My father's dragon - Behind the scenes

[Víctor Paredes]

Some of the scenes rigged and animated by the Moho team for Cartoon Saloon's My Father's Dragon (Netflix, 2022).
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Edit:
And some tests I made early in the production


These are made over the artwork of many artists and teams at Cartoon Saloon.
Most of the tests you see here are not in the final movie, but it was fun to play with different ideas.
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Moho Animation Supervisor
Víctor Paredes

Lead Moho Animators
Pierre Gombaud, Kim Kelly

Moho Animators
David Cockburn, Mansour Moawad, Ahdieh Modarres, Regis Rodríguez

Moho Coordinator
Sarah O'Gorman

Property of Netflix

Music: Western Spaghetti - Chris Haugen

[Greenlaw]

Fantastic work Victor! Congrats to the entire crew!

[CartoonM!ke]

Wow

very nice work. Gonna have to watch it on 'flix this weekend, for certain. Thanks for the BTS look!

[gilcartunista100]

I WATCHED this weekend!!Fantastic work Vítor! Congratulations to the whole team!

[sang820]

Oh~~~Huge workload! Victor and his team are great~~~

[JoelMayer]

This screams for a webinar featuring lots of BTS stuff

[jowzi]

oh great work congratulation for you and for all your team .

[jowzi]

Great job it looks great!

[JoelMayer]

Some of the scenes rigged and animated by the Moho team for Cartoon Saloon's My Father's Dragon (Netflix, 2022).

Really cool Victor!

I got a question, maybe somebody knows the answer. I can't for the life of me figure out a good way of having a simple head turn from 3/4 or front to side and then cut into the jaw so to speak to get that gap like in this tiger turn example:




In Toon Boom i know how to do it, i can just add a cutter and cut into both the mouth and head at the same time whenever i want but with Moho it's a bit more convoluted with the Layer Masking etc. I've never seen it done successfully on a more complex character, that probably already has masking going on with the mouth anyway.

Or is it just a completely new head anyway? I went through this sequence frame by frame and saw that it was mainly a lot of layer shoveling so maybe you can share some insights Thanks!!!

[lucasfranca]

Some of the scenes rigged and animated by the Moho team for Cartoon Saloon's My Father's Dragon (Netflix, 2022).

Really cool Victor!

I got a question, maybe somebody knows the answer. I can't for the life of me figure out a good way of having a simple head turn from 3/4 or front to side and then cut into the jaw so to speak to get that gap like in this tiger turn example:




In Toon Boom i know how to do it, i can just add a cutter and cut into both the mouth and head at the same time whenever i want but with Moho it's a bit more convoluted with the Layer Masking etc. I've never seen it done successfully on a more complex character, that probably already has masking going on with the mouth anyway.

Or is it just a completely new head anyway? I went through this sequence frame by frame and saw that it was mainly a lot of layer shoveling so maybe you can share some insights Thanks!!!

Yes, in moho it would be very easy too if in the subtractive mask we could mark the exclude stroke, it would save a lot of work. I know that technically this is not as simple as it sounds, but it would help a lot!

[Greenlaw]

I use a fully closed head shape that morphs from front to 3qtr views, and past that angle I'll switch to a version of the head with a cutout built in and morph that version into the side view. (Most of the time, I don't even bother with the morph; it's not often necessary when the character is very active.) This is easy to do using switch layers. Then, the mouth switch layer switches to a different (but matching) set of drawings for the side view. I keep the multiple mouth switches and their drawings in sync so I only need one SBD for mouth animations regardless of head angle.* (Actually, I use two SBDs but the second one is used to reshape the mouth drawings depending on emotion, so I don't need to create extra drawings for that.)



To assist the animator using this control, I like to connect a non-rendering Note layer with the mouth shape name attached to the Mouth SBD. The names in this Note layer change in sync with the mouth shapes.

You can see examples of this all over the original Boss Baby TV series I worked on a few years aog. Prior to Boss Baby, I just let the head shape clip the mouth shapes, without bothering with the cutout. This is a basic trick that worked fine for The Croods, Puss In Boots, and King Julien, but the Boss production wanted their character heads to have the cut out, and the above setup was what I came up with. (Some of my Boss Baby animation can be seen in my 2019 demo reel.)

When I need to reshape the mouth and head for large exaggerated poses like in your drawing, I use the Magnet tool to reshape the existing drawings. I'll build something like that into a rig only if it's something I'm sure will be used again frequently, otherwise, it's just not worth the bother. (Sometimes it's easy enough to simply save the poses as a regular action, and then just copy/paste the keys.)

Hope this helps.

*Note: These days, I prefer using the Switch Selection Window for mouth shapes instead of SBDs because it's so easy to use and the name of every drawing appears under the window. The downside with this method is that I need to select each switch layer directly, and unfortunately Moho doesn't have a good native way for selecting any Switch Layers directly when I have groups inside the Switch layer. Layer Shortcuts is an great third party tool that addresses this issue but unfortunately, it breaks when I import a character that has it applied. I'm still hoping we get a native solution for this...it would make using the Switch Selection Window even more preferable.

[Greenlaw]

Oh, if anybody is wondering about the extended lines, it's a trick to preserve the curve of a path when it crosses into another path. It's very useful when you intend to reshape paths during animation, and since they don't have shapes applied they don't render. Just think of them as another type of point handle like Bezier.

[Franky1966]

There's a tutorial for that:

[Víctor Paredes]

Hello! Thank you very much for the comments. I'm very happy about what we could do with Moho and also very grateful with Cartoon Saloon for allowing us to experiment and create animation that is normally done traditionally.

I just added two more videos to the top of this thread. This time is only tests and gifs made by me mostly during the beginning of the production (when the entire Moho team was only me ).

For the tiger's mouth I used an old technique. It involves a couple references and masking.
It's a bit hard to explain, but please take a look at this .moho file:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/8qeksthuwh9c7 ... moho?raw=1
There, you can animate the "mouth original" layer.
To understand what is happening, check the masking options of each layer.