Like Mike, I've been dabbling with Cartoon Animator too. When I bought it, I wasn't looking for a replacement for Moho 12.5 at all because I use Moho successfully where I work and I still like using it in some of my personal projects. That said, CA offers some intriguing rigging and motion editing features that I wanted to check out and when Reallusion had a sale on the Pipeline bundle, I decided to bite.
Even though I use motion capture in some of my 3D shorts and vfx work, I'm not particularly interested in applying mocap data to my 2D work. It's a matter of taste but I always felt mocap looks odd on 2D puppets and it's not particularly appealing me. However, having used mocap edting tools like Motion Builder in my other work, I recognize how similar tools are not limited to mocap data and can be usefully applied to keyframed animations too. These tools make it easier ways to reuse and mix animations, and the animations can be applied to characters sharing similar rig hierarchies even when the body proportions are completely different. While this kind of editing is
possible in Moho, it's not necessarily easy or very practical with the existing tools. CA, on the other hand, seems to have been built with re-usability of rigs and animation in mind.
As I said, I'm not looking for a replacement for Moho 12.5 but, because the current release of Moho 13 has broken my workflow for re-purposing rigs and animation, this seems like a good time to check out alternative puppet animation systems.
I'm just starting to learn CA so I don't really have much useful to say about it yet but here's a little info that may be of interest to Moho users:
CA doesn't have any built-in drawing tools, so that's already big minus to me. You can import layered PSD files from Photoshop, Krita, etc., and I believe you can import vector art, though I haven't tested that feature yet and I'm not even sure what format CA expects (probably svg.) However, to import your own artwork, you need the
Pipeline version of CA because the standard version is designed to use only assets purchased from Reallusion's content marketplace. (I'm obviously not the target user for the standard version.)
CA's rigging options are interesting. The program comes with rigging templates for bipeds, quadrupeds and other creature types, which you can use to 'auto-rig' your drawings. Basically, you import your artwork and move the joints in the rig to fit the character and, in theory, you're ready to animate. I've built re-usable rig templates in Moho to do something like this but it's really not the same thing as what's available in CA. The CA devs have put a lot of thought into their workflow and the system works will in the
basic testing I've done so far. (Actual
production level rigs may be another matter. TBD.)
On the downside, the UI feels a little scattered to me and the template rigs lack some of the advanced capabilities I enjoy in Moho. Also, you know how I sometimes complain about Moho's unnecessary 'clicki-ness'?* Well, so far the same can be said about CA too.
Like Moho, CA uses a triangulated mesh to deform image-based artwork. Unlike Moho, you can adjust the density of the auto-generated mesh like you can in After Effects so that's pretty cool. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a way to create a
custom mesh like you can in Moho. If you've ever used a custom mesh in Moho, then you know that's a really big deal.
There is style of rigging called Free Bone, which is similar to rigging in Moho. There's also a masking tool available where you can paint a mask directly over the image. This is used as a quick way ' break out' a character in layers when you only have a single flattened image to work from. (Which makes me wonder, if I can paint a mask directly over an image layer in CA, why no native paint tools? Maybe that's coming?)
So far, I'm not seeing anything in CA like Moho's Smart Bone Actions. I'm thinking it doesn't exist but maybe I just haven't found it yet. Another big deal of course.
Also, there's no equivalent in CA for Moho's Sketch Bones, which is another huge deal for me since I use the tool all the time to animate tails, hair, capes, rope, etc. Obviously, you can animate these things with bones in CA but Sketch Bones in Moho makes creating organic 'whipping' and 'wave' animations soooo easy.
To be fair, some of these issues I'm bring up may simply indicate that I really don't know what I'm doing in CA yet, and I could be wrong about some of what I wrote above. I recall making similar complaints about Moho way, waaay back when I started using that program so I don't wish to be too hard on CA until I understand the program and its intended workflow better.
Re: CA's mocap features, in spite of what I wrote above, I have played a little with the face mocap system using the web camera in my laptop. To my surprise, the face capture system seems to work better than I expected and I'm already thinking about how to use it in a personal project. I'm not confident this tech will be useful or appropriate in the shows we animate at my workplace, but this might depend on how well it works out in my little 'trial' projects. For example, I like to think '
Scareplane' had a
little something to do with getting Moho green-lit for use where I work. TBD, I guess.
Well, that's about all I have right now. I don't think I'll say more about CA in this forum unless I'm using the program alongside Moho (definitely a possibility.) But In the future I'll write an article comparing the two programs and post it on my website. I'll let you know when that's ready.
BTW, if anybody here using Cartoon Animator in real-world production wants to correct or expand on what I've written here, please do so! While we wait for the next release of Moho 13 to fix what I consider serious 'show stopper' issues, I'd like to learn as much as I can about CA and see if it's appropriate in my animation pipeline.
*Over the years Moho has gotten much better about its 'clicki-ness' though, and I hope the devs will continue to streamline the UI.