Moho 14 hidden improvement of the line width tool and how it changes my global stroke width control workflow

[Daxel]

This is something I discovered today and I still haven't used it in production so take this claims with a pinch of salt. If I find problems I will update it.

The line width tool, that controls what I like to call the point width (to avoid confusion with the "width" of the stroke in the Style panel), had a limitation in Moho 13.5 that seems to be fixed in Moho 14. In Moho 13.5, if you had smartbones animating the point width, animating it manually in the timeline was limited, there were some kind of conflicts that made impossible to modify the width of the points manually (sometimes you could increase the width of a point but not decrease it, things like that). These conflicts seem to be fixed in Moho 14, as in my test I have 3 smartbones modifying the point width of a drawing and I'm still able to manually control the width of each point.

This is super cool. But it's more than that because this seems to change my prefered workflow (and maybe yours too) regarding global stroke width control. For clarification, I mean how you change the width of the strokes of an entire rig or scene when you need it, usually because you want to scale the rig or change the camera zoom and you want to control the width of all the strokes at once.

So far, in my notes I have written that the best method is using a saved style that only forces the stroke width. That way if you have a Superman character you create a "superman stroke width" style that every shape in Superman's rig has applied so you can modify the width as you wish without conflicting with the point width that you may be animating in smartactions. I learnt that from Greenlaw and it has been very useful. However, this only works for different shots so if you need to actually animate the stroke width during animation, for example for a camera zoom, you can't animate the stroke width of the style.

To be able to animate the global stroke width, the most promising tool was this script by Stan: https://mohoscripts.com/script/sz_adjust_line_width
It's very smart because its Multiply/Divide mode lets you modify the width preserving the width of those points that you had at 0 width. The problem with this tool was the limitations the point width had in Moho 13.5: if you had any point width animation activated by a smartbone, this tool didn't work properly. But now that the point width feature has been improved in Moho 14, this script seems to work perfectly no matter the context, making it a promising contender for the best global stroke width control method in Moho.

[mmmaarten]

Hi Daxel, sounds good!
Are you also on the official Discord channel? There is way more communication over there to share such things. It's here: https://discord.com/invite/jsa4syBxmY

[Daxel]

Hi Daxel, sounds good!
Are you also on the official Discord channel? There is way more communication over there to share such things. It's here: https://discord.com/invite/jsa4syBxmY

Thank you I will give it another try.