Need advice on which software to use

[NealF]

Hi.

I'm going to start working on a project that's about 1 hour long. It's mostly music videos strung together to make a story.
I've been going back and forth watching tutorials to see which software would be best for this. I have Moho Pro 12, Clip Studio Paint EX and Opentoonz and Tahoma2D.

I'm mainly familiar with CSP and Moho but neither one does everything I need. Here are the main things I'm looking for:

1. Good Raster drawing tools for a freehand drawing look.
2. I'll be doing FBF as well as digital puppets.
3. And, most important, I need to be able to scrub the audio since it's all going to react to the music. So I'll need it for lip sync, character moves and scene changes to accurately find the audio beats. Estimating is out of the question.

I love CSP for it's drawing tools. But it doesn't have audio scrubbing.
I love Moho because it does have it. But Moho's not great for the rough lines I need. (My computer won't allow me to upgrade to Moho 13.)
Opentoonz, at first glance looks like it'll do everything I need. But it's a totally new learning curve.

If anyone has some experience with Opentooz or Tahoma2D, I'd love to hear it before I put in the time to learn it.

Of course, I'm open to using all together if I find a workable workflow.

Thanks.

[MrMiracle77]

But Moho's not great for the rough lines I need.

Just the other day, Victor posted a topic on simulating uneven/hand-drawn strokes with some very interesting results that you may want to check out:

https://www.lostmarble.com/forum/viewto ... 10#p210410

Animation tools don't usually have audio scrubbing, or detailed audio features at all. Audacity can divvy-up a track into clip-sized pieces; it's also free, but not completely intuitive. Davinci Resolve is a free editor that I use to composite my audio and animation. Its system requirements can be a little steep, depending how many tracks you're working with.

[NealF]

Thanks.
I'll check it out.

Moho and Opentoonz allow you to scrub audio. Clip Studio doesn't.

I don't see how anyone could animate much without it. It would take a very long time just to do lip syncing. Moho make that easy. Relying on the visual wave form is very tough.
Also, unless you're in a workflow where there will be someone adding music last, it's often important to be able to change camera angles and scenes exactly on the beat.
Since my case is mainly music videos, that's of prime importance.

[slowtiger]

1 hr long, that's a big project already. Of course you will split it up in sequences (songs) and these into scenes, otherwise you'll get lost while trying to navigate. You need good planning as well as a good storyboard. And you need a video editor to splice everything together, as well as make adjustments to sound and sync.

As for sync: you can always create temp tracks for everything. In this case you could do just a demo lipsync in Moho (standard mouth shapes are good enough), then render this scene as video and import into any drawing software (I'm not familiar with Opentoonz or Clip Studio). Using this as a guide you easily can draw the mouth shapes in any style you want and have the timing correct.

Here's some stuff I did recently. In the first video the lip sync is done entirely in Moho, as you can guess by the smooth movements.
https://vimeo.com/796390143

In the second the lip sync was done in TVPaint. Note that the line quality/style is the same in both programs.
https://vimeo.com/769549705

And this is some dialogue test I did just this afternoon in TVPaint:
https://twitter.com/slowtiger/status/16 ... 5068456977
It's totally possible to recreate this style in Moho. It's also possible to combine stuff, like draw a face without mouth and eyes in a bitmap program, then import into Moho and create mouth shapes and eyes (because you will re-use those a lot) and put them on top of that. If you chose your style carefully nobody will notice.

[NealF]

That's some really good looking stuff.

Is the woman's face (eyes and half tone skin) done in a raster pgm? Looks great. Love the way you've captured the spirit of the music in the motion on both videos.

I like your idea about doing the lip sync, etc. in moho and using it as a guide in Clip Studio. Just wish there was a way to simplify the work load. With an hour long project, anything I could do to make it simpler is paramount.

And yes, I would be doing it in sections and assembling in FCP X.

[slowtiger]

The one most important factor, to me, is storyboarding. Without a decent storyboard you can't plan. You need to break down everything and then analyze what you're going to do: in which scenes will I use the same view of that character, what else am I going to re-use, do I really need that many BGs, and so on. Only after that you can decide about software.

The woman made of scrap parts: all parts done in TVPaint, the eye blink I traced from some video, the mouth shapes are done in Moho. All parts rigged in Moho and animated there.

