Project folder

[davoodice2]

its very important we can choose base folder as a project folder and moho can set all resource pathes relative to this folder not drive letter.
It is needed becouse we can open the project on every computer with every location.
I think it is most important feature

[Lukas]

Absolutely! +1000

[Gone2TheDogs]

I was thinking the same thing. Webuilder is a GREAT example of how to manage projects and keep files relative to the project.

[mgo]

I agree, would be a nice addition.

[synthsin75]

Gather Media stores the links to assets as relative paths.

[Greenlaw]

Yeah, it can be a problem. When I brought this up several years ago, a few improvements were made to Moho's project content management, and that really helped, but it does need to go much farther.

In a shared network situation, whether I'm using Moho at the big animation studio or in my tiny home studio, I find it too easy to break a Moho project's connections with source and destination folders that reside outside the project's folder, and it can be a pain to re-link everything. We should have the option to specify a root or content directory for a given production that's independent of where a single Moho project resides. At most studios, a Moho project folder is only a tiny part of a larger production environment.

Some higher end animation and composting programs are better aware of how larger productions are structured and can accommodate for it. If Moho could be as accommodating, it may also help solve the problem of the software not being able to persistently remember the preferred output folder for a given project. (Another issue I still gripe about often.)

Gather Media is one way to solution for maintaining relative links for a tiny production, but it's not a practical one for larger productions in studio pipelines or even a small indie studio. For example, when a single episode of a production can have dozens of Moho project files (i.e., one for each scene,) you can't keep using Gather Media for each individual scene.

At the studio I work, we have custom scripts and tools to avoid many of these problems, but this doesn't help most Moho users, including myself when I'm using Moho at home.

I know Mike and Victor have a lot on their plate right now, and personally there are other things I'd like to see taken care of first, but I'd like to see this matter get attention in the future.

I hope that doesn't sound too much like a complaint. I love using Moho as much as ever. This is just one of those things I've learned to live with but keep hoping will get better eventually.

[synthsin75]

At the studio I work, we have custom scripts and tools to avoid many of these problems, but this doesn't help most Moho users, including myself when I'm using Moho at home.

Yeah, I already know how to go about doing that, but since I don't personally need it, working into my schedule would be difficult.

[Greenlaw]

Oh, I didn't mean to suggest you should do it, Wes. To me, these things should be built into Moho natively.

I know Mike's aware of it, and it's probably something he thinks about all the time. But, as acknowledged earlier, he's got a lot on his plate right now and has to make priorities.

For me, it's a workflow inconvenience, but not an impediment. It's like a pothole I can drive around and hope will be taken care of someday.

[synthsin75]

Oh, I didn't mean to suggest you should do it, Wes. To me, these things should be built into Moho natively.

I know, but I like to take some load off of Mike & co. when I can provide something in the meantime. There's always higher priorities than some of these little niceties.

[heyvern]

So something like this can be done with lua? I wouldn't be adverse to throwing a wee bit o' time to it as it would be a fun little project and be a very very satisfying issue to solve.

Does current Moho use relative paths... sometimes? I ask because on my network sometimes it works sometimes I get the broken links. I have noticed this only recently when I switched to a PC from Mac and using a shared external drive.

[Greenlaw]

Does current Moho use relative paths... sometimes? I ask because on my network sometimes it works sometimes I get the broken links. I have noticed this only recently when I switched to a PC from Mac and using a shared external drive.

Yeah, a handful of years ago, something was improved regarding relative paths, and I know it solved a issue I was running into at the time...sorry, I can't recall the specifics right now. Maybe I have notes hidden away about it. Will check in a bit.

[Lukas]

Does current Moho use relative paths... sometimes? I ask because on my network sometimes it works sometimes I get the broken links. I have noticed this only recently when I switched to a PC from Mac and using a shared external drive.

The relative paths can’t go ‘up’ a folder. I once hacked a file and made the folder go up and it opened fine, but after saving those paths become absolute again.

[Greenlaw]

I found some comments about this from 2017 in the beta forums. It's actually about Moho switching from Relative to Absolute paths to solve the problem, so maybe I have this backwards. (Sorry, my brain is not in the right space to think about this right now.) But, anyway, the issue for me is that we should be able to specify the root directory for a production.

A 3D animation program I use calls this the 'Content Directory' and I set it to whichever production I'm currently working on, and the program is aware of where all the production-related files are, even if I move the entire production to a different drive with a different drive letter. The program even lets me specify which folders contain certain types of files, so it knows to look there first when saving and loading that data type. (Just so there's no confusion, this is very different from what Moho refers to as its 'Content Folder'.)

[synthsin75]

So something like this can be done with lua? I wouldn't be adverse to throwing a wee bit o' time to it as it would be a fun little project and be a very very satisfying issue to solve.

Does current Moho use relative paths... sometimes? I ask because on my network sometimes it works sometimes I get the broken links. I have noticed this only recently when I switched to a PC from Mac and using a shared external drive.

If I recall, opening a Moho file will look for absolute path assets it can't find in a path relative to the file, but only in a very limited way, like being in the same folder or the Gather Media folder hierarchy.
What we can do in Lua is have the user set a relative directory that we can store in the project as a tag or something: http://mohoscripting.com/search/?subject=usertag
Do some processing to figure out where that directory is relative to the Moho project file.
Read through the whole document: http://mohoscripting.com/snippets/1
Get the asset file names: http://mohoscripting.com/methods/607 & http://mohoscripting.com/methods/587
And then search the defined directory ( http://mohoscripting.com/methods/112 ), by iteration ( http://mohoscripting.com/methods/113 ), to find and set the files as the asset sources.