Moho Forum

I am using Moho Debut 12.
On my ipad I have a little animation app called Plastic where I can make very rudimentary animations from simple jpg pictures. But the bone manipulation was limited. I got so pumped about this I sprung for the Moho Debut 12 so I could do a little more bone manipulation.
How can I do this with debut 12, as I have still been relying on my little app to do most of the animations.
By the way here is the link showing the Plastic app.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDZiXjbCbQ4

Anyhelp would be appreciated
Thanks
K

You can use almost any bitmap image format in Moho. The only disadvantage is that Moho does not have any built-in bitmap editing tools--you'll still need a paint program for that. However, Moho can dynamically update any changes made to the bitmap by another program so you can work in both programs at the same time. (I often have Moho and Photoshop open at the same time.)

Moho creates an 'invisible' mesh for an image when you add bones to it, you can can deform it however you wish. Debut lets you do much of this, including Pin bones, but I think you need the Pro version to create visible custom mesh layers and use Smart Warp.

You mentioned you want to use JPG. JPG will work in Moho but I recommend using 32-bit PNG instead. JPG doesn't support transparency so you will need to create vector masks for the art in Moho. PNG, on the other hand, can have a transparent background that Moho will recognize and use without additional work. Also, JPG is a lossy format so the image quality is not going to be as good as PNG.

Generally speaking, there is no advantage in using JPG over PNG inside a Moho scene. I only use JPG for an asset file if that's the only version I have for that file.

Hope this helps.

That helps a little. Thanks.
If I have a png image of a person and import it, how can i make the legs ,arms,etc move independently if i add bones?

K

I would recommend watching some tutorial videos on youtube. There are a lot of videos that go over beginner lessons very thoroughly.

Yes, here are a couple:





Since this is a basic way of using Anime Studio, the versions shown above use earlier ones, but the technique is the same regardless: separate the parts in a paint program, import into AS, and bind to bones. Also, as Greenlaw mentions, use pngs in order to preserve transparency.

Once you understand the basics, you can take it even further in Moho 12 using pin bones, smooth joints, and smart mesh.

There used to be a written tutorial on the Smith Micro page, but it appears to have gone away. Luckily, the Wayback Machine archive has preserved a copy here: Techniques - Rigging An Image

Hope that all points you in the right direction.

kristenanne77 wrote:That helps a little. Thanks.
If I have a png image of a person and import it, how can i make the legs ,arms,etc move independently if i add bones?

K

There are many ways to 'chop up' a bitmap character, and some techniques will look more seamless than others.

I typically split apart the body this way:

1. Head
2. torso (usually includes neck but not always)
3. Arms
4. Hands
5. Legs
6. Feet (sometimes combined with legs but not always)

I split out the hands and feet because I usually want them to be in their own switch layers. The hand switch for different finger poses, and the feet switch for side rotations and/or bottom/top poses. You bind the image layers to specific bones in the skeleton, normally using the Use Selected Bones for Flexi-Binding command.

That's for a very generalized setup and it's probably all you need when starting out.

An actual production setup can vary greatly from the above, depending on the design of the character, it's proportions, whether it's bare skinned, furry, wearing clothes, has a tail, or any combination of features. Each limb may even have many subgroups depending on how you intend to animate them. The head group, for example may have several groups for the eyes and mouth, maybe even for noses and eyebrows.

Even the arms or legs might be broken down depending on proportions or clothing. For example, I like to use Smooth Joint for the arms whenever I can because it usually deforms nicely and allows me to use a single shape. But Smooth Joint doesn't work so well if the arms are very thick or has a irregular shape--in this situations, I often wind up chopping the arm further into upper and lower pieces. For really broad chested characters, the shoulders may become yet another piece.

How you break the character down may also depends on how you want to set up turning poses, which can be as simple as using a Switch to swap between basic front and side view rigs, or a very complex single-rig setup that transition to different views using animated layers and masks, actions and smart bones. (At work, I recently had to setup a character rig that needed to turn 720 degrees, or 360 in either direction from the front view, and the bitmaps had to be broken into 55 separate bitmaps, not included additional dozens of 'bitmap style' vector elements. That was definitely the most challenging rig I've had to create to date, and thankfully a very unusual circumstance.)

But you can worry about all that later...for now, just learn the basics and improve your future setups as your skill grows.

Thanks. Had some luck .. but then ran into problem with binding.
First I imported a png file.
Then Added a Bone layer.
Then added some bones.
The moved the png "into" the bone layer.
Then used the bind button.
Problem:
When I went to move the bones, the bones would move but not the png. The png remained static.
Its as if nothing was binding.
Any tips as to what I am doing wrong?

K

kristenanne77 wrote:Then used the bind button.

That step might have been your undoing.

By default, dragging the png "into" the bone layer automatically binds all the bones to the png, depending on the bone positions and strength (the "force field" around each bone, button looks somewhat like a bone with an ellipse around it when the bone layer is selected). You don't need to specifically bind if you want multiple bones distorting a single image.

Binding an image (well, an image layer) to a bone says "this bone, and this bone only, will move this image", followed by selecting a bone. If you click the background, it removes any bone binding that existed (such as dragging the png into the bone layer) so no bones affect the image, which it sounds like you may have ended up with.

Binding an image layer to a single bone is great for cutout animation with multiple images (like a cutout paper puppet) - you bind each image to a single bone in the skeleton - but is no good for "distortion" of "deformation" animation where multiple bones affect an image (like an armature or skeleton inside a clay figure).

If you want multiple bones affecting your png (like that clay figure), go back to your bone layer and Bone menu, Reset All Bone Rigging.
Then choose the Manipulate Bones tool (shortcut Z) and test by moving the bones around. Click the Select Bone tool (B) to reset after testing, or move off frame 0 to start animating for real.

However, having all bones affect a single image can get some weird distortions, smearing your png around if bones are too close or too "strong". That's why Greenlaw and the tutorials neeters_guy pointed you to recommend cutting up your image (and using PNG so you can specify transparent areas) into separate image pieces in a paint program or image manipulation program, even if you don't want to do full rigid cutout style.

You can then select a leg image layer (for example), drag a selection around only the two or three bones (with a foot bone) you want to control the leg, then Bone menu, Use Selected Bones For Flexi-Binding, and the leg image will act like a clay leg with skeleton, but only for those selected bones, ignoring any other bones.