the limitations of working with only bitmap images..
In a lot of the Moho work I'm involved in, a hybrid bitmap+vector approach offers the best of both worlds, and having bitmap tools inside Moho should streamline the process of building hybrid rigs. For example, the ASP/Moho rigs we built for later seasons of King Julien, Puss In Boots, and The Croods were bitmap/vector hybrids and these rigs were responsive and animated very smoothly.
As for better performance with bitmap images, bitmaps in Moho 13 are
probably only going to be a fast as using bitmap images in Moho 12.5--which, IMO, is reasonably fast in most situations. Actual performance improvements with bitmap images will require improvements 'under-the-hood'. For that, I think we're going to have to wait an see.
I'm also super excited to see improvements to the Actions Window. Almost any of my rigs at work can have hundreds of actions and the described enhancements should make managing long lists of actions MUCH easier to deal with.
Hopefully, similar improvements will be coming for all of Moho's windows. For example, we can really use these kind of improvement for managing Styles and Bones too.
Anyway, looking forward to this release!
