Exporting different passes in animation

[striker2311]

Hii everyone,
Is there a way to export different passes like vector line arts,colour, highlights and stuffs like that of a character (which is totally made in moho) separately?
So that it could be later imported in after effects and specific edits could be made to different parts of the character?

[slowtiger]

Short answer: no, not like that.

Longer answer: whatever you put on separate layers can be rendered separately. Use Layer Comps for this.

[striker2311]

Short answer: no, not like that.

Longer answer: whatever you put on separate layers can be rendered separately. Use Layer Comps for this.

OK, cool, I got that.
Thanks, slowtiger.

[Víctor Paredes]

When we were working on Wolfwalkers and My father's dragon, we had to deliver pretty complex exports with several levels of separation so the Comp team could create the final scenes using Nuke. The process we used is complicated, but I will try to explain it here, so maybe some ideas could be useful for you.

This process can be simplified a lot. Many of the of the effects and treatments done in comp could be done perfectly well directly in Moho, but since this movie mixed traditional and rigged animation, we had to follow the same rules used by the rest of the teams (like Cleanup, Ink&Paint, FX, etc), in order to keep the final result totally consistent.

Ok, here comes the explanation. It will be long, sorry.

First, all the sequences we exported had "MO" (for Moho) )at the beginning and a number so the comp team could recognize the department that created them and every part of the characters.
Depending on what was the element we were exporting, we had different naming conventions for each exported sequence

MO_01_BG: Background layers. Usually animated image layers
MO_01_CO: Only the colored fills, no strokes
MO_01_LI: All the fills are white and the strokes keep their color
MO_01_LB: All the fills are black and the strokes keep their color
MO_01_MA: If it is necessary, we exported the masks as black shapes with alpha background, so comp could apply them later
MO_01_TX: Many times the animation was hand drawn, but the textures were added with Moho
MO_01_SH: For shading, all the layers are set to be white and the shading is black
MO_01_HL: For highlights, all the layers are set to be black and the highlight is white
MO_01_CS: If we animated cast shadows, they were exported as black shapes

So, let's say we are working on the scene mfd007_sc014 (My father's dragon, sequence 07, scene 14).
Once that scene is approved we have the final Moho file saved and we never touch it again:
mfd007_sc014.moho

then we save a copy of that file with "_export" in the name:
mfd007_sc014_export.moho

Inside of that "_export" file, we create all the layer comps.
Let's suppose this scene has one human, a car and a dog.
From bottom to top, we create layer comps for each one

MO_010_CO_human
MO_010_LI_human
MO_010_LB_human
MO_010_SH_human
MO_010_HL_human
MO_010_CS_human
MO_020_CO_dog
MO_020_LI_dog
MO_020_LB_dog
MO_020_SH_dog
MO_020_HL_dog
MO_020_CS_dog
MO_030_BG_Car_body
MO_030_BG_Car_wheel_L
MO_030_BG_Car_wheel_R
MO_030_CS_Car_shadow

You can see that the numbers have an extra 0 at the end. We do that just in case comp asks us to separate some part of a character.
For instance, if they need the arm separated from the rest of the body, we create the
MO_011_CO_human_arm
MO_011_LI_human_arm
MO_011_LB_human_arm
(...)
By doing that, the order of the layer comps still works, even if we added a new layer comp in-between.

Now, once we have all the layer comps ready, we save several copies of the file:

mfd007_sc014_CO.moho
mfd007_sc014_LI.moho
mfd007_sc014_LB.moho
mfd007_sc014_SH.moho
mfd007_sc014_HL.moho
mfd007_sc014_CS.moho
mfd007_sc014_BG.moho

In mfd007_sc014_CO, we remove all the layer comps that are not CO.
Then we go to the Project Settings and in Render Style we set 'Stroke style' as 'None'

In mfd007_sc014_LI, we remove all the layer comps that are not LI.
Then we go to the Project Settings, set the background color as white and in Render Style we set 'Fill Style' as 'Background'

In mfd007_sc014_LB, we remove all the layer comps that are not LB.
Then we go to the Project Settings, set the background color as black and in Render Style we set 'Fill Style' as 'Background'



In mfd007_sc014_SH, we remove all the layer comps that are not SH.
Then we select all the layers with color and open the Layer Properties. In the General tab we Colorize the layers and set it to white.

Then, if they are not already black, we select the all the Shading layers and colorize them black.

In mfd007_sc014_HL, we remove all the layer comps that are not HL.
Then the process is similar to the one above, but to set the character black and the highlights white.

In mfd007_sc014_CS, we remove all the layer comps that are not CS.

