Moho Forum

Trying to get back into Moho by doing some tutorials. But though of just a quick conversation starter to ask this forum. The animation I know I want to do will require the character to turn around. I've heard its best to have separate rigs for complete turn around so that's probably what I'll do. But here's the ask I want to ask:

When first drawing your character, is it best to start in a frontal view and rig it to change to 3/4 view, OR move from 3/4 view to a frontal one?

I'm using Moho Professional 12

I always start with the facing forward pose. This way I have a common starting point to work from when setting up the animation to go in either direction. IMO, this is harder to do when you start from an 'off-center' position.

My typical workflow for making turns is this:

1. Create a TurnLoop Smart Bone Dial (SBD).

2. For this SBD, start from the character's center position and work all the way around (360 degrees) in one direction until the character faces foward again. You can copy and paste the forward facing keys on completion of the loop. For this example, let's turn the character to the left.

For symmetrical poses in the second half of the turn, an easy trick is to flip bones or flip the image layers. The tricky bit here is to make sure you keep the left and right side bones/elements on the same side so the controls don't get confusing during animation.

if you want to 'flip' vector art for smooth pose-to-pose morphing, use DKW Root's Swap Sides tool. You can get it from here...

DKWROOT Scripts ( Lots of Improvements )

This tools doesn't merely flip selected points horizontally, instead it repositions the points to mirror its previous shape. If you plan this correctly, it allows you easily animate the shape from a profile or 3qtr pose to the front/backing facing shape and onto a mirror profile or 3qtr pose. It's great for smoothly turning head shapes! Note: make sure you have the same number of points on both sides of the shape before running this script.

3. Make a new SBD called Turn and use this to turn the original TurnLoop SBD and cycle this at least twice. This will allow you to turn the character 720 degrees (or more) and freely overshoot the turn when you return to the front position, so you never need to backwind the SBD. (Note: 720 degrees is normally enough, but you might want to build in extra cycles if you expect the character to spin a lot during animation.)

4. Make a second Smart Bone Action for this same Turn bone...Moho will automatically name the new action it Turn2. Now at frame 1, wind the TurnLoop SBD to its end position and animate this SBD turning backwards at least twice. (You'll need to reset it halfway.) This becomes your control to turn the character 720 degrees to the right.

5. Use Shy to hide the original TurnLoop SBD. You don't want to animate this bone, you should only animate the Turn SBD.

Now you have a Turn control that turns your character at least 720 degrees to the left or right. If you need to edit the original Action, you can show the bone by toggling Hide/Show Shy Bone from the Bone menu, or if you have MQC installed click the Show Shy button (clicking it again will hide all the Shy Bones agains.)

For me, this is the easy way to make turns because it reuses a single turn animation for both directions, which can be a HUGE timesaver for those extra complicated turn animations.

Hope this helps.

Even though Moho is super fun and easy to use I think you should really understand character design first and the proper way to set up a character sheet before just rigging. Here is a really good video that explains how to do a proper turn around sheet and tips on how to set up the proper guides when drawing in a different stoftware. Personal advice do not create a character within Moho itself without drawing the character in a different software or paper. You really only need 5 base drawings and flip unless the character is not symmetrical and you'll need to edit the flips a bit to make it fit for the other side and after that you can use Moho to tween the rest. However I wouldn't do it to floaty with a lot of frames otherwise you'll have very noticeable pop in with things like ears, nose, and some hair. Remember we don't want it to look mechanical when animating so proper timing and planning is needed. Just remember a rig cant do everything so you'll still need to manually draw extreme or irregular poses that are very scene specific manually. Rigs cant do it all so make sure you know that drawing substitutions are needed. Even something as simple as Gumball or South Park need to do this often.

A few more tips:

BigBoiiiJones brings up some good points. Before you begin rigging, you need to understand how to design a character for rigging. I think the video has great general advice applicable for making turns in any animation program. Doing this in Moho presents some specific considerations that depend on what the character is expected to do and how you intend to animate it. For example...

1. Does the character need to animate smoothly or will 'popping' between poses be acceptable?
2. Do you want to use vector art or bitmap? A hybrid of both?
3. Do you intend to animate using simple 'one-off' setups, an general purpose rig, or both?

Before drawing the body parts in Moho or another program, I would create some character studies and a model sheet. The studies should show the character in typical action poses you expect to animate, and all the key facial expressions you intend to use. The model sheet should show the character standing in a line up of at least four poses: Front, Front 3qtr, Side, and Back. You'll probably use this sheet to draw over.

Then consider how much of what you will create needs to be animated smoothly and how much you can get away with by using static images.

At the studio I work at, I'm usually given an animatic from which I can determine what type of rigging I'll need to do. If the character is only shown from limited camera angles, I may decide to make 'one-off' or shot-specific project files, and these rigs are designed to do only what's required of each shot. If the sequence of shots runs longer and has many complicated poses and motions, I may then decide to create a general purpose rig that performs all or most of what's seen in the animatic. It's not unusual for me to create both types of rigs for a sequence but a lot of thought and planning is put into what I'm going to need before I start drawing and rigging anything. Since the rigging stage is the most consuming, I don't want spend more time than we have scheduled, or waste time building in features that won't get used during animation..

