Moho 12: Has it caught up with CelAction 2D in 2018?

[Francis Seven]

Greetings, friends! This is my first post in three years!

Back when I was learning Anime Studio Pro I started getting a project together. I even showed some of it to Slowtiger. But at around that time I was transferred from L.A. to Seattle and wasn't able to pursue my animation project any longer. Then, a year ago, my son was born. I didn't just flake out, I was just too busy.

In fact I have forgotten how to use Moho (I'm not sure why it keeps changing name). And I'm unsure whether it will do the type of animation I need.

The TV show Peppa Pig is made with CelAction 2D. My 5 minute short film project is on the same level of simplicity. What I'm finding is not a whole lot of proper tutorials for Moho. Most of the tutorials look so bad I can't really believe the people making them actually know what they're doing. And many of them don't show the final product right at the beginning so you run the risk of wasting time.

And for Celaction 2D I'm not finding any tutorials at all. Not even bad ones. But I know it would do the job because it's used in the shows that are like mine.

So, can Moho 12 do things like this?

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2I-3TqBsPs[/youtube]

Or should I just go ahead and get Celaction 2D?

[drumlug13]

Congrats on the new addition.

What I'm finding is not a whole lot of proper tutorials for Moho. Most of the tutorials look so bad I can't really believe the people making them actually know what they're doing. And many of them don't show the final product right at the beginning so you run the risk of wasting time

I couldn't agree more, but now if I'm looking for something specific I'll scan ahead in the video to find the end result before I start it over.

And Moho would be a great choice for the Peppa style animation. Compared to the price of CelAction 2D it can be done for half the price

[Rainer]

Congrats on the new addition.

Compared to the price of CelAction 2D it can be done for half the price

... and jn half the time. Agree with comments on some of the AS/Moho tutorials. Looks like some people just get hold of Moho and make tutorials while learning as they go along, blind trying to lead the partially sighted. If you can identify what you need to know there's usually a tutorial that will help, or you can come here. Funny how some reviewers comment on the lack of advanced drawing tools in Moho, when there aren't any drawing tools at all in CelAction, but there is a whole lot of extra clutter. (Note, this forum you're mainly talking to Moho evangelists).

[chucky]

Yes I agree there is a terrible rash of tutorials and not enough actual productions.
It's a marketing problem essentially (plus some little development tweaks and bug hunts).
Moho has not been marketed enough toward pros and so there's a bottom up process going on in general.
With creative products this DOES NOT WORK to create sales.
Artists aspire to be as good as the people who inspire them.
For Moho to succeed properly a higher level of examples have to be promoted and encouraged.

3 second blasts of poorly drawn content , aren't going to help... in fact quite the reverse.
It gives the wrong impression entirely.
Allowing social media to get to where it is has also been a problem.

Smith Micro needs to properly invest not just money, but time and effort ( not forgetting money though) in creating a public image that elevates it from the appearance of a bargain bin toy to the production quality powerhouse that it should be.
I believe the Debut version should probably be greatly restricted in it's capabilities as well, to allow for a clear distinction between , material produced in Debut and Moho proper.

If it were up to me , I would make some drastic changes, some might seem harsh.
Two pronged:
Really push to get some top notch examples out to the public to attract more REAL pros.
Make Debut a properly reduced beginners program which is super easy to use and allows for very few creative errors and needs no tutorial academy to get started.

For Debut I would go to the lengths of limiting colour palettes so ugly colour combos would be hard to make.
Removing the ability to have varied line thickness in Debut, to eliminate the poor use of this feature with the untrained.
Even reduce frame rate and make all interpolation linear.
The biggest issue is rebuilding a really great character generator, with some really top notch walk cycles and reusable actions.
Let's see the noobies put out stuff that looks good and as effortless as it could be.

For Pro, I would hunt down all the bugs and limitations that hold it back.
Especially freeing up the rigging to a more easily modular operation and bring the drawing and colouring tools up to a higher level.
Find anything that's a bit crappy and really work on it, and don't bother releasing it until it's mind blowing.
I would pay for some amazing examples that are properly coordinated with the marketing strategy and corporate ID of the program.
No more bits and pieces... a proper strategy.





AS far as tutorials go, I'm not sure you need that many to do pepper pig, go through the manual and basic tutes at Smith Micro.

Most of what you need to know is the artistry of animation , which is application agnostic.


Oh btw this film was entirely made in moho (besides two background plates painted in CSP and comped in Moho) Every shot was a single pass render inside Moho.

[Andy Blazdell]

Hi, it's Andy from CelAction here, I feel I should step in and clarify some things about Peppa Pig. It's not a simple as it might look.

