Boss Baby, now with vitamin Moho!

[Greenlaw]

Hi guys,

Boss Baby: Back in Business premieres on Netflix today. Why should you in the Moho forum, care? Well, apart from being very cute and funny, it features many 2D 'fantasy' sequences created in Moho by me and the artists I work with at DreamWorks Animation.

The BB:BIB digital animation team is: D.R. Greenlaw, Florie Duhau, Hilda Karadsheh, Chris Gottron, Tyler Melee, Patrick Moss, and our leader Ernest Chan...with special guest artist Victor Paredes! The characters and props were drawn, rigged, and animated using Moho Pro 12 and comped in After Effects by us. The background paintings were provided by Boss Baby's art department.

Enjoy, and remember: Cookies are for closers!



(Disclaimer #1: Sorry, no 2D segments featured in this trailer but the very first episode opens with one.)
(Disclaimer #2: I'm posting this as an independent Boss fan and Moho enthusiast, and not as an official representative of the company I work for. Whatever, just watch it!)

[jahnocli]

Congratulations -- great stuff!

[visualbug]

Great news! nice to se MOHO being used in more and more

[cabbage0896]

Great work! It's nice to know someone of your caliber and talent has the time and patience to answer questions from us rookies. Don't stop! you have answered many of my posts with great success. By the way I did figure out masking rigged characters with your help, a light bulb went off one day and it all made sense, thanks again. I do have one question for you: can you briefly explain the purpose of the motion graph in a professional setting and could it apply to a novice level user like me? Just curious, I'm trying to figure out it's purpose and if I can use it. Thanks

[visualbug]

I just watched the first episode, and the "fantasy sequence" in moho just looks amazing!

great job guys! hope you can share a little bit of the process!
how was the compositing created in after effects? did you export layers with the background and then the characters separated? color grading?

the lighting and color grading looks really good, love it!

[Greenlaw]

Thanks for the nice comments, guys!

@visualBug, Dekker Moonboots and Space Boss Baby were the very first rigs I created for the show. Believe it or not, all the interactive lighting effects for the characters were built into the rigs. The face lighting, in particular, was one of the more complicated things I've had to make in Moho...it's fully automated, and needed no special attention from the animator. (BTW, in this episode, Dekker and Boss were animated by Florie Duhau, who had barely touched a Moho rig before, and she made it look awesome.)

The 'built-in' lighting looked great but it was very time-consuming to set up, so for other episodes, where the lighting effect wasn't as clearly specified by the art director, we came up with other strategies for lighting.

For advanced lighting effects, I like to 'break out' the character's limbs using Moho's Layer Comps and combine the elements using Set Channels in After Effects to create special masks. This method is faster for getting that layered 'inside' highlight and shadow effects. This can look more dimensional and realistic than simply off-setting an alpha mask. (This 'break out' method isn't specific to AE; you can do this in any compositing program like Fusion or HitFilm. The key is in how you set up your Moho Layer Comps.)

Other times, when we felt we could get away with lighting just the edges of the character, we used a combination of filters in AE. There's limited flexibility with this method but it's an easy trick that can work 'well enough' in many situations.

There is one episode where I had to come up with a very dimensional cast shadow effect, which was created entirely within Moho. I don't want to go into detail because I'm not sure that episode is out yet...I'll have to check. (I've yet to watch all the episodes on Netflix myself.)

BTW, I've been developing a Moho Pro animation production class, and plan to cover lighting techniques in detail. I'll post more info about this project when I get close to releasing it.

[neeters_guy]

It was exceptional as expected but way too short for my taste. Looking forward to your production class!

[jahnocli]

Looking forward to your production class!

Ditto!

[slowtiger]

So far I never spent much time (read: close to none) for lighting my characters, mostly because the style didn't ask for it. But I'm beginning to accept the importance of it in certain cartoon styles. Could you recommend any book or website which covers this specialty in general? My own search only dug up specific examples from specific shows, but I don't need so much detailed "how it's done in software X" but a more artistic point of view, "why do we do this".

[ernpchan]

...artistic point of view, "why do we do this".

-It helps to add dimension to the character.
-A shot my require interactive lighting.

[hayasidist]

... -A shot my require interactive lighting.

does "interactive" mean how we see changes in placement / intensity of illumination on a character walking through lit areas; how they cast shadows etc?

[chucky]

Wow that's beautiful Dennis ! Congrats to all the 2d team for pulling that off.

[visualbug]

So far I never spent much time (read: close to none) for lighting my characters, mostly because the style didn't ask for it. But I'm beginning to accept the importance of it in certain cartoon styles. Could you recommend any book or website which covers this specialty in general? My own search only dug up specific examples from specific shows, but I don't need so much detailed "how it's done in software X" but a more artistic point of view, "why do we do this".

For my understanding ALL animated shows have a "step" that is called "compositing" in which a software like AE, fusion or Nuke have a big-time process, because the animations exported from the software is still raw (talking about colors here), is exported separated by layers: (characters, fx, foreground, middle ground and background layers).

Some productions place a subtle texture on a top layer others just do "color grading" or color correction/effects and others create a big system with line textures, color textures like ed, edd & eddy lines can be created in comp etc. the idea is to give a "mood" to the production. And THIS separate the amateur animations vs the "PROS" you can see the difference and is what I am researching a lot right now for my future web series if you want to learn this, need to research: VFX compositing, cinema techniques, etc.

Here is an example from Toon Boom Compositing - 2d vfx:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpPcg9ixqUc

[ernpchan]

... -A shot my require interactive lighting.

does "interactive" mean how we see changes in placement / intensity of illumination on a character walking through lit areas; how they cast shadows etc?

Yes. Not so much about cast shadows but more about the character being lit by something. For example, if a character is walking up to an object that is casting light you might want to have a hotter rim pass for the lit side and a darker rim pass for the opposite side. It helps to add dimensionality to the character and adds detail to your shot.

[mrc]

I completely agree with the others: Excellent work on that fantasy sequence!

Marc