Smith Micro Software Releases Moho Pro 12

Smart Bones is an incredible feature that reduces or entirely removes distortion around your character’s joints – specifically around knees and elbows. Group a set of points and use the Smart Bones control levers to create 3D looking motion that you can easily repeat with the turn of a dial. For example with Smart Bones you can control facial expressions and head-turning on a character with simple dial movements instead of having to touch each bone point. Smart Bones not only steps up the quality and realism of the bone actions, but makes it MUCH easier to repeat complex movements and control your rigged elements. Smart Bones allow the ability to control Switch layers, Layer order, Layer visibility, Follow path, Flip layer horizontally/vertically, Stroke exposure, Shape effect positioning, Shape effect parameters (like gradient colors), 3D thickness of vector shapes that have been converted to 3D and even more smart bones controls.

Several major enhancements have been made to Moho’s bone features. The new bone constraints feature will include rigging options that will help set up characters that are more complex and powerful. The independent angle constraint allows a bone to maintain its global angle similar to a camera crane and is not affected by inverse kinematics or its bone parents. Ideal uses for bone constraints include robotic arms or feet on characters that maintains constraints when the rest of the leg is moving. The squash and stretch bone scaling enhancement allows bones to squash and stretch objects. The elbow bending feature helps improve otherwise abnormal bending and squashing issues. New target bones help bones point in the right direction rather than having the need to consistently set angles. Other improvements in bones include an updated inverse kinematic solver and automatic bone scaling. 

Unity™ game developers and users will now be able to use FBX support of animated 2D content in Moho Pro, eliminating the need to create rigid sprites for game development and providing the ability to get the exact look and feel that they want. FBX, the adaptable file format for 3D animation from Autodesk®, is the most common method for integrating animated 2D and 3D assets in Unity. 

Import your existing Photoshop files with all layers intact. Changes made in Photoshop instantly appear in the imported file in Anime Studio, allowing you to continually refine your Photoshop document. Many Photoshop features are supported in the imported PSD files, including blending modes, layer opacity, smart objects and smart filters. Groups are also supported and can be set up in Photoshop to automatically get imported into Moho Pro as switch layers for quick animating.

By applying the Bounce keyframe type to the timeline, any object interpolated will appear to bounce, all within two keyframes. Elastic provides a rubber band effect, making objects spring back and forth before reaching their end point. Settings can be adjusted for each of these interpolation types to change the amount of times the object bounces, the intensity and more. Stagger creates the effect that the animation is stuttering or staggering between two keyframes. No additional keyframes are created for this effect. This is great if you want to create the effect a character is having issue lifting a heavy object, as an example. 

The new Real Time Media Connection in Moho Pro automatically updates image, movie and audio files in your imported Anime Studio files when edited in an external program. This is a great workflow enhancement for individuals and production studios alike. 

The Batch Exporter and Renderer are now performed as a separate process. Even if you quit from Anime Studio Pro, the render process continues until the job is completed. 

You can now preview animations before committing to rendering. By going up to File > Preview Animation, a small video file will be created allowing you to view the animation, with no dropped frames, as it appears in workspace mode. While this method should not be used for final exports, you can take these files and save them elsewhere on your computer or even share them with others if needed. This can cut down tremendously on trial and error when animating and save lots of time, which is invaluable for creative projects.