Moho Forum

I made this in 3ds max using a rendered image from moho.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a36lZB93Dno

I was wondering if anyone out there would know what the best way to animate using some animation made in moho, probably exported to quicktime with alpha or a series of png's. Any suggestions or other forums would be most grateful.

I'm thinking I could animate the texture and then manually cut round for each frame but that would be a very time consuming task. Does anyone know if the alpha channel in png files can be used to make a shape on a plane in max. Hmm or a way of animating a mask in max. I'm pretty stuck as you can see.

I have used after effects in the past by importing a quicktime moho animation and making it into a 3d layer. But the effect i'm looking for is the one above. So its looks like its made from a thin plastic. I'm not sure if 3ds max is the best program to use so if anyone knows of anything that might help i'd very much appreciate it.

Thanks,
Luke

if you wish to integrate your Moho animations with a 3d application, I would suggest exporting your moho animation as a targa sequence or tiff sequence (I'm not sure if png will work.) Then jump in your 3d app. Create a plane and texture it with your moho image sequence. I work in Maya so I'm not familiar with the 3d max workflow...but make sure the image sequence goes into the color and transparency channel of your texture. The alpha should knock out the transparent bit of your plane. Hope this helps.
Cheers.

You could definitely export your Moho animation to a sequence of images with alpha channels but I'm not exactly sure how you would give the flat plane some dimension in 3DS like you have in that 3D turnaround. Mapping the sequences of images wouldn't be hard, its just giving it that slight dimension I'm not sure on. You might go onto http://forums.cgsociety.org/forumdisplay.php?f=6 and ask that part of the question there. Thats the 3DS specific forum on CGSociety. There are a ton of great users that surf that forum, even industry experts. I'm sure they could help get you going in the right direction.

Thanks for the help guys. I'm getting somewhere with it now. I've posted on the CG forums as well now, some sound people on there. I will post back and share when I've got it to work.

Thanks,
Luke

Hey Dr Demo

Did you figure out how to do this? I can tell you if you're still interested.

Gochris

Not got very far with it at all. Managed to texture a plane with a tga sequence. Looks nice but the shadows come out all wrong. Any how I'm probably going about it the wrong way. Definitely still interested in any suggestions.

Thanks,
Luke

Sorry I can't provide screen shots, but here's what I did in AS Pro and 3ds Max 5.

1. In AS, create an animation. Use the Winston character. Do 100 frames of him moving his arms. Use BLACK as the background - very important.

2. In Quicktime, use the "Millions of colors+" to get an alpha channel. Render these 100 frames. Save the Winston Quicktime .mov on your desktop.

3. In Max's front viewport, create a plane, call it AS Character. In the top viewport create a teapot behind the plane. Then create a large plane behind the teapot - call this back plane. You'll need this back plane because it it what the lights will throw shadows on to. This back plane should be perpendicular to the front viewport.

4. Open the Material Editor. Click on the bitmap button, find your Quicktime created in AS.

5. Assign the Quicktime Bitmap to the plane called AS Character.
(In the window in the Material Map browser, you should see the Quicktime movie with a grey background.)

6. In the material maps rollout:
click on the Alpha map button, and assign the AS Quicktime .mov to the Alpha channel.
(Now in the material map browser window, you should see the Quicktime .mov with a Black background.)

7. In the material Editor's Bitmap Parameters section, here are the settings you want:
Filtering: Pyramidal
Mono Channel Output: RGB
RGB Channel Output: RGB
Alpha Source: Image Alpha

But you're still not done!

8. Add a target spot to the scene, and focus it on the AS Character plane.

If you render now, you'll see the AS Character standing there. You won't see the AS Character plane that the Quicktime .mov is attached to, you'll just see the AS Quicktime there and hopefully you'll see the teapot behind it.

But the shadows on the back plane will be square - they'll be the shape of the AS Character plane. And we want shadows in the shape of the AS Character Quicktime .mov, don't we? Here's what to do:

9. Go into the light's Modify panel.
here are the settings you want -
Under Modify general parameters -
Shadows On checked
and the rollout just under Shadows should be Ray Traced Shadows.

Render now, and the AS Character plane should throw shadows on the back plane, and the shadows on the back plane should be in the outline of the AS character you created.

I hope you are successful.

Now you can mess with lights and fog and stuff. In this image I used a shadow map to give the shadows some texture.

Doing this in Max reminded me of how I switched to 2-D animation - I love Max, but everything you do in it is as complicated as a Moon Launch!

Gochris[/img]

Now that I've done this, I'm not sure it is really what you want.

I made a series for TV called Strjerks. I used Moho and Lightwave in the exact way you described. It was fun but production slow as heck on the 3D side. Afterwards, like GoChris1, I switched completely to AS 2D animation as I realised it is far healthier for the artistic apetite to be able to create than for it to die at the expense of a GUI.
You can watch an episode of Starjerks here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK0S3O-qmmg

Cheers
D.K

Actually I use Toon Boom now. I draw with paper and pencil and a lightbox, and scan the drawings into ToonBoom. It's more fun to animate that way than to push pixels around.

I use AS for special effects, and sometimes use 3DS Max for toon renders or 3-D backgrounds.

DK- Starjerks is a lot of fun. "All hands on deck!" Liked the Ambassador, and the fact that Jabba looked Ronald McDonald. Nice job.

LOL...I had fun doing it too but was a lot of hard work with 3D side. From now on im sticking to doing 2D with AS.

Cheers
D.K

Sorry for the late reply. Its not exactly what I was aiming to do but it's definitely helped me as I didn't know how to get the shadows from being the shape of the plane.

Thanks Chris,
Luke

Here's a quick clip I made with the help of Chirs. If anyone out there is interested in using AS with 3DS Max then give us a shout.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOSOq2bI_5M

I will post some more exciting animations soon.

Luke

GoChris1 wrote:Actually I use Toon Boom now. I draw with paper and pencil and a lightbox, and scan the drawings into ToonBoom.

Can't you animate using a drawing tablet straight into Toon Boom? Seems with the technologies of today that it would be cost effective and MUCH faster than drawing on paper. I mean even Flash will allow you to draw directly into the program to animate frame by frame w/ a tablet.