The early seasons were deliberately limited in terms of numbers of characters on screen at one time and complexity of backgrounds, but that is certainly not the case for more recent episodes. I was looking at a scene the other day with 80 characters and a background which was basically an entire city that could be zoomed from about a kilometer wide into the size of an apple. Some objects in other scenes have well over 100,000 vertices (and multiple occurences of similar size objects are in the same scene). The pipeline to render Peppa Pig doesn't require After Effects to composite such heavy scenes. It can all be rendered within CelAction2D.

There are plenty of software solutions to approximate "early" Peppa Pig-style animation. If the OP has Moho already, it makes sense to use that. If you have Adobe Creative Cloud then you have Animate CC (Flash) included, that would work. People are using Blender and OpenToonz too to make simple cut-out animation, and those tools are free. But if more complexity is needed after animating some tests, then that's the time to look at more powerful tools designed for heavy workloads. Because whatever workarounds you can do in other software to speed up something simple, when you have to apply those same workarounds to something complex, you quite often find that they are tens of times slower or even impossible to do.

We've been working with professional animators for over 20 years on CelAction2D, and every single function has been born from a request by real-world productions. It's well worth it given the literal years of time we have cumulatively saved our clients by implementing those features. In 2017 alone we did 50 program updates to clients (not all to the same client!), such is the pace of our development. We believe in getting new features into the hands of the clients that request them as soon as possible, so they can get the benefit immediately.

Peppa Pig is created by an incredibly talented team, that make the complexity invisible to the viewer. They need the ability to work beyond the limits of other software, and they need pro-level support. Not everyone needs that ability or that level of support, but CelAction2D is meant for those that do.

[InfoCentral]

We've been working with professional animators for over 20 years on CelAction2D, and every single function has been born from a request by real-world productions. It's well worth it given the literal years of time we have cumulatively saved our clients by implementing those features.

I useToonBoom Harmony. Do you have crossgrade pricing?

[Greenlaw]

The animation team I'm part of at DreamWorks uses Moho for special sequences in multiple TV shows on Netflix. You can see some of the early (2015-2016) work on my 2017 Demo reel.



We use a lot of different programs in our group, including After Effects, Adobe Animate, and Harmony, but Moho clearly plays a significant role. This is because of Moho's excellent rigging and IK system, Smart Bones Actions, Smart Mesh, and Layer Comps. Sketch Bones has been awesome for us too, since we have a lot of characters with long tails.

I feel the work we've done this past year is a more advanced than what's shown on my 2017 reel. I can't discuss unreleased shows but some of this new work should be coming out very soon. I'll let people know after it's officially out there.

For the most part, we've been happy with Moho in our toolbox. There's definitely room for improvement with the software, but the dev team has been good about listening to our needs and addressing them. I'm expecting wonderful things in future releases of Moho.

I wasn't aware of CelAction 2D before I saw this thread. Will have to check it out when I have time.

[chucky]

Love the kung fu Lemur, Dennis. Really nice!

[Greenlaw]

Thanks! The Thighsander Plunderhorse 'fan fiction' segments in that episode (from AHKJ, s4 e2, I think,) were among my favorites to work on, and it the longest one up to that time. There were at least 18 Thighsander scenes split between three animators, and we were still figuring things out in Moho 11. (I believe we had just switched up from ASP 10 to 11.) As expected, we spent most of the time drawing and rigging the puppets, but once that was done we blasted through the animation in record time. This episode helped prep us for more complicated animations to come.

And now, back to the regularly scheduled thread.

[Greenlaw]

What I'm finding is not a whole lot of proper tutorials for Moho. Most of the tutorials look so bad I can't really believe the people making them actually know what they're doing. And many of them don't show the final product right at the beginning so you run the risk of wasting time.

I haven't released anything yet but I've been developing two training courses: a free 'beginner' class and a modestly priced 'advanced' class. I'll post more info as I get closer to releasing them.

[drumlug13]

.
Bare with me for a second, I want to try something out real quick ...

... Ready?


.... CelAction 2D !!!!


(... is Andy back yet? )

[synthsin75]

You have to say it three times...maybe even in a mirror.

[Greenlaw]

Candyjuice, Candyjuice, Can...

[drumlug13]

Olivia Newton John, Olivia Newton John, Olivia Newton John!!!!

(fingers crossed)

[synthsin75]

Candyjuice, Candyjuice, Can...

Warning, don't look that up on urban dictionary.

Olivia Newton John, Olivia Newton John, Olivia Newton John!!!!

(fingers crossed)

I think I became a man watching Xanadu.