Moho Forum

This looks interesting. I have not had time yet to play with it. It's a free (by donation) character rigging tool for After Effects.
http://duduf.net/?page_id=151

I used DuIK with AE on a couple of productions in the past. Combined with the native Puppet and Liquify tools, it's actually a great add-on for an AE. The main issue is that DuIK can get painfully slow with complex characters that have many layers and masking effects. Also, since you can't scrub audio in AE, it can get a little awkward for syncing events and long dialog. Still, it's fun to use and, if all you have is AE to work with, DuIK greatly expands what you can do in it.

I guess the big question here is how does AE/DuIK stack up to ASP? Well, as far as I'm concerned, it's apples and oranges.

ASP is a dedicated animation program with many features specific to character animation. It's generally faster to set up characters and animate them in ASP than it is in DuIK. ASP's compositing and effects tools, on the other hand, are fairly basic.

AE is primarily a compositing and effects program, and that's it strength. DuIK adds better character animation capabilities but it's still somewhat basic compare to a dedicated cartoon animation program like ASP.

In my opinion, the two programs compliment each other nicely, especially if you use ASP's excellent Layer Comps feature to output passes for AE (or for any compositing program.) Also, I'm grateful to have Liquify, Puppet and other warping tools available in AE for tweaks and quick fixes that might take too much time and effort to address in ASP.

G.

I totally agree with you, Greenlaw.

I have use After Effects Duik rig at a Animation class.

I also agree with Greenlaw and would add:

1) There is no visual feed back with AF, You don't see the bones, just the controls.

2) Names matter, if you drop rig. (A set rig of a biped)

3) AF can use layer functions. A math control to the layer.

Dale

Talking about math controls on layers with duik in AE...
Is it possible in Moho to loop just one layer of a character? For example for an animated facial expression while the rest of the body moves differently?
And to change clothes of a character (so i dont need to change the whole charactee if only want change clothes)

Greenlaw wrote:...Also, since you can't scrub audio in AE, it can get a little awkward for syncing events and long dialog...

FYI: I've since learned that audio scrubbing is possible in AE, it's kind of a hidden feature. To scrub audio in AE you need to hold down the Ctrl key.

Thank goodness! I use this all the time now.

fantasmo wrote:Is it possible in Moho to loop just one layer of a character? For example for an animated facial expression while the rest of the body moves differently?

Sure, you can animate any layer independently. You can animate bone layers, vertex layers, and switch layers each by themselves, or use Smart Bone Actions to control any of these together. Moho is super flexible that way.

And to change clothes of a character (so i dont need to change the whole charactee if only want change clothes)

It depends on your setup. With images, you can sort of swap out images by making another directory with different clothes art but using the same file names. Then, you just change the names of the directories and point Moho to the other directory if it asks where the images are. That's kind of a hack solution but it should work. This assumes the clothing art is the same scale and reasonably covers the same areas.

If the clothing is very different, you're better off creating another rig since you may also need to modify the rig. You could just duplicate the existing rig in that case and manualy swap the images that are different, and then make rig adjustments as needed.

Then, just place the different versions of the character in the Library and draw the version you need from there.

If the clothing needs to be changed 'interactively' for some reason, you can probably just use a Switch Layer setup for this.

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If the artwork is vectors, you'll need to replace the art in the layers and save the rig as a new rig. As with the above, you can also create different clothing options in a Switch layer but, IMO, that's probably not a practical approach in normal circumstances. It really depends on your character design and animation workflow of course.

Thank you for your reply.
Being able to just switch clothes (clothes with same sizes) would be very convenient.
I will try that switch layer thing how it works...