Share your Moho workflow!

[vunderkind]

Hey everyone!

Long time Moho user here - even though I haven't used Moho in a year or so. Following the news of a change of hands (yay, Lost Marble!), I'm thinking of giving it another shot.

Lately I've been really intrigued by the way people integrate Moho in their workflow, and i'm curious about how members of this community do theirs. I'll start with mine.

Pre-production
I love to spend a lot of time with pen and paper at this stage, so I do a lot of my character sketches on paper, and sometimes the storyboarding too. Needless to say this is preceded by the script-writing (which I used to write on Amazon Story Writer, which has now been discontinued). As soon as I have the basic storyboard done and character sketches complete, I begin the arduous task of translating the sketches into character style sheets. I love to do all of these on my iPad using Procreate. Once this is done, I'm now ready to rig with Moho.

Production
Rigging is another long process, so I like to spend a few weeks of work just rigging characters and not doing much else. I'm really elated to see more and more 360-degree turns in the community, but that often tends to be cognitively expensive for me, so I tend to fake it with half-turns, thereby limiting the range of motion for my characters. Then again, my animations typically don't rely on a lot of action. When the rigs are complete, I like to back up all the files to the cloud. It's a lot of work, y'know?

I also draw my background assets in Procreate, FYI.

I do audio recording in Audacity and also get sound assets from freesound.org. Sometimes, I buy audio, but this doesn't happen very often.

In post-producion I export my completed animation scenes to Adobe Aftereffects. I apply only the most minimal effects (most of them usually lighting tweaks, some noise, the occasional blur - but it means that I separated layers properly in Moho), and so on.

It ain't much, but it's honest work.

I hope more people get to share here, hoping I can learn a thing or two from how you do things!

[Greenlaw]

Thanks for sharing your workflow! It's always interesting and educational to hear how people work and use their software.

My workflow for personal projects isn't that different from what you described...

Pre-production
Develop concept, sketches and designs, write the script and make a storyboard. After I have the storyboard drawn, I'll figure out what I need to animate scenes. If the project starts to look too difficult, I'll simplify the storyboard so the project is doable.

Next, I cut the storyboard with audio into an animatic using a video editor. (An animatic is the storyboard with scene timing and sound, and it serves as the blueprint for your film.) For sound fx and music, a temp track is fine; for dialog, I like to have final audio if possible, because I'll need it to animate lip sync. The editorial program I use at home is Vegas Pro but any editor should work fine. Once I'm happy with the animatic, I'll render a movie I can use for editorial reference, and I'll also output each scene as a separate clip for animation reference. Some animators like to render movie files for animation reference, but I prefer low res JPEG frames, and .aif or .wav files for audio. (For me, this is frame accurate and plays more efficiently in an animation program.)

Finally, I'll break down every scene to an x-sheet (aka, dope sheet.) I like to use Google Sheets or LibreOffice for this. (Both programs are free.) The X-sheet contains useful info about each scene, and a column to mark the status of each scene as it gets completed.

Production & Post Production
I'm lumping both Production and Post Production together because these stages always overlap.

First comes building the puppets. Sometimes this means drawing everything with Moho's vector tools and sometimes I'm creating the art in a paint program like Photoshop, Procreate, or Krita. It's also not unusual for my puppets to be a hybrid of vector and bitmap art. Fortunately, Moho handles both types of art perfectly!

When I'm developing rigs, I typically create one 'general purpose' rig for a character that's capable of most common poses and actions, and I may also create simpler 'special' puppets that only do shot-specific poses and animation. I try to keep the puppets easily editable and modular so I can re-use them or parts of them for multiple scenes.

I avoid making a single puppet that does everything imaginable. The problem with this type of puppet is that something you haven't imagined yet will inevitably come up, and the more complicated your puppet is, the more difficult it can be to customize it. I also find that super complicated puppets are not necessarily easy to animate.

A good example might be my first Moho short film 'Scareplane'. For this film, I made a simple 'general purpose' puppet for each character, and adapted these three puppets for whatever they needed to do in each shot. There are only a few shot-specific shots where I had to create completely new artwork and rigs, and those were very simple setups. Once I figured out what I was doing in Moho (thanks to help and advice from many experienced users in this very forum,) 'Scareplane' rolled out very smoothly.

Next, I create all the backgrounds and props I'm going to need based on what I see in my storyboard. I may also prepare template projects that contain the environment I'll be animating the characters in. (For 'Scareplane', I created template projects the side, front and back views of the passenger section, as well as the front, side and back view of cockpit. By arranging the layers in 3D space, I had the flexibility to get even more camera angles from the same artwork.)

