Moho Forum

chucky wrote:Anyway on the subject of shading in AE...Sure... but in some workflows I am loathed to run to another program for something as necessary as a bit of shading on characters.

...that scene above was a bit of a shading extravaganza for AS but timing was more controllable inside AS as there's no program' loop' that can slow everything down so...

I guess a DreamWorks things are a little different...

I wouldn't call it a DreamWorks thing...rendering animation for compositing is pretty much expected at every studio I've worked at. (Thank goodness for Moho's Layer Comps tools and Moho Exporter! It's one of the many reasons I love this program so much.) For me, I've yet to find a single animation program, 2D or 3D, that could handle everything I needed efficiently, and I always wind up using different programs at various stages of production.

AE might have appeared to be overkill for the lighting effect described but I was actually doing a lot of other stuff for that scene in AE too. The fire for example was created using Trapcode Particular; yes, I probably could have done that using ASP particles but for me, it was easier and faster to do that in AE. And since I was playing around with the fire animation and cave lighting effects in AE, it just made sense to deal with the timing of the character lighting there too. For me, this was a more efficient workflow since it didn't require re-rendering any of the character animation just to change the timing and intensity of the lighting.

I really just brought the scene up to show that it's not necessary to do all lighting and fx where you do animation. There are other options available, and sometimes it's better and faster to do parts of your shading and fx in another program. (For me it is, anyways.)

I wonder how quickly that WOULD render on a surface pro or how AE goes on it

That's a good question. I know my Companion 2 breezes through stuff like this using Moho and AE, and this computer is comparable to the higher end Surface Pro 4. The only area where my workstation really outperforms my tablet is for anything requiring a powerful GPU to render. (The Companion has an Intel Iris 6100, which is decent for a tablet computer I guess, but obviously nowhere near as powerful as a real graphics card in a desktop computer.)

For comparison, my previous mobile, an old convertible tablet computer with 6GB of RAM and modest ATI graphics, handled animating and rendering Scareplane with no trouble. But when I was created HLF on this computer, I found it could only handle the animation part. All the rendering and compositing for that project had to be done at home on my workstation. I think this was mostly because I had to render full HD and I was using AE to add motion blur and other optical fx. Even my workstation, which only had 9GB of RAM at the time, ran into some trouble with rendering that job at 1080p.

Hmm...I think I'll try running an HLF ASP/AE scene through the Companion 2 tablet and see how it handles. Wouldn't it be something if it actually outperforms my old workstation?

I wouldn't call it a DreamWorks thing

Typo here should have been...."
"I guess AT DreamWorks things are a little different..." hich changes the meaning completely sorry for that, my bletooth keyboard is a bit far from the port so I end up with LOTS of dropped letters- plus I type like an actor.
Yes, every studio I've worked at does the same with AE, however when I do solo projects I really don't need that extra step plus other reasons.
This issue of shading is not about studio workflows just the capabilities and possibilities with Moho, witout other software, staff , time and money.
Sorry about the typos again, I left them in mostly, this time ,so you can see how often it happens.

Actually here's a thing about AE post and Moho, I had been getting fairly ordinary motion blur ( which I don't often like using) using real motion blur plugin unless I got really involved with extra compositing , wasting a lot of time and effort , but when Moho added good moblur which I could pick and chose where the blur occurs and finely tune it, the end result was actually MUCH better and MUCH, MUCH quicker.
I think anytime ( on small budget productio) you can remove processes and people, you can maximise output without losing creative expression.