Current Approaches

Have you come up with a good Moho trick? Need help solving an animation problem? Come on in.

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strider2000
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Re: Current Approaches

Post by strider2000 »

mkelley wrote: I came across your question about relative motion.
I think you're meaining, "Walk Transition for additive cycle"
mkelley wrote:My Swiss Army Bone script does just that --
Thanks for the update.
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strider2000
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Re: Current Approaches

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Separating Bone Layers
Just sharing a little improvement I'm making to my characters. I'm separating the facial expression bones from the main body bones to make animation a little cleaner.

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Re: Current Approaches

Post by strider2000 »

What naming convention do you use for left and right sides?

Just a quick note on my "current approach on this". Thread is here.
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=29569#p167412

I still like using the left and right from the view perspective, but it's really the bone coloring that helps the most. However, more and more I'm starting to JaMike's idea of Front and Back.
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=29569&start=15#p167447
In addition, Jeff Holland's "Poptoogi Base Model" character uses it and it seems to work pretty well.

I'm not an actor, or very familiar with acting, so "upstage" and "downstage" are not intuitive for me.
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Re: Current Approaches

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Frame 0 to Actions
This is just a quick note of a technique I started using to make it easier to do head turns. Basically I want to copy the point locations (not the points themselves) from frame 0 in one view, to a smart bone action for another view. It may be obvious to some, but I didn't think about it until recently, so I thought I'd share in case it helps others. :)
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strider2000
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Re: Current Approaches

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Animating Quickly
This is just a quick video to share some of the approaches I'm currently using to create animations quickly. It's probably most helpful for hobbyists.
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strider2000
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Re: Current Approaches

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Blender for quick previs
I'm starting to use Blender to create simple 3D scenes that I can then load into Moho for a previs. Once I've loaded the scene in I can then set the camera angles to get the angles I want. I can then either use those models if I want to create a quick previs animation. Or I can just use them as a reference for drawing scene related items. It's far easier to create the 3D objects in blender, than in Moho, and it's very easy to load them in.
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strider2000
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Re: Current Approaches

Post by strider2000 »

Head and Body Bones
For a while I tried a number of approaches for decluttering my workspace with head and body bones. The shy bone tool, is pretty close, but I finally decided to write a script to toggle display of head and body bones, because nested bone layer seem to be more trouble than they're worth.


If anyone has any insights on the kinds of bugs I ran into (in the video) I'd be interested in your insights.
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synthsin75
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Re: Current Approaches

Post by synthsin75 »

With the body and head bones on separate layers, the bones in the head layer will keep any higher bone layer from having influence. But you can show the keyframes of both layers with timeline visibility (v12). The "face turn" in the head layer problem looks like a user error (maybe in the smart bone action), but I can't verify that from just the video.

But ain't scripting grand? Just force Moho to your will.
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Re: Current Approaches

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synthsin75 wrote: But you can show the keyframes of both layers with timeline visibility (v12).
Ah, I see, if you select both bone layers at the same time. I had seen that before, and thought it was cool, but never needed it enough to know what triggered it.
synthsin75 wrote:The "face turn" in the head layer problem looks like a user error (maybe in the smart bone action), but I can't verify that from just the video.
Yeah, probably somewhere. That's the primary thing that motivated me to write the script. Moho is so powerful that the more complex you get, the easier it is to have some user error. Then I spend all my time debugging something I messed up :(
synthsin75 wrote:But ain't scripting grand? Just force Moho to your will.
For me, that's the most impressive part about the software! It's awesome!
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Re: Current Approaches

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strider2000 wrote:
synthsin75 wrote: But you can show the keyframes of both layers with timeline visibility (v12).
Ah, I see, if you select both bone layers at the same time. I had seen that before, and thought it was cool, but never needed it enough to know what triggered it.
Yeah, there are even checkboxes on the layers to keep them on the timeline when they're not selected.
synthsin75 wrote:The "face turn" in the head layer problem looks like a user error (maybe in the smart bone action), but I can't verify that from just the video.
Yeah, probably somewhere. That's the primary thing that motivated me to write the script. Moho is so powerful that the more complex you get, the easier it is to have some user error. Then I spend all my time debugging something I messed up :(
True.
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strider2000
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Re: Current Approaches

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synthsin75 wrote:Yeah, there are even checkboxes on the layers to keep them on the timeline when they're not selected.
Wow, there is so much functionality to Moho. Even after several years of using it, I still find things to learn. Since you mentioned it, I checked it out, and now that I see it I remember reading about it when it first came out, but didn't have a specific need for it then. I guess it's just easy to fall into patterns. Man there is just so much to this program.
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Re: Current Approaches

Post by strider2000 »

Easy Head Turn from 3/4 View
Hey everyone.
This isn't anything amazing for the experts, but hopefully it will be helpful for some people. It's basically my current approach for easily adding a smooth head turn to a 3/4 view. It's been a while since I've had a chance to do some animating and I had forgotten I had done it. So, if noting else it helps me remember :lol:
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Re: Current Approaches

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Painting Programs and How Tos
I love working with Moho, but of course we can't do bitmap drawing directly in Moho, so I use other programs for that that. I've started spending some more time creating both sketches and images to use in Moho. Also, there have been some nice improvements to painting programs recently so I decided to put together some videos to help people who are either new to digital painting or haven't seen or tried some of the more recent programs. My series overview is here:


I've already uploaded a number of videos, including a quick comparison of a number of paint programs:

(there's also a full comparison, where I show the basics of each program. That's a long one, but it does have some details).

I'm also creating very short "How to" videos for each program, since if you already know how to paint digitally, you just need to know how the tools work in each program. As an example I just uploaded a video on how to create flat and shader brushes/pens that emphasize the canvas in Clip Studio Paint. I really like those for the texture flexibility.



I won't update this thread every time I post a new video there, so check out the playlists on my channel if you want to see the other videos. I expect to post quite a few, if for no other reason than to help me remember how to use each of the programs :o

I hope it's helpful to others.
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Re: Current Approaches

Post by mrc »

strider2000 wrote:I hope it's helpful to others.
Yes. Thank you.
You don't agree with the post above? Click here.
www.tricklabor.com/en
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strider2000
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Re: Current Approaches

Post by strider2000 »

Lessons Learned

Just sharing some lessons I've learned while comparing different rigging approaches. Maybe it will help others. In particular, I'm working through approaches to help me reduce my character construction time. Just playing around a bit, while I have a little time off from work :0

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