Moho Forum

The title says it all . . . of course you probably wouldn't ever need this many head positions in any given shot of an animation, but here they are, just the same:

http://www.visiontovision.com/ARatHeadSpinMay2005.mov

Greg Smith

Looks good, how many actual drawings did you have to create? Some angles had stretching and moving parts to sell the effect right? At the end he gets a bit epileptic though, are you going to try Linda Blairs' head turning from The Exorcist now? Hmm, that's the second time today I need a "vomit" emoticon...

Reindert.
www.nobudgetvideo.com

So did you do it all with switch layers? Also, did I detect a bit of bone dynamics in the waving ears, or did you animate that?

Thanks for sharing, and nice work!

The exercise was to test just how few "in-between" poses one could get away with and still create the illusion of a rotating head. In this case, only 5 were used, total, for movements in both directions . . . and I think it shows. Adding more poses would make the effect more convincing, but, as more poses need to be manually added, the benefits of vector-based animation begin to decrease. Still, even with quite a few more poses, the labor involved is substantially less than redrawing each and every position every time a movement is needed - and moving points around is much less laborious than redrawing.

The trouble with the proposition of a person creating animation, alone, is that the process is so time-consuming, that the chances of one ever finishing anything of merit approaches zero, faster than you think.

Greg Smith

An educational test, in reality you'd try to find other means in storytelling probably. cut to another angle, a fast rotation with speed lines and/or blurring. Look at the old Warner Bros. cartoons, amazing how expressive these are with so few drawings. The often mentioned depth positioning of layers in Moho is another good way of partial rotation without drawing every frame. I mean nose in front layer, eyes a bit further back, face, ears etc...

Reindert.
www.nobudgetvideo.com

Jorgy:

The whole animation is primarily done with switch layers and interpolation, the idea being re-usability of this many-angled head in any given shot. Yes, a few bones were used in the face, but, in truth, I really prefer straight point animation - especially when the point count is very small, as is the case with this model.

What is surprising is how the bones still work, no matter how different the "in-between" is from the intitial pose the bones were aligned to.

Moho: A truly flexible animation system. It amazes me that more folks haven't done amazing things with this software.

Greg Smith