Question about smart warp (Moho vs live2d) and frame by fram

[breedrill]

Ayy.


I'm thinking of making the switch from anime studio/moho pro 11 to moho pro 12. However, there's two things I want to know;
1. One of the bigger reasons I want to get moho 12 is because I have been wanting a good program to animate 2d images for a while now. Live2d is good, but the monthly subscription thing really puts me off. Is there a feature in moho like 'glue' in live2d? basically where if you have two layers, you can connect certain points so that specified places make it so both layers are affected by the same mesh?

2. Is frame by frame any better now? I've tried adobe animate cc, but once again the idea of having to pay a monthly subscription just isn't appealing to me.

[Greenlaw]

1. One of the bigger reasons I want to get moho 12 is because I have been wanting a good program to animate 2d images for a while now...Is there a feature in moho like 'glue' in live2d? basically where if you have two layers, you can connect certain points so that specified places make it so both layers are affected by the same mesh?

I'm not sure how it works in live2D but in Moho you can create any shaped 2D mesh, and have multiple layers affected by the same mesh. Some rules: hierarchically, the image or vector layers must be at the same group level as the mesh layer or below to be able to see the mesh. Layers that exist higher up in the hierarchy do not see the mesh. Also, groups are not affected; only individual layers. Not a big deal really, just something to be aware of.

LIke any vector layer, a mesh layer can be animated with bones, point animation or actions. One powerful new feature in 12 is Pin bones, which lets Moho work with meshes like Puppet in After Effects, but with all the other useful Moho deformation features that AE lacks.

2. Is frame by frame any better now?

A little better, but I wouldn't make it the deciding factor. There are much better reasons to upgrade to 12 than its FBF tools.

The FBF system actually works well enough for certain types of animation. I use it occasionally at my job in TV animation production. Unfortunately, weaknesses with the freehand and blob tools is what diminishes its usefulness. The devs are aware of this though, and I believe improving the freehand drawing tools is a focus for future releases.

For now, I think using Moho's FBF depends on what you need it for and how you intend to use it.

A few months ago, I used Moho's FBF with Freehand to draw a brief but complicated bit of character animation that transitioned into the rig version of the character. The result looked pretty good but it took too long to complete the FBF portion because I kept fighting the Freehand tool's errors too much, and wound up using Add Points, Transform, and Magnet for most of it anyway. For a later scene, I had to animate something similar and I instead used Harmony for the blended FBF segment and imported that to Moho as an Image Sequence layer. The Harmony painted parts didn't look exactly like the Moho vector parts but it was close enough and I was able to draw the animation more quickly. The one downside is that, if I had to go back and change the Harmony bits, it usually meant a complete re-draw. Even so, for this sort of thing, I'd still use an external 2D program along with Moho...at least until Moho gets better freehand tools.

At home, I prefer TVPaint over Harmony for FBF. Some good free FBF programs are Krita and OpenToonz. My 11-year old daughter uses TVPaint, but she also likes Krita a lot. Her one complaint about Krita is that it can't display a waveform in the timeline--not a deal-killer for her but syncing animation to audio is obviously easier when you can see and mark up a visible waveform in the timeline. Neither of us has used OpenToonz yet but it's very popular. I also have Adobe Animate as part of my CC sub but I haven't spent enough time with it to comment personally. However, I've been watching an animator at my workplace use it and the results look fantastic. Other studios we work with use either Adobe Animate (Flash) or TB Harmony for FBF, and I've read that one animation studio in the area, Rough Draft, uses OpenToonz.

Where Moho's FBF has really worked out well for me is when I need to add FX animations to the character animation, like water/lava splashes, wind, and fire effects. You can see some of that stuff in my DreamWorks Demo Reel linked in my signature below.

Even though FBF in Moho 12 is still limited and even frustrating to use for complicated animations, I feel confident that the Moho devs will get it right in upcoming releases. The general idea behind Moho FBF system is sound, it's just the freehand tools are still bad. They're aware of this and working on it.

As much as I like animating FBF in other programs, it would be so convenient to be able to do this directly inside Moho without the drawing errors, especially when combining it with Moho's powerful puppet rigging tools. Once they get it sorted out, I'll want to do more FBF work inside Moho.

But even after that happens, I'll probably still use a dedicated FBF program for major FBF animations. It will take a lot of work to make the FBF part of the program fully competitive with a dedicated FBF program, and I'm not sure that's the current goal of Moho development.

We'll see.

[breedrill]

Ah thank you! I've found this info very helpful ^_^