Moho Forum

Like many modern 2D animation and compositing programs, Moho has a basic 3D environment for animating the camera and placing/animating 2D 'cards' in a 3D space, but its focus is primarily 2D animation. And while Moho does allow you to import 3D objects via OBJ, what you can do with the OBJ is pretty limited.

If you're intention is to import a 3D character and rig it in Moho for animation, you're going to be disappointed because Moho is not meant to work that way. For Moho, you're better off rendering images from your 3D program, importing them as bitmap layers and then rigging that as a 2D puppet. I do this occasionally, and the new Mesh tools in Moho make this process easier than ever.

For true 3D character rigging and animation, you need to do that in a dedicated 3D program, like Maya, Lightwave or Blender. (The 3 programs I'm most familiar with.)

Blender is a good choice and I recommend it. I've been using mainly LightWave since the 1990's and occasionally Maya, and recently I started transitioning to Blender for 3D animation. Though my experience with Blender is mostly recent, I have to say this program has come a long way in just a few years. As you probably know, Blender has a unique 2D drawing system called Grease Pencil, and the results can be rigged like 3D objects because every stroke in the drawing is actually a 3D object.

Working and animating with Grease Pencil is quite different from Moho, and I do not anticipate using Blender the same way I use Moho. As a 2D puppet animation program, I think Moho is easier to use and far more capable, but as a companion program, I feel Blender can offer different possibilities than I have from working with Moho alone.

In fact, many of the projects I work on tend to mix Moho animations with other 3D programs, along with a compositing program like After Effects or Fusion, so adding Blender to my tool box feels completely natural.

Re: FBX, I do wish Moho gets more I/O development love in the future. To transfer camera, object, bones and layer data between a 3D program and compositing programs like Nuke and Fusion, I typically use FBX, and Alembic for point displacement animations. But After Effects is a bit of an outlier; it's not natively compatible with FBX or Alembic, so other methods are needed for getting 3D data transferred. Moho has options for getting 3D data to compositors but it's limited compared to what I have available in the 3D programs I use.

That said, Moho has some really good tools for faking 3D animation. If you look at my 2019 demo reel at around 2:08, there is a truck that appears to be 3D but this animation is actually a flat 2D vector-paint hybrid drawing I drew, rigged and animated in Moho.

The sports car, on the other hand was modeled and animated in LightWave, with the 2D characters drawn and animated in Moho imported to LightWave and parented to the car in LightWave. The winding road environment was painted in Photoshop and put together and animated entirely in After Effects or Moho, so this is another good example of using multiple (2D, 3D, painting and compositing) programs together for one final result.

house10 wrote: ↑Mon Nov 22, 2021 10:58 pm sorry can u plz give an example of this...

Greenlaw wrote: ↑Mon Nov 22, 2021 8:02 pm If your intention is to import a 3D character and rig it in Moho for animation, you're going to be disappointed because Moho is not meant to work that way. For Moho, you're better off rendering images from your 3D program, importing them as bitmap layers and then rigging that as a 2D puppet. I do this occasionally, and the new Mesh tools in Moho make this process easier than ever.

thank u

Sure, I have a few examples of 3D that was rigged and animated in Moho. Some of these elements were rendered as still images or image sequences and then imported to Moho for rigging with bones and meshes, or used in switch layers; and sometimes the actual OBJs were used as elements in Moho.

The closest thing to the above that I have viewable in public is probably the 'Big Guy' test I did for our Trolls TV series. You can see this footage at the end of the reel. This test is actually a composite of elements I modeled and rendered from LightWave, images I painted in Photoshop, and photographs of craft supplies I shot myself. The elements were prepped in Photoshop, imported to Moho and rigged with bones and mesh layers.

A critical part of the character that came from LightWave was the hair, which was modeled and rendered as a 360 degree turntable image sequence, which I then linked to a Head Turn Smart Bone action so I could animate smoothly rotating hair for the character. Growing the hair and shaping it was done using tricks in Moho and After Effects. A few other elements were modeled and rendered from LightWave for Moho, but it may surprise you to hear that the light wrap effect in the footage is actually a layering trick I'm doing entirely in Moho. (Note: this footage was never used in the show, it was an exploratory test I was asked to develop as an alternative to the scrapbook animations we wound up doing for the show. I create a lot of little tests clips like this where I work.)

When I was developing the Dekker Moonboots rigs for Boss Baby, I tried a setup using some OBJs I modeled in LightWave and rigged in Moho for parts of the space suits. Sadly, I abandoned this approach for drawn versions of the parts because I couldn't control the lighting on the OBJs the way I needed it to match with the rest of the character art. I might try this again for something else because, except for the lighting effect, it animated the way I wanted. The footage on the reel was what appears in the show without 3D elements.

I have a couple personal projects where I used literal 3D renderings from LightWave and rigged the renders in Moho but I'm not ready to show any of that yet. These rigs will turn up in future tutorial videos. Other users here have also used 3D renders for Moho rigging, and some users have brought in OBJs as 3D sets. A search should turn up some of these threads.

Short version: honestly, anything you can draw or paint in a paint program, render from a 3D program, or take a photo of using a camera, can be imported to Moho and rigged. If the art exists as a bitmap or vector graphic, the source of the artwork really doesn't matter...you can rig and animate it in Moho.

Personally, I prefer to keep complex 3D animations in a 3D program, but sometimes it makes sense to simulate 3D animation in Moho. That's when I might use a 3D program to render elements that I can rig with bones and meshes in Moho.

Another good example of this might be my very first animation created in Moho, a short film called Scareplane, created in 2013 using Anime Studio 9.5 (what Moho used to be called.) I made this project so I could try out and learn about nearly every feature in Moho, and since I was primarily a 3D VFX artist at the time, I wanted to see how well I could integrate Moho with 3D. Most of the film's shots are entirely animated in Moho, and there are only a few scenes that are fully 3D. But even when a scene is mostly 3D, there's still a bit of Moho in it too. For all of the interior shots, any 3D motions were set up and animated inside Moho or inside Fusion.

I hope this gives you some ideas for different ways you can use Moho with 3D programs. With a little imagination, practice, and cleverness, the possibilities with Moho are endless.