Soul Sikher

nobudget · Post by **nobudget** » Wed Sep 21, 2005 5:24 pm

If anyone's interested I have worked on a project that involves some animations done in Moho. I can't show everything but here's a trailer that shows some of the material. Watch it here: http://www.sody.co.uk/soulsikher.html

There's some bits and pieces of animation, mostly involving a mosquito but also a semi-3D pong, a man from India with a peacock (the bird, not a penis shaped like a vegetable), straight animation and live-action/animation. You'll have to look closely because the trailer is hectic but I hope you enjoy it. The animations will be shown competely as part of a one-man show in the UK, about 5 minutes of animation total. It's a multimedia driven comedy show from Britain with a lot of material about India and the Sikh culture so naturally a Dutch atheist white man like myself was asked to do the animation...

About the use of Moho; thanks to the bone structure I was able to create a moving, bending and stretching mosquito with one single drawing. I used tweens to make his eyes move, make the eyelids to form expressions and cycling came in handy for flapping wings. I used .avi video clips in the background to combine animation and live action, sometimes I also used Moho to alter the video, resize, camera blur and fades.

Reindert.
www.nobudgetvideo.com

bupaje · Post by **bupaje** » Wed Sep 21, 2005 5:38 pm

I like the Moho bits. Must take some work to synch something like the mosquito flying around his head. Good work as always.

mr. blaaa · Post by **mr. blaaa** » Wed Sep 21, 2005 7:36 pm

Yeeehaw! Looking forward to see the show someaday

nobudget · Post by **nobudget** » Sun Oct 02, 2005 4:04 pm

Here are some stills from the trailer with some Moho specific comments:

http://www.nobudgetvideo.com/moho/souls ... hading.jpg
I like the shading feature, although with large offsets and sharp edges it tends to look distorted. The way you can apply it to a layer or a group makes it quite versatile.

http://www.nobudgetvideo.com/moho/soulsikher_mask.jpg
You can't see it here but when the mosquito was behind the man I used a quick-n-dirty "blob" as a masking object for the contours. When the mosquito was completely behind the man I just turned visibility off, faster rendering!

http://www.nobudgetvideo.com/moho/soulsikher_popeye.jpg
Two bulging eyes that were tracked frame-by-frame in Moho. I used a dissolve (opacity tween) from the real eyes to these eyes so the popping looked more convincing.

http://www.nobudgetvideo.com/moho/soulsikher_3d.jpg
This is the pong game in 3D with a solid wall and cube-like paddles. Because of the poor depth sorting I had to render it in about 6 segments and adjust the center points to fix the layer order. Rotating the camera screwed up the depth sorting.

http://www.nobudgetvideo.com/moho/souls ... rawing.jpg
Unlike many users I find the Moho drawing tools to be pleasant for cartoon characters. The limbs of the man look a bit weird because the contours had to resemble India. Thanks to the bones i could animate the neck and head of the peacock with just one drawing. The feathers were duplicated and I slightly rotated that group in the animation to give it a fake 3D perspective during the movement of the head.

I don't think this project could have been done without Moho.

Reindert.
www.nobudgetvideo.com

jorgy · Post by **jorgy** » Mon Oct 03, 2005 4:59 am

Wonderful job!!! Inspriring! The attention to detail is very good.

Fun topic, fun music, fun everything!

Thank you for sharing, and also for sharing your insights, tips, and techniques!

jorgy