In mfd007_sc014_BG, we remove all the layer comps that are not BG.
If an animated layer has Blending Mode applied, usually we set the blending Mode to 'normal' and add the blending mode as part of the name.
For example "MO_04_BG_Car_windows_Overlay".
That way, the comp team receives the normal layer and can apply the blending mode layer later.



To finish! Some tips to make the process a bit less tedious:
- Use the Layer Window filters! They are great and can save a lot of time
- Use 'tags' in your layers names. So you can quickly filter, for example, every Highlight in the project and colorize them all at once
- You can also use layer color labels. For us, if I remember well, a Green layer means it will be colorized in white. Purple means the layer will be colorized black.

Ok, sorry for the huge message! I hope it maybe could help you or someone else some day

[Greenlaw]

Hii everyone,
Is there a way to export different passes like vector line arts,colour, highlights and stuffs like that of a character (which is totally made in moho) separately?
So that it could be later imported in after effects and specific edits could be made to different parts of the character?

If you just want to do normal layer passes (bg, fg, char, etc.,) yes, use Layer Comps with Moho Exporter. Exporter has a button for breaking out all the passes automatically.

If you want to export the layers as a vector sequence to edit the shapes or animation in another program, I don't have any experience with that. But After Effects wouldn't be able to use animated data that way, not easily anyway. Better to just get the animation the way you want in Moho and export a normal image sequence.

If you want to easily edit line and shading effects, and you have After Effects, you should install the free OLM plugins. This is a collection of tools that allow you to recolor and apply various shading effects to imported footage. Important: If you're using OLM, be sure to render from Moho with anti-aliasing disabled. When you're done, you can apply anti-aliasing to your layers or precomp as a post effect using OLM Smoother.

Here's a handy trick: Make a reference of your character and change the styles in the reference so all the lines and fills are one full color (i.e., 255 red, 255 green, or 255 blue.) This is called an RGBA pass and it allows you to have up to four perfect mattes in a single render (the fourth is the alpha channel). This is a trick I used to use all the time in 3D animate before the Cryptomatte channel because available for EXR files (In many 3D programs, you put almost anything into the alpha so it's not necessarily the matte of the combined RGB channels.) Once you have this reference layer prepared, turn it into another Layer Comp pass for Moho Exporter.

BTW, in a future release, I would love to be able to get Cryptomatte and EXR out of Moho. With Cryptomatte any 3D object or material can be used as a matte in comp; I believe it's possible for the equivalent can be defined in Moho and used the same way.

[Greenlaw]

When we were working on Wolfwalkers and My father's dragon, we had to deliver pretty complex exports with several levels of separation...

Interesting...I was exploring just this process a few days ago after Wes pointed out these options to me. I saw potential in it so I'm glad to hear you guys got it working for you.

But, yes, this process is a bit convoluted. It would be great if a future version of Moho allowed users to generate these special layer passes more easily and add it as one more Layer Comp in the 'master' project for Moho Exporter rendering.

Thanks for sharing this info Victor! Looking forward to reading your post more carefully over the weekend.

[slowtiger]

This is great info! Shows again what you can achieve with Moho, but you'll need a lot of preparation and discipline. I confess that I'm lazy, and I've never had the necessity of rendering several passes of anything (other than 2 versions of a particle effect when something else had to be inside of it).

[striker2311]

When we were working on Wolfwalkers and My father's dragon, we had to deliver pretty complex exports with several levels of separation so the Comp team could create the final scenes using Nuke. The process we used is complicated, but I will try to explain it here, so maybe some ideas could be useful for you.

This process can be simplified a lot. Many of the of the effects and treatments done in comp could be done perfectly well directly in Moho, but since this movie mixed traditional and rigged animation, we had to follow the same rules used by the rest of the teams (like Cleanup, Ink&Paint, FX, etc), in order to keep the final result totally consistent.

Ok, here comes the explanation. It will be long, sorry.

First, all the sequences we exported had "MO" (for Moho) )at the beginning and a number so the comp team could recognize the department that created them and every part of the characters.
Depending on what was the element we were exporting, we had different naming conventions for each exported sequence

Woooooowwwww !!! Its super awsome info from you Victor.
Thanks a million bunch Victor.
I'd love to give it a try.

Sorry for late reply, I was away from my laptop for my college exams.

[striker2311]

Hii everyone,
Is there a way to export different passes like vector line arts,colour, highlights and stuffs like that of a character (which is totally made in moho) separately?
So that it could be later imported in after effects and specific edits could be made to different parts of the character?

If you just want to do normal layer passes (bg, fg, char, etc.,) yes, use Layer Comps with Moho Exporter. Exporter has a button for breaking out all the passes automatically.

