Moho Forum

Hey all,

Recently purchased Moho Pro 14 and am wondering, if you're a pro or power user, what is your gut reaction to building and rigging this character?
Would you go for more of a separate shape or liquid shape route? He's definitely rubbery and stretchy.

The character will be used in tutorials / on-screen animations. So as production ready and flexible as possible.



Link (just in case embed fails): https://drive.google.com/file/d/15FmytR ... drive_link

I imagine as I use this tool more, I'll revise this rig and try new things, but I want to have a good direction to start in. I also plan on utilizing Vitruvian Bones as I like drawing!
Any pointers or advice will be helpful. I'm currently going through the Moho tutorial series as well. Thanks in advance!

Hi tripplejaz!

The design looks cool! It should be a lot of fun to animate.

If I were rigging this, I would use my regular bipedal character setup:

Root bone at the hip position, and branch off the parts from there. For the tail, check out my tutorial on basic tail rigging and animation techniques. (I'll be covering variants of the technique in other tutorials.)

Create separate turn Smart Bones for the head, body, and individual limbs. Don't make a Smart Bone to position your limbs. In my experience, it's far better to position the joints manually as you animate them; you'll find more flexibility for posing the character this way.

For turn Smart Bones, I start with the front pose and animate a full loop around. This becomes my Loop Smart Bone, which will be 'hidden' using Shy Bone. Then, for my actual Turn bone, I will daisy-chain* it to operate Loop bone and have it turn the bone in either direction. This way, I only need to make one complete turn, not two separate turns in opposite directions...big time saver, and half the chance of making mistakes.

(*if you don't know what a daisy chain setup is, be sure to watch my current tutorial on using Smart Bones.)

For the head, I prefer to animate from front to slightly more than 3/4. Then I'll switch to a side view. From there, the backside version of what I do for the front, and work my way around. This is much easier than trying to complete the turn with one giant morph. This does result in a slight pop going from 3/4+ to side, but it's not noticeable in most animations. (All of my Moho work for DreamWorks used this setup, as do the characters in my recent personal projects.) The same can be done for the body.

The other day, in the Moho Animation Software Discord server, I discussed my 'advanced' hand setup a little. You can check that out too.

I'll present a proper demo of this described character setup in an upcoming tutorial.

This isn't the only way to rig a character, but it's what's worked well for me in the last 10 years of using Moho in TV production.

Hope this helps.

Greenlaw wrote: ↑Sun Jun 15, 2025 8:25 pm Hi tripplejaz!

The design looks cool! It should be a lot of fun to animate.

If I were rigging this, I would use my regular bipedal character setup....

Thanks for the in-depth explanation! Really appreciate you and your videos as well. Are there symmetry tools in Moho to speed up this process? I can't seem to find any working scripts or built-in tools to help create symmetrical characters. Thanks!

UPDATE: I found DKWROOTS tools which allow you to Mirror points through a menu. It seemed like it was incompatible with Moho 14.3 Pro but I found your Mirror link you posted with permission from DK and it works great!