Get the colors and shapes to stay the same from Illustrator

[Toontoonz]

The problem: I draw my characters in Illustrator CS, export them out of Illustrator as a legecy file version 8. Then I import them into Moho.

Then some problems begin:
1. The colors are not the same as in Illustrator - either a different shade of the color (usually much, much lighter -except for black and white) or a totally different color; for example, it was pink in Illustrator and imported into Moho it is dark green.

2. The drawings have lost their shape. What had crisp angled edges in Illustator soemtimes comes into Moho with rounded, curvy shapes. The clean curves drawn in Illustrator come into Moho as not the same thing I drew in Illustrator - a little or a lot off.
The only time Moho seems to correctly read the drawing is when everything has square shapes, curves and sharp angles seem to cause problems. I have experimented with various things and can´t figure out what is causing this on the Illustrator or Moho end.

Anyone have any suggestions on how to remedy these export and importing of drawings from Illustator into Moho? Thanks!

[LittleFenris]

The color problem maybe be that your Illustrator file is saved in CMYK color mode and maybe Moho only reads RGB color space.

As for the curves and sharp edges I'm not sure, I have imported a few fairly complex characters in from eps or AI files and they were perfectly fine.

[Lost Marble]

Moho "tries" to read the CMYK colors, but Adobe has lots of patents on that and Moho can only do a simple approximation. If you switch to RGB, the results should be better.

As far as shapes that don't look right: Moho and Illustrator represent vector shapes in very different ways. Importing an Illustrator file into Moho requires a certain amount of "approximation". For some artwork, this works great and the imported shapes look fine. In other cases, the vector shapes are going to need some cleanup after importing them.

[janimatic]

hey lostmarble,

thank you for your reply

Look at this it is not CMJK and it's still not primary color result as it should be :

http://animatic.no-ip.com/projets/vrac/ ... g_MOHO.png

I wish i could check the moho code myself to save you time!
If at least i could now the exact color offset i would fix it through lua for now...

About the shape troubles i found this workaround in illustrator :
path > add anchor points
it helps moho to preserve the shapes

will you fix the RGB color conversion ?

thank you very much!

[Toontoonz]

I did a test to compare an RGB and CMYK file created in Adobe Illustrator CS and brought into Moho.

I opened a new CMYK file in Illustrator and made two shapes using the Primary colors Red and Yellow. As a second test I added anchor points as janimatic suggested in his post to one set of the graphics.

I then opened up a new RGB file in Illustartor and did the same thing again.
(Each was a new file opened from the start in either RGB or CMYK - I did not switch the color swatches - each was totally RGB or CMYK.)

Here you can see the results taken directly from Moho.
http://www.toontoonz.com/yelredtest01.png

The CMYK file translated the colors correctly, the RGB file has lots of problems with the color in Moho.

Note that the shapes stayed the same in either RGB or CMYK.

Also note that adding anchor points in Illustrator - as suggested by "janimatic" in a previous post- helped the round shape problems that were occuring in Moho.
Janimatic´s work around for the shape problems in Moho seems to work so far, but I will have to test further whether it is better to use CMYK to work in Illustrator.

[LittleFenris]

I did a little testing of my own. I had done a couple characters in Flash, then found Moho and decided that was a much better way to go for character animation, so I exported them from Flash so I could redo them a bit easier in Moho instead of starting completely over. Any ways, here are the 2 ways I tried and you can see the dramaticly different results:

Original Flash document:


Exported from Flash as an EPS 3.0 file (this is a render from Moho right after importing):


Exported from Flash as an AI 6.0 file (this is a render from Moho right after importing):

[Lost Marble]

janimatic and Toontoonz - can you post links to the Illustrator files themselves? It's interesting that you get very different results with RGB mode, and I'd like to see what's going on in the actual Illustrator files.

[janimatic]

hey LM!

please just browse in this directory here are .ai sample files :

http://animatic.no-ip.com/projets/vrac/moho/


best regards!

(BTW can i access "named styles" through lua API? i just posted this question in the scripting forum)

[Lost Marble]

janimatic - Actually, both your colorBug and shapeBug files appear to be in CMYK format. colorBug has a little weirdness that Moho doesn't like - we can fix that to get a better import result, but they're still both CMYK.

[Toontoonz]

I will email you the four different RGB and CMYK .ai files for your review.

I am interested in what you can discover from them to see what the problem is.

[Toontoonz]

Just for the heck of it I wanted to see what a bit more complex drawing looked like when created in Illustrator CS and brought into Moho.

Here is a link to the comparison:
http://www.toontoonz.com/womandollhandsup.jpg


After I exported/imported straight from Illustrator to Moho I tried the Illustrator to Flash MX to Moho idea presented above by another poster. In Flash the drawing looked just like it does in Illustrator. Once it was exported as an Illustrator file and imported into Moho did the changes occur.

There are some definite color and line weight situations when going from Illustrator (or Flash) to Moho.

[Lost Marble]

I think I know what's going on here, and I may have a workaround for you. But, can I first see this file too? You can email it if you don't have a website to post it.

[7feet]

Well, heres my bit of input on the color issue. Now, I really haven't got a clue where the difficulty comes in. But I did spend a bit of time going over the file format specs from Adobe ( actually it's for Illustrator 7, pub. 1998, but I'm led to understand that it's functionally the came for version and looking at one of the example Illustrator files (the shapeBug_8.ai file). And heres what I got.

In the section that describes your drawing, there's a line for each object to give it a color. In the specs it sez the line should be 3 numbers, between 0 and 1, that describe the amount of each color, red, green, blue. And then an "Xa" to say it's an RGB color. And that's it. Now, heres the line that describes the color of the red circle in that file:

Code: Select all

0 0.9922 1 0 1 0 0 Xa

Hmmm. Whaddaya know, even though it's supposed to specifically describe an RGB color, there the CMYK values are at the front of the line. And if you plug those selfsame 3 first numbers in as if they are actually supposed to be talking about an RGB color, you get exactly the color bollox that you are seeing. Curiouser and curiouser.

At a guess, someone at Adobe got a little sloppy and let something slip into their "legacy" format this time around. If this is indeed the case, then it should be just a case of Moho looking at the "Creator Version" line at the head of the file, and if it says 11 (CS), then compensate for some idiocy. That may also be why the CMYK files come up correctly. Have they tagged the RGB colors onto the front of the CMYK lines? Seems like a sure bet...

Hope that makes that one fairly easy to solve. For the shapes, I don't even wanna thing about what a huge pain it must be to get Bezier curves to translate happily into Moho's way of describing curves. Ack!

--Brian

[Lost Marble]

Toontoonz, thanks for emailing the file. The reason the lines on the character's arms and face look so thick is a mis-match between the dimensions of the Illustrator file and the Moho file.

In this case, the Illustrator file is supposed to be 736x673 pixels. I assume you're importing it into a default Moho project of 320x240 pixels. Moho is importing the lines as if they were at the 736x673 dimensions. We'll get this fixed for the next update, but for now here's a workaround:

When importing an Illustrator file into Moho, first match up the dimensions of the two files. Either resize the Illustrator file to match the Moho file, or chnage the Moho file to match the Illustrator file. In this particular case, follow these steps:

1. Set the Moho project dimensions to 736x673. (Use the File->Project Settings menu command.)

2. Import the Illustrator file.

3. Re-set the Moho project dimensions to whatever you actually want them to be.

The line width should be much better after following these steps.

[janimatic]

hey 7feet, LM,

thank for this very usefull info
i just posted some script workaround for the color problem : replace color

http://www.lostmarble.com/forum/viewtop ... =6467#6467

I hope it will save some of your time!

regards