The computer I used to make
Scareplane and
HLF was a fairly modest laptop computer with Core 2 and 4GB RAM, and I was able to animate 3 characters in the first film, and up to five in the second without problems. The rigs were smoothly interactive throughout the productions.
In the first film, the characters were all vector graphics created in ASP 9.5. I was being very careful to use as few points as possible in the characters, and probably over-optimized the setups. This was because Scareplane was my first ASP animation and I really didn't know what to expect. As it turned out, ASP was super efficient and I probably could have animated many more characters on that computer if I had to.
For HLF, I initially meant to use all bitmaps for the characters. ASP is pretty efficient with bitmaps too but if they're high res, it does drag down the computer much sooner than with all vector setups. After my initial R&D tests, I found that using pure bitmap setups was not going to work well on this laptop, and I finally settled on a hybrid setup using vectors for nearly all shapes (characters, props, backgrounds, etc.,) and Image Texture for the fills and strokes. This setup worked remarkably well and I was able to animate scenes with up to five characters with full interactivity, including bone dynamics for hair.
Rendering the layer comps went very quickly for either production.
The only major slow down I experienced on this laptop was during compositing for HLF using After Effects. The laptop just couldn't handle many 1080p frames with lots of motion blur effects added in post. I wound up doing the composting on my desktop computer at home. But even the desktop was fairly modest (a 5 year old i7 quad core with 9GB RAM,) and it struggled a little to output the final movie file...but it managed to finish the job.
I've since upgraded the desktop's RAM to 18GB and put in a better graphics card, which pretty much maxes out this computer, but it handles higher res textures in Moho and large 1080p frames in AE much better now.
To summarize: if you don't have a lot of RAM or a powerful CPU, stick with vectors. Moho handles vectors remarkably well, even when you use a lot of masking effects and dynamics.
If you need detailed fills, you can use Image Texture or masked layers. Use textures that are only as large as you need--you'll have to experiment with different resolutions to see what your limit is. (For HLF, I think most textures were about 800k but many were designed to tile. Some larger areas, like skies and the bigger buildings were 1k to 2k--probably bigger when there was panning involved.)
If you choose to go with a bitmap look, use the hybrid setup as much as you can. Use a texture brush for 'organic' looking shape edges and use Image Texture for the fill
and strokes color. Don't worry about the Image Textures getting out of sync when you transform them--the two separate properties actually share the same widget so ASP/Moho will keep them in sync.
You'll probably be able to use a few 'pure' bitmap characters but expect a slow down to occur much sooner than with the hybrid setup. In HLF, the 'Heart' people are entirely bitmap and I found that in the second scene where there are only four of them visible, both computers' performance really bogged down. This is mostly because there are many instances of dynamics applied to the hanging arteries, but even with dynamics disabled it's noticeably slower to animate than other scenes using the hybrid setup characters. (Note: This particular slow-down was mainly caused by a dynamics bug in ASP 10, which was fixed in ASP 11.)
Hope this helps. The best thing you can do is to just try a bunch of stuff and see what works best for your setup.