If you want to export the layers as a vector sequence to edit the shapes or animation in another program, I don't have any experience with that. But After Effects wouldn't be able to use animated data that way, not easily anyway. Better to just get the animation the way you want in Moho and export a normal image sequence.

If you want to easily edit line and shading effects, and you have After Effects, you should install the free OLM plugins. This is a collection of tools that allow you to recolor and apply various shading effects to imported footage. Important: If you're using OLM, be sure to render from Moho with anti-aliasing disabled. When you're done, you can apply anti-aliasing to your layers or precomp as a post effect using OLM Smoother.

Here's a handy trick: Make a reference of your character and change the styles in the reference so all the lines and fills are one full color (i.e., 255 red, 255 green, or 255 blue.) This is called an RGBA pass and it allows you to have up to four perfect mattes in a single render (the fourth is the alpha channel). This is a trick I used to use all the time in 3D animate before the Cryptomatte channel because available for EXR files (In many 3D programs, you put almost anything into the alpha so it's not necessarily the matte of the combined RGB channels.) Once you have this reference layer prepared, turn it into another Layer Comp pass for Moho Exporter.

BTW, in a future release, I would love to be able to get Cryptomatte and EXR out of Moho. With Cryptomatte any 3D object or material can be used as a matte in comp; I believe it's possible for the equivalent can be defined in Moho and used the same way.

I never used that feature and even I just noticed it.

I will try to get hold of that. Thanks for the plugin too Greenlaw, I'll definitely try that.

Thanks Greenlaw again.

[Shade]

When we were working on Wolfwalkers and My father's dragon, we had to deliver pretty complex exports with several levels of separation so the Comp team could create the final scenes using Nuke. The process we used is complicated, ........

very useful information, thanks victor.
Never thought that render styles could be useful

[striker2311]

Hii everyone,
Is there a way to export different passes like vector line arts,colour, highlights and stuffs like that of a character (which is totally made in moho) separately?
So that it could be later imported in after effects and specific edits could be made to different parts of the character?

If you just want to do normal layer passes (bg, fg, char, etc.,) yes, use Layer Comps with Moho Exporter. Exporter has a button for breaking out all the passes automatically.

If you want to export the layers as a vector sequence to edit the shapes or animation in another program, I don't have any experience with that. But After Effects wouldn't be able to use animated data that way, not easily anyway. Better to just get the animation the way you want in Moho and export a normal image sequence.

If you want to easily edit line and shading effects, and you have After Effects, you should install the free OLM plugins. This is a collection of tools that allow you to recolor and apply various shading effects to imported footage. Important: If you're using OLM, be sure to render from Moho with anti-aliasing disabled. When you're done, you can apply anti-aliasing to your layers or precomp as a post effect using OLM Smoother.

Here's a handy trick: Make a reference of your character and change the styles in the reference so all the lines and fills are one full color (i.e., 255 red, 255 green, or 255 blue.) This is called an RGBA pass and it allows you to have up to four perfect mattes in a single render (the fourth is the alpha channel). This is a trick I used to use all the time in 3D animate before the Cryptomatte channel because available for EXR files (In many 3D programs, you put almost anything into the alpha so it's not necessarily the matte of the combined RGB channels.) Once you have this reference layer prepared, turn it into another Layer Comp pass for Moho Exporter.

BTW, in a future release, I would love to be able to get Cryptomatte and EXR out of Moho. With Cryptomatte any 3D object or material can be used as a matte in comp; I believe it's possible for the equivalent can be defined in Moho and used the same way.

I am really really amazed after seeing the versatility of MOHO today.

Though greenlaw, you told me to use comps, and it is great but I'm again facing an issue.

Suppose I have a character say in comp 1 I have to take only his strokes, in comp 2 I have to take only fill of the character and in comp3 I have to take highlights of the character.
But as soon as I create 3 comps and remove fill for taking only strokes in comp1 and fill automatically gets removed from every comp.

comp is only working for me for the case when I have to hide one layer in comp 1 and show in another comp.


But I want strokes, fills and highlight separately. how can I achieve that?

[Greenlaw]

Since you're using After Effect to composite Moho layers, I would just render out the character layers with no anti-aliasing and use the OLM Tools plugins I mentioned to affect the lines and fills. OLM Tools are After Effects plugins that let you select any color (i.e, lines, fills) and recolor it or apply various effects to it (special gradients, smearing, etc.) When you're done, you apply OLM Smoother to your precomp to anti-alias it. (All of these tools work best where there is no anti-aliasing in the source footage.)

