arglborps wrote: ↑Sun Dec 27, 2020 3:54 am
Yeah, really, I was close to getting depressed looking at the state Moho was in, I looked into alternatives, but there wasn't any even remotely appealing.
Hi,
I know exactly how you felt. Since you brought up these 'alternatives', a few comments based on my experience...
Except for Cartoon Animator 4, we use all of these animation programs at my workplace. IMO, they all have their strengths and unique features, but for
puppet style animation, none of them come close to the ease and flexibility Moho offers. Moho's greatest strengths are with its advanced Bones and IK system, Sketch Bones tool, custom Mesh Warping, and of course Smart Bone Actions. My typical workflow is to rig and animate characters in Moho, use Moho's Layer Comps to output render passes, and then composite, light, and add effects using After Effects. Most of the work on my last two demo reels had been done this way.
IMO, Toon Boom Harmony's puppet rigging tools are just okay (compared to Moho's puppet rigging tools,) but its strength is drawing frame-by-frame animation and nodal compositing (which is Moho's weakness.) We used to use Harmony for puppets, but switched to Moho a few years ago. Sometimes, however, I'll use Harmony to draw an FBF sequence and import that into Moho as a 'bridge' animation. (Moho is capable of FBF, but it's easier and more precise to draw this in Harmony.)
We have Adobe Animate, and some of the studios we work with use Animate for our TV shows. I don't personally have a lot of experience with Animate, but from what I can tell, the freehand vector tools in Animate work better than Moho's. However, Animate's rigging system is primitive compared to Moho.
So, nothing is perfect but depending on what you need to do, some programs are better suited than others. For the type of cartoon animation I'm typically asked to create these days, Moho rises to the task
Last spring, when I thought Moho had reached EOL and could be going away, I purchased Cartoon Animator 4 Pipeline for personal use at home. There are a lot of interesting features in this program, but there are odd timeline and output limitations that keep me from embracing it. Specifically, editing keyframes and interpolation modes (called Transition Curves in CA4P) is clunky (compared to Moho,) and there is no curve editor, no drawing tools, and not being able to animate explicitly at 24 fps is a bit of a non-starter for me. (CA4P seems to default at 30 fps and allows you
export at different framerates, but of course that's not the same as
animating at a preferred framerate.)
That said, CA4P's emphasis is on
performance capture, or animating characters by using a webcam for face/head, and a Leap Motion for hands and fingers. Since CA has been developed with motion capture in mind, this also means they have standardized rigs, which simplifies rigging for certain types of characters, and makes it super easy to re-use and mix animations between characters. Besides, this aspect of CA4P is a lot of fun to
play with.
TBH, I can't see this style of animation being used for the TV shows we make at work, but I see enough potential in CA4P to try it on a personal project. In brief: if mocap is your thing, CA4P is definitely worth a look; but if you prefer to hand-keyframe your puppets, Moho is much better. (I mostly hand-keyframe my animations, but sometimes use mocap when I think its appropriate.)
Since I own CA4P, I'm going to keep an eye on its development, but right now, with the recent announcements from Mike and Victor, my attention has shifted back to Moho.
Besides, lately, I'm using Moho at work again. Man, I really love using this program!
