Current Approaches

[strider2000]

M1 Specification
As some of you may know, I love the artistry of animation, but I'm an engineering type of person, so I've been trying to design a rig system that is flexible and easy to use.

I've tried a lot of different things and have finally come up with a rig I really like.
I call it M1. M for Mitch, me, and 1, for specification 1. They're 3/4 views, but have smart bone
controls for head turns and body turns. But the thing I'm happiest with is the system for expressing emotions

I've created a number of characters with this system and have been really happy with the consistency of animation. I started designing the system in Anime Studio Pro 11, so it's fully compatible there, but I now have Moho 12 (yea, finally), and so I finished them up there. The characters work in Anime Studio 10 with the exception of the head and body turns (see my previous post). I use bone flippimg for the turns, so that doesn't work in Anime Studio 10.

Here's a video about the M1 specification



I'm definitely interested in thoughts people have.

I also have a little video that's made entirely using the M1 characters. It's a little commercial about the characters.

[neeters_guy]

I'm having fun exploring with these rigs. I like that they're easy to use but still provide a good range of expressiveness. I hope you add more characters to your catalog as there's a real need for them. (If you need ideas, check out this guy's characters.)

Great job, Mitch!

[strider2000]

Tanks for the encouragement and feedback. I love your characters, so I definitely appreciate it! Thanks for the link too. With a standardized rig I hope I can make some more characters available soon. Might be a little slow, since I just do this on my free time, but hopefully soon.

[strider2000]

M2 Specification
I've created an M2 specification, that is the same as M1, but allows for smooth head turns and up and down. It doesn't replace M1, it just specifies that the character does support smooth head turns. Of course, it takes a lot longer to create such characters

Here's a video about it.

[strider2000]

Clip Studio Paint for reference and bitmaps
I'm working on some new characters for Moho and I'm using Clip Studio Paint to create the reference drawings and bitmaps. I love Clip Studio Paint (formerly Manga Studio), but it's so powerful and flexible that, even though I've been using it for several years, there are still a lot of things that are confusing or hard to figure out. Plus, while the documentation
http://www.clip-studio.com/site/gd_en/c ... _new_0.htm
is getting better, I think it's still hard to follow for native English speakers.

Anyway, I'm starting to create some tutorials to remind myself hand help others
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... 0HxPwkkPks. I'm also creating some tutorials for Krita. To import into Moho I just save as psd.

Here are two tutorials I just uploaded

[strider2000]

Crop bitmap images
Well duh, this tool is one that long time users are surely familiar with, but I haven't had a need for it until now. Or, probably more likely, I was working around it and could have used it lots of times before. So, I'm adding a tiny video here, mainly as a, "This is cool" note for newer users. So, it's definitely a "current approach" in my toolkit now.


Enjoy!

[mkelley]

Just happened to drop by and saw this thread (because you updated it a few days ago) and in starting at the beginning I came across your question about relative motion.

My Swiss Army Bone script does just that -- I've got videos that show this and you can easily find them, but it's one of the problems that it solves (and the script won't be up for much longer, as Dropbox is changing its policies and I don't know if I'll update my links).

Just a thought -- forgive me if you don't need that kind of solution anymore.

[mkelley]

Here's a very short video demonstrating this:



It's an old script but this ability still doesn't exist in Moho.

[strider2000]

I came across your question about relative motion.

I think you're meaining, "Walk Transition for additive cycle"

My Swiss Army Bone script does just that --

Thanks for the update.

[strider2000]

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.

[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.

[strider2000]

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.

[strider2000]

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.

[strider2000]

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.

[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.