Now, with the puppets and artwork created, I'm ready to animate the scenes.

First, I'll open a copy of an 'environment' project, and import the animatic clip into the project to use as reference and make sure the frame range is correct. Then I'll import the characters from their project files. (Sometimes, it's helpful to import your characters as a Reference but that's a whole other topic.) Once all the pieces are in place, I'll make my mods to the rigs if the scene calls for them, and finally I animate the scene.

I like to composite all my animations, so I setup render passes using Moho's Layer Comps. The layers are typically: backgrounds, midgrounds, characters, and foregrounds. I may break things down further and include special matte passes if I think it will help me in comp. Finally, I use Moho Exporter to render all my Layer Comps as separate PNG image sequences. (Moho Exporter has a handy 'one-click' button for splitting out the Layer Comps and rendering them.)

Next, I'll import the layer frames to my compositing program (After Effects or Fusion.) In comp, I'll add effects like lighting and shading, shadows, and other effects or color processing. Sometimes, I'll import footage I created in another program (like, for example, the 3D animation in 'Scareplane'.)

When that's done, I'll render out a movie file of the scene, and import that footage to my video editor, and overcut the animatic's scene. (Tip: I use a separate track on you timeline. This way, I can do comparisons between the animatic and final footage when I need to.) Repeat this process for each scene until I've replaced every scene on my animatic with final footage.

Oh, almost forgot: remember that X-sheet I created in pre-production. This is a chart with information about each scene, including duration, description, and status. The status is indicated by a number, which automatically color codes that field. Red means the scene hasn't been started yet, yellow means the scene is in-progress, and green means it's done and imported to the edit. (Actually, I like to break things down into more specific stages, like layout, animation, compositing, and editing, but you get the idea. TBH, that's just me, and it really doesn't need to be THAT complicated.) Once all the red is gone and I'm mostly seeing green, I know I'm on my way to finishing.

Now I'm ready to mix my audio, which includes music and sound fx. I may have already inserted the final audio when I made the animatic but the mix can always be improved.

Once I'm happy with everything, I'll render out the final movie file. (Realistically, I may do that several times before I really consider it 'final'.)

You might have noticed that there is a mostly linear procedure to how I work. This is typical for most productions. Having clear stages in a production makes it easier to monitor my progress, and makes me feel like I'm actually getting stuff done. I don't recommend jump around too much to work on only the 'interesting' parts. Better to stick the plan if you want a finished film that looks like anything.

Anyway, that's my personal projects workflow.

Where I work, the workflow is a little different. I can't go into detail of course, but it's safe to say there are a lot more people involved in a studio production...I usually work with my animation supervisor, other animators, the art director, and the editor...but it's essentially the same process.

(Revision: Added a paragraph to Production & Post Production about using the X-sheet.)

[cgrotke]

I like to sketch and storyboard, and spend time thinking about what I want to accomplish, what style to do it in, and how to be efficient overall. Sometimes a script gets written. Usually lots of little thumbnail sketches. Sometimes I spend a lot of work on timing and make charts of where I want to be at specific frames.

Pen and paper, iPad with pen, Pixelmator Pro... all useful tools.

Work in MOHO starts with building characters and props, rigging character, importing or creating backgrounds, and importing sound files. I use the audio to help guide my overall timing. I spend the most time on building and rigging characters, and/or duplicating them and re-making them for a specific scene or purpose. It's my least favorite step, but I love what's possible.

I usually break the audio up by scene, and animate each scene by itself. Helps me stay organized, and I end up with a bunch of small movie file to assemble at the end.

To animate, I often get lip sync out of the way first, then do broad motions to get characters to their marks at the right time. I'll then work on what I'd consider a primary motion for the character - accentuate the dialogue, throw a ball, whatever... I want to make sure the main objective is accomplished. Then I do another pass to do secondary motions to support the primary actions, such add some anticipation or follow-through. I'll do a final animation pass to review and work on little things like eye blinks, or shifting of weight, or any extra that might give it a bit more life, and/or fix anything that is bothering me.

Somewhere in here I work out camera moves, usually near the end once everything is starting to be the way I want it.

Final step is putting it all together. I use iMovie for myself or send files to an editor. Sound FX and other polishing happens last, as does the almost inevitable re-rendering of files because of an error that gets noticed. : ) Audacity, Mixxx, GarageBand get used for audio. (I have lots of musical family relations, so I often ask around and get original music for my own work.)

...

Sometimes, though... I just play. I'll open MOHO and make a quick something and start banging on it, or try a tutorial I've seen, or see if I trick I thought up will work. Fun to try out things that aren't necessarily called for in a current production.

