Moho Forum

Hi,

Since After Effects (and also Rubberhose/Duik) offers horrible sluggish slow character animation in a very non-intuitive way, I started with Moho specifically for character animation.

Our studio mainly creates explanimation videos, which we design using Illustrator and pushing the artwork to After Effects with Overlord for animation. I'd very much like to do the character animation part in Moho, are there any workflows / tips&tricks available that describe handy production workflows concerning this? The final compositing will be done in After Effects.

Thanks for reading, greets!

There are several workflows possible, depending on style, looming deadline, and artists involved. Here's some thoughts:

1. Do a good storyboard and get your client's OK before you start anything. Planning ahead is especially needed for all assets' dimensions, like for close-ups. Do layouts, import into Moho, use as reference for creating/placing elements. Think of necessary transitions, especially if you do something in a "one take" style without cuts but with pans/rotations.
2. Depending on your style, it might be better to create vector characters in Moho instead of Illustrator because they're much better to animate.
3. Anything rigid, like props, backgrounds, or even body parts for cut-out, should be imported as bitmaps, this makes Moho much faster.
4. Break up the project into short pieces with own project files. Although it's perfectly possible to do 5 min in one Moho project, navigating the timeline is hell.
5. If you multiply something, see that you do all animation first, then render this element as video file and re-import, then multiply. Anything else will cause long rendering times.

Of course you already know about layer comps for rendering.

Illustrator's usefulness depends on how you intend to rig and animate in Moho. Because vectors are resolution independent, the AI art is good for backgrounds and props. It should be fine for non-deforming or minimally deforming characters too. Just be aware that not all AI vector properties will transfer to Moho intact, even when you use SVG.

IMO, creating vector art in a separate program is less useful for fully deforming characters because getting good rig deformations require optimal point placement and curvature settings, especially when Smart Bones are involved. Since this level of point control requires manually plotting the points, I personally don't see an advantage in doing this in Illustrator instead of directly inside Moho. But go ahead and try it. It really depends on what your expectations are. In my experience with using AI for character art, I spent way too much time adjusting and re-working the AI art to work properly with my rigs, and I found it was easier to just create the art directly inside Moho. But depending on your designs and how you plan to animate them, your experience may differ.

As for using AE, we use AE with Moho at my workplace all the time, and Moho's Layer Comp system goes hand-in-hand with it. At the most basic level, using Layer Comps to simply split out the characters from Moho, you'll find it's faster to comp and render the characters with the BG art in AE. Also, where I work, we may be asked to revise animations often so having Moho render fewer pixels (i.e, no background) can be a huge timesaver. At a more advanced level, you can use Layer Comps to break out the parts of a character for sophisticated lighting, stacking and masking effects that would be difficult or impossible to do inside Moho alone.

Sometimes, I may even add AE deformers like Puppet and Liquify to the Moho renders. Whatever works!

Using a compositing program also allows you to merge in animation from other programs like a 2D frame-by-frame animation program or a 3D animation program.

(For my personal projects, I may use AE or Fusion for compositing...or both.)

Hope this helps.

(P.S., I just read Slow Tiger's response and, I agree with all his points. Actually, we kind said many of the same things, but I hope this was still helpful.)

This fairly recent video tutorial series might be of interest:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz9hvjmK6QQ

Marc

@slowtiger & Greenlaw
Thanks guys for your helpful insights. We always try to split up our videos into seperate Ae projects (max 15 second scenes), which when finished are imported into the master Ae project and immediately proxied to Quicktime Animation (with alpha backgrounds for way smaller filesizes). This gives us really good performance and a fast final render for the client (we use Handbrake for the final mp4 render, since the colors are more accurate than Adobe's Mainconcept H264 codec).

I am currently drawing isometric characters, that have pretty easy walkcycles and not a lot of detail (close to stick figures). This should be a good way to test our Moho > Ae workflow.

@mrc
Wow. Amazing tutorial, what a great guy haha.

His reasoning: "all the illustration tools that Illustrator offers are more valuable to me, than the time it costs to adjust the SVG import to seperate layers in Moho." is what motivated me to use Illustrator for the art. Though, I guess in the end, learning to illustrate using Moho would give the best animation results.

I'd very much like to see your isometric walk cycle! Can't remember having seen anything like that done in Moho.

Here's the first version =)

View My Video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz9hvjm ... qc6FCe4Wya

A good series by Jared Hundley with that workflow, hope it's useful.