[NealF]

Very well done.
Worked well with the music. I'm a schtickler for editing to music. I also have no idea if I spelled "schtickler" correctly.

Thanks for the tips.

[Greenlaw]

For 2D animation, I mainly work in Moho Pro. In fact, a lot of the work on my last two demo reels was rigged and animated in Moho.

For artwork, I tend to create all my art within Moho unless I need a more textural bitmap look, but even then my work tends to be a image-vector hybrid, meaning I use textured fills and strokes in vector shapes. I find this is more efficient and more flexible to work with than going with pure bitmap artwork. The Hearts Like Fists titles on our Vimeo channel is one of my oldest Moho projects but it's a good example of this mixture.

I also tend to composite everything in After Effects or Fusion Studio, which allows me to create shots exactly the way I want them, a lot faster and easier than when I work exclusively in Moho (or any single 2D or 3D animation program for that matter.)

For FBF animation, if the element I need is simple, I may create it directly inside Moho using an FBF layer, but for more complicated things, I like to use Adobe Animate because it's easier to match the look of what I have in Moho in Animate. But I sometimes use TVPaint when the look needs to be more textured.

I also like to mix in 3D animations. For that, I often used LightWave, but lately I've been using Blender more.

So my personal list of programs I use for animation production is...

• Moho for 2D puppet animation
• Adobe Animate or TVPaint for FBF Animation
• LightWave and/or Blender for 3D animation
• Adobe After Effects and/or Fusion Studio for compositing
• Adobe Photoshop for painting. Sometimes I'll use ProCreate on iPad, but that eventually winds up in Photoshop for finishing.
• Adobe Audition for sound editing
• Vegas Pro for video editing and sound editing, and final output.

At my workplace, the list is similar but with the addition of Maya for 3D, Toon Boom Harmony for FBF, and Nuke for compositing.

There's a lot of Adobe products listed here which requires a subscription but, IMO, it's well worth it if you use 3 or more of the programs included in the subscription. (I regularly use 11 of the 26 programs.)

If I was going to minimize my toolset, it would probably be Moho, Animate, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Audition and Premiere. (The latter six all come with Adobe Creative Cloud.)

If I didn't already have Vegas Pro for video editing, I would probably use Adobe Premiere since it's part of the subscription. But I've been using Vegas for a couple of decades and I really like editing with it. Alternatively, I could use DaVinci Resolve Studio which came with my Fusion Studio purchase, but I haven't had time to learn that one yet.

For FBF, I like to dabble with Calipeg and ToonSquid on iPad. Both of these feature FBF and tweening animation, and I like both. Calipeg has been around longer than ToonSquid so it's feature set is more mature and robust, but ToonSquid is developing quickly. TS also has vector drawing tools and Calipeg doesn't. Both are a little quirky in their own way and hard to figure out without the documentation, but they're actually easy to use once you understand them. Finally, they're both really cheap.

Hope this helps.

[JoelMayer]

Wow is Lightwave still around :O

Totally agree with Greenlaw, i think we all use a bunch of software to produce our stuff.

For me it's

Obviously Moho
TB Harmony Premium for FBF or sometimes rigged things if i know it will have a lot of replacement parts or will be a more hybrid style of fbf and rigging
Storyboard Pro for well... Storyboards
Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere, Audition, InDesign, Media Encoder, XD
Frame.io for client feedback
Affinity Designer if i know i don't have to deliver any working files and am not in the mood for Illustrator's bloat
Clip Studio EX for drawing, Illustration, etc.
ProCreate on the iPad
Construct 3 for little game prototypes in HTML5
A little bit of Blender

Lots of Adobe stuff as well. I probably could live without it the problem is often times when having to exchange files with external partners who definitely will use CC and it just can give you problems when you don't have the official thing even though most other software saves .psd's, eps' and whatnot. The one thing by Adobe i just couldn't live without is After Effects and so far i haven't really seen a viable alternative for Motion Design. Maybe Apple Motion but honestly, in my age i'm also a bit lazy to learn new software and just want to produce stuff with the things i know.

