Getting hand drawn images into moho

[11thIndian]

can anyone point me to a workflow for porting hand drawn images into moho? I usually do this kind of work in photoshop, but I've found that photoshop eps files can be a bit wonky when brought into illustrator.

This, of course brings me to another point. I tried bringing in some exising illustrator vectors into moho and it took about two minutes to load in the eps file. Is this just how long it takes or are there thing I just shouldn't be doing?

Is the best way to work in moho to just draw things in moho? considering the limited tool set, I would think not...

[7feet]

One of the most common methods seems to be to save your drawing as an image, and then bring it into Moho as either a tracing image, or an Image layer (my preference, so I can scale it) and trace it in Moho. Also, sometimes imported EPS's have a huge number of control points, Moho has to convert them to how it represents points and curves. That can take a bit. A huge number of points will also slow Moho down in general. I had made a script to cull out extraneous points from imported vectors a while ago, but I wasn't so happy with it. Making it more usuable will probably be my next project, along with another re-working of the Freehand tool.

[11thIndian]

That's what I figured.

I tried tracing an image last night. The toolset for moho actually works pretty well, and I'd imagine if you can create the image in moho it will work be more responsive with less points. The only advantage of illustrator seems to be to be able to independantly adjust the curvature going IN and OUT of an individual point.

I know I've read about Freehand. Doesn't that allow you some control over the number of pointes generated when inputing a drawing?

[Toontoonz]

Is the best way to work in moho to just draw things in moho? considering the limited tool set, I would think not...

I draw in Illustrator and export/import the images as Illustrator 8 files into Moho.
However, Moho has problems with those in maintaining shapes, edges and colors. (Check out the scripts in the script forum that deal with this.)
To help with maintain the shapes of vector drawings from Illustrator, one needs to add more anchor points in Illustrator. This helps most of the time, but still the line does not seem to be as graceful or sharply drawn as was drawn in Illustrator.


One could say just don´t draw in Illustrator or another program, draw in Moho.
I use Painter, Photoshop,Illustrator and Freehand to draw with; however, I find drawing in Moho is a bit difficult, clumsy and awkward and involves too many switching of tools to achieve something.
Maybe it is because I am not used to having to use the magnet, curvature, bend points, peak, add point, delete edge, and smooth tools in Moho to do the work that the Bezier-method does so simply in Illustrator and Freehand and the others.

And a big problem with doing Vector-type drawings in Moho is one cannot export the vector Moho drawing/file (or I have not been able to figure it out) as a vector file.
I can export or Render the drawing as an image (png,targa,bmp,jpg), but not a Vector file that can be used in another Vector drawing program.
This causes situations when one is drawing for a client and they want not only animated work, but also still illustrations for other print material - magazine ads, catalogues, etc. The Vector file is perfect for scaling things up and down. (This is why you see lots of print illustration work done in Vector type programs - the file scales up and down perfectly - so that it works as a 72 dpi, 300 x 200 pixel drawing on a web site and a 300 dpi, 30 x 20 cm drawing on a poster, plus the vector file is a small file.)

If I draw a vector drawing in Moho, I can´t use it anywhere else unless I want it as an image file. (And Moho only export files as an image at 72 pixels per inch. Yes, one could figure out that to get a 72ppi file in Moho to, say, a 30 x 20 cm, 300 dpi image file. But this means one has do number crunching on a calculator and then one has to make the Moho Project setting (in this case) a width and length 3543 x 2362 - but that is real awkward. And then try to Render that monster file in Moho - takes a while, plus one can only see only a tiny fraction of the drawing in the Moho render window. )

I hope there is a way that someone can figure out how to import vector files from other programs into Moho and the files translate into Moho accurately.

[LittleFenris]

Is the best way to work in moho to just draw things in moho? considering the limited tool set, I would think not...

If I draw a vector drawing in Moho, I can´t use it anywhere else unless I want it as an image file. (And Moho only export files as an image at 72 pixels per inch. Yes, one could figure out that to get a 72ppi file in Moho to, say, a 30 x 20 cm, 300 dpi image file. But this means one has do number crunching on a calculator and then one has to make the Moho Project setting (in this case) a width and length 3543 x 2362 - but that is real awkward. And then try to Render that monster file in Moho - takes a while, plus one can only see only a tiny fraction of the drawing in the Moho render window. )

This is a case where people are using a program for something it wasn't designed for, but can be forced to do with work arounds. A car wasn't designed to float on water, but if you toss on some 50 gallon barrels you can force the thing to float. Same with Moho. It wasn't really designed to render out print resolution files at 300dpi, but if you do the math, you can figure out how big that needs to be at 72dpi to then be resized to 300dpi in a program like Photoshop. It is strange however, that Moho is a vector based program, but won't export vector based artwork. Probably the same reason it doesn't import them from other programs too well...because it does the same thing a slightly different way.