[arglborps]

I'm producing a scifi animated series as a one-man operation, so YMMV.

I'll be talking about my workflow at some point in my vlog, too.
https://www.youtube.com/KilianMuster

1. Write Script – I'd first draft out some beats / bullet point outline in any text editor. When I ready to start writing dialogue etc. I'd take the outline and flesh it out into proper screenplay format using Slugline 2
2. Create Artwork – If new characters appear I'd draft them in pencil, then do the colour draft using ProCreate (on a lowly 9" iPad with the old Apple Pencil – still does the job). This image I'd export to PNG and do the tracing work and final drawing in Moho (12.5.1). Then do the rigging in Moho.
   Regarding background artwork, I've switched to doing all backgrounds in Affinity Designer. This has the downside that the line thickness is fixed and zooming in and out will yield varying line widths, and I first thought this was a no-go, but ever since I noticed that Final Space is doing that excessively and it didn't really bother me, I though "screw it". But the upside is that I can tweak/swap/remove background elements and graphics, by simply replacing the externally referenced file and re-rendering, without having to tweak the Moho (or Motion) file itself.
3. Record Narration – Once the script is finalised, I'd record the whole narration (since I'm a one-man project) using GarageBand. I'll export every voice as a separate file, but basically one large file for the whole episode for every voice.
4. Animatic / Storyboard With the Artwork I'll create a few stills for key scenes within the story. I'll name all files according to the season/episode and scene numbers in the script something like s01e02-001-INT. SPACE STATION to keep things organised. So my "animatics" are very static (remember I'm a one-man operation, so I don't have to put in much detail to "get it" myself). I'll then put the visuals in the timeline in Final Cut Pro X. Then I'll import the previously recorded narration for every voice and setup up roles (a way to tag different kinds of audio for later separation/editing in FCPX). Once that is in, I'll tweak the overall rough timing and possibly even lay in some preliminary music to set the mood and pacing. Once I'm happy with the the overall episode length and pacing, I'll export the audio for every scene.
5. Character Animation – I'll import the audio for the scene that was previously exported from FCPX into Moho. Now depending on the backdrop I might import PNGs from Affinity as final backdrops and do the whole scene in Moho, but quite often I just put a backdrop in the Moho file as "stand in", because I'll often do the whole compositing and lighting in Apple Motion. For the character animation I'll first start with the lip synching. I'm using interpolation for most mouths, so the timing from any kind of automated lip sync never really worked for me, I've gotten really fast doing the lip synching now by hand, so that's how I'll do it. Once the mouth animation is done, I'll add any other movements/expressions for the scene.
6. Compositing – If I decide not to do the whole scene in Moho, I'll export the animated characters (sometimes separately) as PNG image sequences with alpha channel (the ProRes 4444 and 422 files that Moho exports have screwed up color profiles, so the colors are washed out, also the alpha channels that Moho creates for ProRess are not clean). So when I need alpha channels I always use image sequences, when I do the whole scene in Moho I sometimes just export in ProRes 422 anyway if the colours don't look too bad. Another great advantage of using image sequences is that if you need to fix any issues in a long scene afterwards, you only need to render out the few frames that you fixed, so that's much quicker than having to re-render the whole scene. Apple Motion can import image sequences as animations. It's super smooth to use those just like a video file, and Motion can still do anything I throw at it in real-time (I got an eGPU with a RX Vega 64, but even the built in graphic card can handle real-time compositing quite well). Then I'll place all characters and backdrops in 3D space, add lighting, particles, camera movement and finish the scene in Apple Motion. This will be exported to Final Cut as a ProRes 422 file.
7. Final Editing – I import the ProRess 422 file from Motion (or Moho) into my Final Cut project for the episode, but disable the audio for that footage (I only use the audio to make sure it's in sync with the already existing audio tracks that are separated for each voice and music). Then I'll add any kind of foley, like footsteps, punches, explosions, beeps, etc. Next there's final audio level adjustments, adding effects (echo, room etc.), add/finalise the music and levels for music, add the series' intro/outro with titles and finally add the closed captions and subtitles (I usually add subtitles for English, German, Japanese).

Again, this is just what I figured out to work for me, and since I'm not a trained animator or from the business YMMV greatly.

[MrMiracle77]

1. Script - written. I often just use wordpad for this, nothing fancy required. Establish who says what and what sort of scene is involved: interior/exterior, day/night, close-up, medium, distant shot. I'll usually wait a week after writing the script to record because I'll come up with changes while I'm making new assets.