Software currently on my list i would like to learn:
Would like to look into Rive but at the same time our web dev tells me that Lottie is the future so will probably just get an export add-on for After Effects. For light character animation i then probably have to learn something like Limber
Really should learn Figma for future interactive design

So yeah, it never ends. You learn this stuff over years of working in the field and will quickly realize, there's no end all be all software, they all have their pro's and con's. Generally however i believe that dedicated software made for one task is often times more streamlined to work with hence why Moho is so good at what it does, it's purpose is specifically 2D puppet animation. Same with Storyboard Pro for that matter. But compare Moho to brute forcing a character rig in After Effects with 200 add-ons and yeah. You see what i mean.

Having said all that, my company pays for all this stuff so if i was a freelancer and/or hobbyist i'd probably use much less haha.

As Albert Einstein once said: The day you stop learning, you start dying

[hayasidist]

one approach I use for audio sync especially if it's a long track / multiple tracks that will entail multiple moho files is:

load the audio into moho and create a switch layer with vectors for each planned shot -- the vectors might have a "clapperboard" which shows which shot I want and then a "pulse" / "beat indicator" for action such as a foot stamping. Then export that as multiple short videos to use as sync ref tracks -- and import those into the actual animation moho files. IMO a whole lot easier than scrubbing the music track with "heavy" animation going on....

[NealF]

Whew! A lot to absorb here.

Part of my problem is I'm not a pro animator. I'm good at drawing and always loved animation, but I'm mainly a composer/producer.
But I'm always trying to get to the next level in animation to create the desired effect.

This new project of mine is a huge challenge. I'll never be able to approach the level of you guys who do this for a living. Not enough time left in my life.
But there are so many styles of animation and some are much easier than others.

My goal is to find a style I can do easily that will still create the emotions called for in the story. The music is done. That's a no brainer for me. But now I need to create the equivalent of 17 music videos. 90 percent of which will be animation.

Some of my favorite animators are Ralph Bakshi, Bill Plympton, and Miyazsaki. All very different. But all create a great effect.
I'm learning what I can from them and many others (some of the people in this conversation).

I'm also limited in funds. So I have to use the programs I've got. But even though they're not the latest updates, they still all do great things.

Ever since I was 5 years old and saw Coco the clown, I wanted to be an animator. Once I realized that you don't just draw one picture and then it comes to life, I went into music instead. A good choice for me, but never stopped my love of animation.

[JoelMayer]

We all start somewhere and tbh, if you're seriously thinking about doing one hour of animation as a first project, the software choice will be the least of your problems

I really don't mean to discourage you or anything but i think many here would agree, that you are setting yourself up for disappointment. Even one minute of fairly limited animation (like flat explainer style with no colors or something) can take up to a week, Moho or no Moho. Probably even longer depending on how many scenes, characters, etc. Sure you can make a loop and just let it cycle for an hour, if that's your goal, then by all means. If not, my advice would be to chop your project up in smaller, more digestable sections and maybe think about releasing it episodic. If in five years you suddenly produced an hour worth of animation in total, you can still cut it together and release it as the special edition Just my two cents.

[Greenlaw]

Wow is Lightwave still around :O

Ha ha, yup...still using it in TV production as recently as yesterday. I used Blender and Maya yesterday too...turns out I can't have too many programs to do my job.

[NealF]

We all start somewhere and tbh, if you're seriously thinking about doing one hour of animation as a first project, the software choice will be the least of your problems

I really don't mean to discourage you or anything but i think many here would agree, that you are setting yourself up for disappointment. Even one minute of fairly limited animation (like flat explainer style with no colors or something) can take up to a week, Moho or no Moho. Probably even longer depending on how many scenes, characters, etc. Sure you can make a loop and just let it cycle for an hour, if that's your goal, then by all means. If not, my advice would be to chop your project up in smaller, more digestable sections and maybe think about releasing it episodic. If in five years you suddenly produced an hour worth of animation in total, you can still cut it together and release it as the special edition Just my two cents.

Just to make it clear. It's not my first animation. I've done quite a bit but I'm trying to make this one many times better than anything previous.
I know how big a challenge it is, but the project is by far the best thing I've written. So it's worth the time and effort. All the music is done, the script is written, just need to make sure the visuals are aesthetic enough to keep the interest.

[Greenlaw]

Looking forward to seeing what you're working on Neal!

FYI, I saw your music video You Have The Right a few years ago and was impressed by its thoughtful humanitarian message. More recently, I listened to some of your songs and really enjoyed them.

Just wanted to wish you good luck with your current project!