The OLM plugins were developed by the Japanese anime studio OLM, and they're completely free. We sometimes use them at work for output from Moho and Harmony in After Effects, to apply special selection and shading effects, and to match footage from different animation programs. If holding out strokes and fills, and applying effects to these areas in post is what you want to do, it can be done more easily using Ae and OLM, and I highly recommend this approach.

If you don't use OLM, it helps to use easily keyable colors like 255 R, 255 G or 255 B. If you composite in a different program and don't have access to OLM, this can be a good way to go. (I'm still hoping that Moho gets support for EXR someday so we can take advantage of embedded channels like Material/Object IDs and Cryptomatte for working in compositing without rendering out a bunch of matte and mask passes, not to mention depth, normals (for lighting), and motion vectors (for motion blur).)

The Layer Comps approach can also be used for breaking out character elements (lines, fills, etc.,) work too but this can take a lot of extra work to set up. In my experience, The Layer Comps window is best for outputting layers based on whole scene elements, like background, midground and foreground layers, character and prop layers, and fx layers. In Moho Exporter, you just setup the output directory for the project, click the Split Selected By Layer Comps button, and Moho will save each pass to its own folder. (The Layer Comps window is useful for scene setups and rigging too, but I digress.)

Sometimes I'll use Layer Comps to output special texture and masking passes for characters. I do this for shading characters in a way that would be difficult in Moho but easy in a compositing program like Ae, Nuke or Fusion. (The Kung Fu Panda footage seen in my 2019 reel is a good example...I'm using it to get a stained paper look that deforms with the character but without stretching in weird ways.) Since I'm not using OLM for these passes, I usually render this with Antialiasing enabled.

[striker2311]

Since you're using After Effect to composite Moho layers, I would just render out the character layers with no anti-aliasing and use the OLM Tools plugins I mentioned to affect the lines and fills. OLM Tools are After Effects plugins that let you select any color (i.e, lines, fills) and recolor it or apply various effects to it (special gradients, smearing, etc.) When you're done, you apply OLM Smoother to your precomp to anti-alias it. (All of these tools work best where there is no anti-aliasing in the source footage.)

The OLM plugins were developed by the Japanese anime studio OLM, and they're completely free. We sometimes use them at work for output from Moho and Harmony in After Effects, to apply special selection and shading effects, and to match footage from different animation programs. If holding out strokes and fills, and applying effects to these areas in post is what you want to do, it can be done more easily using Ae and OLM, and I highly recommend this approach.

OK nice, greenlaw.
I understood what you are saying to me. I'll definitely try out what you have told me.

[Greenlaw]

FYI, just in case somebody is wondering "Why would you change the lines colors in post? Why not just set the color you want in Moho to begin with?"

That's a fair observation, but the reason I'd like an easy way to render a holdout matte for the strokes is to use it so the lines don't get changed by post effects applied to the character.

The common way light* or otherwise apply an effect to a character in post is by manipulating the character's alpha channel, usually by taking two or more instances of an alpha matte and offsetting or eroding one of them to create an edge highlight, edge shadow, and/or a light wrap, certain glow type effects. However, when the character design has outlines, this trick becomes obvious when the effect is equally applied to the lines as it is on the fill areas. This is where having a matte for the strokes in Moho comes into play.

Anyway, that's one reason I'd like to be able to separate style elements from Moho in a render, maybe as a layer comp option so I can have a little control over which characters and which stroke lines (based on custom style maybe?) to breakout during a Moho Exporter render.

I can list other reasons but this is probably a common one for animators who prefer to composite their animations in another program.

[striker2311]

FYI, just in case somebody is wondering "Why would you change the lines colors in post? Why not just set the color you want in Moho to begin with?"

That's a fair observation, but the reason I'd like an easy way to render a holdout matte for the strokes is to use it so the lines don't get changed by post effects applied to the character.

The common way light* or otherwise apply an effect to a character in post is by manipulating the character's alpha channel, usually by taking two or more instances of an alpha matte and offsetting or eroding one of them to create an edge highlight, edge shadow, and/or a light wrap, certain glow type effects. However, when the character design has outlines, this trick becomes obvious when the effect is equally applied to the lines as it is on the fill areas. This is where having a matte for the strokes in Moho comes into play.

Anyway, that's one reason I'd like to be able to separate style elements from Moho in a render, maybe as a layer comp option so I can have a little control over which characters and which stroke lines (based on custom style maybe?) to breakout during a Moho Exporter render.

I can list other reasons but this is probably a common one for animators who prefer to composite their animations in another program.

I totally agree with you there.
By separating the stroke lines from the fills and highlights, we can have more control over the final look of the character during compositing in another program.
You just have to play with your imagination and creativity to get the best results.