2. Establish Assets - do I already have the assets for this work? If not, make a list of what I need to make in terms of characters, props, and backgrounds. If a background is complex, I'll render it as a PNG and then import it into the final shot.

3. Composite scene - put assets where they'll be in a given shot.

4. Record dialogue - done in Audacity. This is done later if I have to adjust the script.

5. Animate a scene - usually done linearly. Once I'm satisfied with a scene, I hand it off to the render farm for uncompressed video. I can work on a second scene while the first is rendering, then double-check for errors after the render is complete.

6. Initial edit pass - I use ffmpeg to convert my uncompressed video to YUV, then import it into Hitfilm (which has problems with the default uncompressed export from Moho for some reason). I do a rough cut in Hitfilm, looking for any gaps in the scenes that might require new animation.

7. Other Audio - music, foley, and ambiances are added and mixed into the scene.

8. Export - I do a 720p @ 6.5Mbps for youtube and an uncompressed 720p for supercuts further down the line.

9. Stress - realize that I have to start the whole process over again for the next video.

[chucky]

1 Script

2 Rough board/ script edit
3 Dialogue record
4 Tight Board/ animatic

5 Animate with imported audio/Animatic as guides ( save files with Scene folder containing Images, Audio, Video, any files from other apps, Archived Moho iterations and Render Sub folders

6 Export in png Stills.
Sometimes multipass using layer comps.

7 Comp/ Edit.
8 Render,

9 Make revisions , repeating steps 5 to 8 as many times as believable

10 Deliver,

11 Assume foetal position.

[LeviEnton]

Hi everyone,
I'm very new to this forum and want to start disscussing in the community as a long time moho user. All the workflows have been super interesting to read, so i thought i'd share mine too:

1. Writing the script in trelby after some brainstorming with my brother.

2. Drawing the backgrounds with pencil and paper and than scanning them.

3. Using gimp to turn the pencil strokes into black outlines

4. Colouring the backgrounds with MyPaint.

5. Recording the voicelines happens around here - i edit the voice lines to one big "audio book", so the timing is done beforehand.

5. Preproduction in Moho 11, Making new character models, 3d backdrops or scenery, sometimes they're just made on the spot..

6. Animating with the wigs, or frame by frame - depending on the scene.
I usually do the camerawork and compositing while animating, sometimes even before that - but usually all in Moho. Effectswork like smoke or explosions are either frame by frame, or from the moho content library - usually the ck particles since they improve about any scene.

7. After rendering I edit everything in Kdenlive, add SFX from the internet or record them myself and adding music - usually Kevin MacLeods.

Even when i plan everything out, my files are all super messy and patchwork so its super difficult to do corrections afterwards.
Hope you had fun reading this,

~ Levi

[SuperSGL]

Ideas and brainstorming
1a) Sometimes I'll create notes in windows sticky notes so I can easily add stuff on the fly. I've used notes in Moho as well with sketches of characters. And for those long story ideas I'll use Corel's Word perfect.

1b) Often times I will search Deviant Art for ideas on the subject matter of my film. I used this for my last animation for robot's, doing this gave me some more ideas I may not have thought of.

2.) I still use CorelDraw for backgrounds and Logo's or Signs. Things like buildings with lots of windows is much faster in Corel. Sketching characters... what ever is available.

3.) What I don't do AND SHOULD! is the animatic's. Although I will use markers in the time line for special effects, extreme body turns or actions. (so I spend a lot of time re-timing my animation)

4.) I'll export different scenes and put them back together with Corel Videostudio (warning Corel has no interest in fixing bugs in the program) Here I'll add some effects but mostly sounds and music and occasionally credits.

5.) For sound I have an old CD KABOOM with a ton of wav files and download freebies from sound Bible I'll edit these If I need to in FL Studio (or Cakewalk by bandlab which is now free)

6.) Music: Videostudio has some pre-made songs you can edit to be a certain length, but I also record my own music with a Roland FA 07. I used that to write a song for the robots animation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qbDjH9K3OM

[Dave@JOS]

How to work F-A-S-T!!!

Since January 2020, WORKING ALONE, I've completed 564 short cut-out animated comedy clips, all in Mojo. Yes, 564, usually under one minute in length. How do I do it? Be super organized, with simple production steps. I produce and distribute (4) new clips a week on my newsletter and website,[ b]jokeonastick.com[/b] - I have no team, I'm it. You'll be shocked at what's possible...

Happy to share tips, ask away. I'm not selling anything, no ads, everything is on Vimeo, ad-free. Simply browse the "Jokes" library, it's MASSIVE!.

Happy animating!

Dave