If we think the general purpose rig will be used again in future episodes, I'll try to anticipate everything the character is likely to do, but again I'll try not to spend more time on this than we have available. IMO, you shouldn't design the character to anything unnecessary, unless you're just doing this for the learning experience.

For the main 'turn' SBDs, make separate turn SBDs for the head and body. Don't build the arm and leg positions or stacking orders in the body turn. Doing this can lock your rig into poses you might not want later, and you'll find yourself fighting your own rig. It's better to keep the arm and leg positions by hand...you'll find having this flexibility will make animating easier and it will look better too.

In addition to SBDs for turning the head and body, don't forget to make turns for each limb.

Keep the body parts each in their own group underneath the character's Bones layer. This makes it much easier to animate the stacking order since you're only dealing with a few layers. (Typically, for me, this is head, body, armUpR, armLoR, armUpL, armLoL, legL and legR.)

In the head group, I have a face group that's usually parented to its own bone parented to the head bone. This makes it easier to animate the position of all the face elements with a single bone for turning and tilting (up/down). Within the face group, I often use separate groups for the eyes, nose and mouth. If you want to keep your rig manageable and easy to edit/animate, the Group layer is your friend.

I should have mentioned this earlier but you should also give every bone, layer and action a clearly descriptive name. Don't settle for Moho's generic letters and numbers unless you enjoy torturing yourself.

If you'd like to see a rig demo I did for one of our TV shows, check out the rig I made for the interactive episode of Puss-In-Boots on Netflix:

My ‘Puss In Boots Interactive’ Demo Reel (2018)

Throughout the course of the demo, notice how every body part, the head, body, arms, legs and even the tail, all have independent controls for turning. I had very little time to animate about 18 of these 'choicepoint' animations, and once I had my rig completed, I was able to finish all of these animations (including the background animations) in less than 10 days. I probably spent half that time developing the rig. (Nowadays, I have a bit more experience and can probably do this quicker, but I had to start somewhere.)

Recently, I came across my demo project for the Po rig seen in my 2019 demo reel. This rig is a lot more complicated than the Puss rig because it need to turn in three seamless sections (bodyLo, bodyUp, head). I'll put together a similar demo reel for it and post it in the near future.

Hope this info helps.

Frame 0 facing the camera is often a good approach because you have a lot of control while keeping the points symmetrical. The only thing I dislike about it is that often facing the camera is the ugliest pose from a model sheet and not seen in the animation AT ALL. So sometimes it's better to simply start at three quarter position and go from there. Think of the animated end result and work your way backwards. Have a storyboard and model sheets before you decide how to rig.

Some more tips:

When I rigged the Boss Baby characters seen in my 2019 reel, I limited the smooth parts of the turn to Front-to-Front 3qtr poses, and then popped from 3qtr to the Side poses. This allowed me to avoid the complexity required in transitioning from the front to side versions of the mouth and eyes setups. In animation, you really can't tell the poses pop because of how I animated the character moving into the poses. Note how the head and body doesn't slide linearly from side to side, rather they swing in an arc between key poses. This makes the lack of an in-between the 3qtr-to-side poses far less noticeable. Another useful trick is to close the character's eyes in a turn and open them at the completion of the turn...this way, the viewer doesn't notice that the eye shape has changed from a front view drawing to a side view drawing.

For the back view poses for the 'hero' characters, I set up hard 'popping' turns from Side-to-Back 3qtr poses, and smooth morphing turns from Back 3qtr-to-Back poses, just like I did for the front range. But for most 'non-hero' characters, I may drop the Back 3qtr pose and animation altogether if I felt I’d never use it. If I didn't need the Side poses in any shots, I'd drop these too. (The tentacled aliens are a good example; they only have smooth front-to-3qtr poses.) As mentioned earlier, I try not waste time building features into a rig that will never be seen in the final shots.

I'm not sure how typical this hybrid approach is for other Moho users, but the above setup allowed a small team of artists to complete a ton of high-quality puppet animations on a fairly short timetable.

Another useful trick is to close the character's eyes in a turn and open them at the completion of the turn...this way, the viewer doesn't notice that the eye shape has changed from a front view drawing to a side view drawing.

Eye blinks are an animators' friend. It's one of my favorite ways to add some life and thinking to a simple character. Using them to fake out viewers is great. Viewers watch the eyes and face...

Back to the subject... I think it is good practice to make some full rigs that can do lots of things. When working on projects, though, I look for the simplest ways to get things done and often it means just building part of a character or rigging part of the artwork. Storyboards guide me to let me know what pose will be needed.

I find it sometimes faster to make a new quick simple rig for a shot, and as was said above, no need to work on anything that won't be seen.

That reminds me of Terry Gilliam's animation book. He shows all sorts of cheats to make things easier. Put your character on roller skates to avoid walk cycles. Put your character behind a wall or bush and avoid animating most of the body. Those sort of cut-out animation principles can transfer to other styles.

