MonsterMash.zone Users Forum

I love the animation capabilities of MonsterMash, so please relate to this post as a wish to make it better and more widely useable.

I would love to be able to import my template outline from a png. There are so many free and open source imaging softwares out there that it would be a shame to waste development resources on improving the drawing function within Monstermash - why not just leverage what already exists?

I would also love to be able to import the interior of the image and have MonsterMash inflate/animate that.

How easy would it be to provide programmatic access to the animations, via Python or similar, so that the animator can define the click point and the frame by frame coordinates of the motion?

It would be great if MonsterMash could output in a more widely accessible video format/codec, or even as a jpeg/png sequence, so that it can be easily imported to other video software. Basically I envisage a workflow like this:
Photoshop/Gimp/Paint.net... --> MonsterMash --> Nuke/After Effects/Natron/Blender - would be very interested to hear your thoughts on this. I am just trying to understand how I can incorporate MonsterMash into what I already do.

Finally, how about an undo function?

Once again, this is a totally amazing tool. I want to see it get the maximum exposure and takeup possible.

Thanks a lot for all the suggestions for improvements!

nitram wrote: ↑Tue Jun 22, 2021 11:57 am I would love to be able to import my template outline from a png. There are so many free and open source imaging softwares out there that it would be a shame to waste development resources on improving the drawing function within Monstermash - why not just leverage what already exists?

I would also love to be able to import the interior of the image and have MonsterMash inflate/animate that.

We tried this in the past and it required quite a lot of preprocessing of the input user supplied images to make them compatible with what MM expects. It wasn't a priority back then, maybe we will get back to it.

nitram wrote: ↑Tue Jun 22, 2021 11:57 am How easy would it be to provide programmatic access to the animations, via Python or similar, so that the animator can define the click point and the frame by frame coordinates of the motion?

Currently, it's only possible to control the position of existing control pins by altering the file cps.txt in a MM project zip file.

nitram wrote: ↑Tue Jun 22, 2021 11:57 am It would be great if MonsterMash could output in a more widely accessible video format/codec, or even as a jpeg/png sequence, so that it can be easily imported to other video software. Basically I envisage a workflow like this:
Photoshop/Gimp/Paint.net... --> MonsterMash --> Nuke/After Effects/Natron/Blender - would be very interested to hear your thoughts on this. I am just trying to understand how I can incorporate MonsterMash into what I already do.

Right, that functionality is not available yet. As a workaround, you can either record your screen or export the animation to glTF and process it in a 3D modeler as, e.g., Blender.

nitram wrote: ↑Tue Jun 22, 2021 11:57 am Finally, how about an undo function?

Totally right, it's a shame that undo isn't available. Hopefully that will change soon.