Upgrade to MOHO 12

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toshiyori
Posts: 116
Joined: Fri Jun 27, 2014 3:12 pm
Location: Palmetto Florida

Upgrade to MOHO 12

Post by toshiyori »

I have Pro 10 & thinking about upgrading to MOHO 12. Is there a big advantage of this upgrade ? My main animation is cartoon characters, if I could ever enter a character & apply "Bones" it would be great.
Psmith
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Joined: Fri Dec 10, 2010 12:47 am
Location: Flagstaff, Arizona

Re: Upgrade to MOHO 12

Post by Psmith »

Toshiyori:

You can already "apply Bones" with the version of Anime Studio Pro you already have. For cartoon characters (the squash and stretchy kind) - the most valuable new features of Moho 12 are Pin Bones (which allow you to randomly distort areas of your character - but in a very controlled way) - and Smart Meshes, which allow great and precise distortion of both Vector Layers and Image Layers.

Maybe you should learn how to apply Bones to your characters in the version of Anime Studio Pro that you already have - and then watch some videos about the specialized uses of Pin Bones and Smart Meshes found in Moho 12.


Greg Smith
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Greenlaw
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Re: Upgrade to MOHO 12

Post by Greenlaw »

If you're coming from version 10 there a many significant improvements when you move to 12, and many improvements carried over from 11.

For me, the major ones are:

Sketch Bones. From version 11, this tool allows you to draw bone chains and animate them using a stylus. At my workplace, we animate a lot of characters with long tails so this tool has become a favorite and an incredible timesaver. Any fluid bone chain movements animated with this tool just look better too, more organic. Sometimes I will even use Sketch Bones to pose a character's arms and spine/neck and get nice 'gestural' poses.

IK improvements. Now we have the option to have IK ignore 'accessory' bones...finally! :)

Frame By Frame and drawing tools. FBF was introduced in 11 but with the big improvements to 12's Freehand tool, FBF is much more useful now. In 11, I used FBF mainly for fx animations like water, lava, wind, etc., but with 12 I'm starting to use it for certain character elements like hair and cloth. FBF and Freehand can still use improvements but these tools have come a long ways since version 10. In fact, I'm beginning to rely on Freehand more often these days for art creation in Moho.

The physics engine is more accurate now. I use it in bones for hair, feathers and accessories, and sometimes to simulate cloth motion. It's also much faster than it was in version 10 (which actually saw a great performance hit compared to 9.5, but became faster again during the 11 cycle.)

Mesh generation and Smart Warp. I used to rely on AE's Liquify and Puppet for this kind of effect and animation, but Moho 12 lets you do it directly in the rig. The mesh generation process itself is far much more customizable than in AE (or other 2D animation programs I use for that matter.) Also, if you've ever ran into problems with low-poly segments in 10 and 11, that's no longer an issue in 12 because you can make the mesh as smooth and detailed and you like now.

Improved Batch Render panel. Not specifically a character tool but critical if you do large projects with many characters, and especially if you use Layer Comps. (Many of my scenes use 8 to 10 layer comps, more if there are many characters.) Just being able to point to a deeply nested destination and have Moho remember multiple output paths is huge, especially when you work across a network and on many different shows. (Thank goodness! This was the one thing that really made me nuts in 11 and earlier versions.)

Layers and the timeline are much easier to manage now, thanks to filters, tags and multiple layer displays. This one is huge for me because some of my scenes can have hundreds of layers to manage.

Tons of 'small' workflow improvements all around make animating with Moho 12 much easier than it's ever been, especially with very complex scenes and rigs.

I hope that helps your decision. FWIW, I highly recommend it.
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