Here are some thoughts and suggestions for anyone interested. It's mostly stuff I've talked about before, and some of it may sound repetitive to anyone who's been in these forums for a while. But if you're new to 2D puppet animation or to using Moho, this post might be insightful...
IMO, storyboarding is crucial for getting a production completed...period. When I storyboard my productions, regardless of scale, it helps me plan for what I'm going to need. This includes everything I need to draw, how I want to animate it, and how I'm going to rig it.
In my own projects, I typically build a single general-purpose rig for characters that can achieve at least 70% of my posing needs. This rig might be capable of full 360-degree turns, but only if the storyboard calls for it. The rig is also not so over-engineered that I can't easily adapt and modify it for special situations. This type of rig takes the most time to create, but it can pay off during the animation stage.
I avoid adding any Smart Bone controls that don't actually help me animate cleanly and quickly. When a rig is hard to animate because I'm keyframing too many separate controls, it probably needs to be simplified. Don't make controls for anything you can easily keyframe directly.
When I have multiple characters in the project, I'll repurpose my general-purpose rig as much as possible for each character. At the simplest level, this is just a matter of replacing the artwork. At a more advanced level, it can require transforming bones, rebinding the art, and editing or creating new Smart Bone Actions. It's another reason to keep things reasonably adaptable...I don't like using rigs that break easily when I want to change it.
By the way, it's possible to transfer body parts and Smart Bone Actions between characters without breaking them, but the procedure can be a bit complicated. I've explained some of my techniques in other posts, but a better way today is to use Kuzkuz's
MR_Transform Rig Tool. This is an advanced rigging tool, but it's well worth learning, and it can simplify sharing rig parts between characters.
When a shots calls for poses and animations that a general-purpose rig can't achieve, I will make a quick
one-off rig that performs only the one or two tasks required in the shot. This rig type is very simple, and I may not bother adding any controls because this rig might never be used again.
Another type of one-off is to draw a short FBF sequence. This doesn't typically involve rigging (although it certainly can in Moho,) but in some situations, it can be faster to draw an FBF animation than to rig a puppet to perform the same animation. The result can be more expressive, too. Previously, I would create my FBF sequences in another animation program, but with the recent improvements to the Freehand tool and FBF layer in Moho 14, I think I'll be drawing my FBF animations for Moho completely inside Moho now.
If you look at my very first Moho short
Scareplane (2014), I created this in Moho 9.5, using a general-purpose rig for each character that I modified as necessary from shot to shot. There are a few one-off rigs here and there for simple motions, like the close-up of Toullie's paw pressing the seat button, or the side-view of sister jumping, or all three characters tumbling. There are even some hybrid FBF sequences that were drawn and animated using the Switch Layer because Moho didn't have the FBF layer back then.
This short film was conceived as a big learning project for me. When I drew the storyboard, I kept in mind all the features I read about in the manual that I wanted to learn. I created the short film on a laptop during my lunch breaks at work, staying up late at home in the evenings, and hanging out at the public library on weekends. The bulk of the production took about six weeks to complete because I had given myself a fixed deadline.
But before I started rigging and animating the short, I spent several days ahead of production where I just thought about it a lot and created my storyboard. I also experimented with Moho a lot, creating many throwaway tests, much like the simple examples I post in these forums. They're just tests so I try not to make them fancy or complicated; they just need to show me how a feature works so I know how to apply them to real work later.
Hope this helps.