Lukas wrote: ↑Mon May 23, 2022 9:01 am Frame 0 facing the camera is often a good approach because you have a lot of control while keeping the points symmetrical. The only thing I dislike about it is that often facing the camera is the ugliest pose from a model sheet and not seen in the animation AT ALL. So sometimes it's better to simply start at three quarter position and go from there. Think of the animated end result and work your way backwards. Have a storyboard and model sheets before you decide how to rig.

True

0 makes sense from rigging also a good way to strip the life from a character.
Model sheets help though.
I actually try not to use front on views until absolutely necessary, it can get the viewer to pay attention for a second but best kept for special occasions.

I agree!

For many characters, the front view pose is rarely appealing to look at (e.g., Bart Simpson's front view pose always looks wrong to me,) but this pose does make a great starting point from a rigging perspective. The rig can be set up to move in any direction from the front view pose: left, right, up, down, and interpolated to any position in between.

When working with the front view head pose, you might even call this 'the joystick pose'. In fact, there are some clever Moho head rigging techniques that literally use a joystick UI. A search on YouTube or this forum will turn up at least two methods. (I personally don't use joystick UIs for production rigs, but they are fun to play with and you can learn a lot from setting one up.)

But during animation, I try to avoid using front view too. Slightly off-center to full 3qtr is used most of the time, but the front view is necessary to switch sides and on the occasion when the character needs to look directly into camera.

cgrotke wrote: ↑Mon May 23, 2022 4:26 pm That reminds me of Terry Gilliam's animation book. He shows all sorts of cheats to make things easier. Put your character on roller skates to avoid walk cycles. Put your character behind a wall or bush and avoid animating most of the body. Those sort of cut-out animation principles can transfer to other styles.

Oh! I didn't know this even existed. Terry Gilliam's cartoons on Monty Python were so influential on me when I was 12 or so. Back then, I tried to imitate that style using my dad's 8mm movie camera. I sucked at it and wasted a lot of film, but that didn't stop me from mowing a lot of lawns to buy more film and trying harder. (And I'm still at it...animating, I mean, not mowing lawns.)

I need to find this book!

The Gilliam book is a must have if you like his stuff. I wouldn't say it is a great animation book, but there are some of his thoughts about cutouts documented. A bit like a Monty Python animation book. Animations of Mortality is the name.

Those tricks are pretty visible in any kind of Anime. My animation teacher showed us some examples, and they were exactly in the same line with Gilliam. And I use them still today!

In designing a character's head I came to prefer a 3/4 view as the main position. From there I develop the front (0°) and side (90°) view, which, again, are not really useful in itself (as Greenlaw rightly states). For creating dramatic dialogue scenes we need the range between 5° and 75°, and 110° to 175° again (when 0° is front view). This is where most of the drama happens, just watch some good live action.

The front view is often problematic because of the nose (in 2d). Where does that outline go, and when does it switch sides? I was taught to do a head turn with the front position tilted a bit, so the nose is deepest in front view and its outline at the bottom. All these head turns neglect that you need tilted head positions as well which are far more important for expression. (If only for that anime trope of a face closeup showing nose and eyes, trying to look menacing into camera.) (And you all know how Phineas & Ferb avoided to show Ferb in front view at all - there's only 1 occasion the did it!)

I've collected a bunch of model sheets over the decades and noticed that the "front view with outstretched arms" came into fashion with the advent of 3D animation. Pixar et. al. used it, so it must be standard, right? But not for 2D animation. In 3D you can turn around your characters any time, this one pose is just a snapshot. I have a feeling that many 2d productions suffer from tilt-less head turns (with camera at eye level). I think (but I would need to re-watch) that classic animation from Superman to He-Man mostly had dramatic angles, with camera above or below eye level, which also made head turns more interesting.

One thing many of us (me included) do is to stage their scenes in a stiff theatrical way: 2 characters standing somewhere, visible from head to toe, talking to each other but facing the audience. That's OK for lots of situations, but it gets boring fast if that's all.

Greenlaw wrote: ↑Mon May 23, 2022 2:20 am if you want to 'flip' vector art for smooth pose-to-pose morphing, use DKW Root's Swap Sides tool. You can get it from here...

I installed all these scripts, some gained new functions, but I lost one that I use a lot, which is the split curve. Do you know which one I should install specifically for this purpose you mentioned, the flip curve?

1-Moho is not 3D. Any animation that simulates perspective motion requires great effort and technical accumulation.
2- What kind of swivel do you want? a Turn around slowly and gradually. The b1 frame switches between different angles. a is very difficult, especially if you want to rotate more than 180 degrees, you need to spend a long time studying the modeling law of Moho vector model. b is relatively simple, as long as you do multiple independent model switching.The moho animations we often see on youtube are almost all
3-I like [a], my 0 frame is [front], and the first frame of turning starts from [back]. The possible [initial connection] of the intelligent skeletal action will not affect the frontal 180 degree with higher usage rate. It is more important to ensure the smoothness of the first 180 degrees.
4-Have a nice Moho modeling experience=3