Uneven strokes using a special brush

[Víctor Paredes]

Hello. I have been playing with the brushes in Moho, trying to create a brush that could paint some kind of uneven line width (but independent to the actual width of each point). Something like this:

The brush system in Moho is not really able to create this kind of line, but I found a workaround
Here's an example. From left to right: no strokes, strokes with no brush & strokes with this new uneven brush

The trick is I created an 'animated brush' (it's just a circle changing its size) and exported that animation as an image sequence

And then put that sequence in a folder inside of the Moho's Brushes folder (in the Custom Content folder)
If select the new brush and uncheck 'Random order', Moho will follow the sequence order to paint the brushes, smoothly making the brush smaller and bigger across the line.
In a way, it is as if the vector line were the timeline

Here you can download the brush with some settings that work well for me:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ckav9thpcmz99 ... .zip?raw=1
And here's another WIP example I'm preparing:


Please let me know what you think and if you have any other ideas that could work with this 'animated brushes'.

[Greenlaw]

That's very cool Victor!

It's been a few years since I last experimented with custom brushes. Your trick above inspires me to jump in again.

[Daxel]

Looks cool. I am interested in how it looks while being animated. If the strokes change from frame to frame, it could be a nice effect to simulate a more FBF style, where the lineart is more dynamic than it usually is in Moho animations.

[Greenlaw]

Good point.

My guess is that the stroke pattern should be stable from frame to frame so long as Minimize Frame-To-Frame Randomness is enabled. When it's off, it will chatter too much. However, it might be fine with higher frame intervals. (I think Moho's brush settings will respect different frame intervals in Moho but I usually apply this effect in After Effects using Posterize Time.)

What might still occur is the stroke can appear to 'slide' slightly as the curves stretch and contract, but in most normal situations I haven't seen that as objectionable.

I'm going to have to try this myself tonight and see what happens.

[Greenlaw]

Yay, I got Victor's brush working here and it's really fun!

If I have time tonight, I'll post something using the technique.

[funksmaname]

This is brilliant! Good work Victor

And congrats on your 8000th post @Greenlaw

[Greenlaw]

Woah! That sure snuck up on me.

[Víctor Paredes]

Thank you, guys!
I'm playing with some other ideas today. Here's another brush, in case you want to try it

[Víctor Paredes]

OK, another example

[MrMiracle77]

Outstanding technique.

I've tried achieving this by giving line width a 'noisy' animated interpolation for one frame, but the same 'noise' interpolation was applied to every point along the line, so the whole line just got thicker and thinner all at the same time.

[Onionskin]

For uneven strokes i use vector noise settings, line count must be more than 1, offset and scale pixeles how you prefer.

[Víctor Paredes]

Yes, the vector noise settings can be very interesting too! Thanks for the idea, Onionskin.
Some time ago I was playing with the idea of brushes + vector noise for texturing.


I think there's a lot of potential there.

Now, what I'm liking the most about having the variable width in the brush itself is the amount of control you have over what you are drawing.
With vector noise you can get great results, but personally I never feel I'm in full control of the final result.

[Víctor Paredes]

Maybe you already watched this one, since we shared it on the Moho social media.
When I was playing with these new brushes, I saw this illustration created by Chris Chatterton and thought it could be fun trying to reproduce the style.

Here you have from left to right the original version, the one with Moho vectors and the construction curves:


The final result in Moho is not exactly like the illustration, but I'm happy with how close the 'feeling' is.

Here you can see a higher resolution version and some behind the scenes too:

There's some extra work on the brushes and textures. The setup is pretty similar to the Poorly researched dinosaurs I shared some weeks ago

[Greenlaw]

I just saw this a few minutes ago on YouTube...it's cute and very well done!

I'm always impressed by how much quality you can get from Moho through simple and straightforward techniques. I think some users, especially newer ones, feel they need to construct highly complex rigs to get good animation in Moho, but your videos demonstrate how it can be more effective to work smarter, not harder.

Thanks for sharing your animation and BTS explanation Victor, and please keep up the great work!

[Onionskin]

Natural pencil look and feel with that brush is great, the best I ever saw for Moho