Using my own drawn images, but cant just import the drawing.

[Burn Toonz]

hi, I just got moho 5 yesterday, and it took me about 5 mins to relize this was the best prog for me. Tested some others but this was easy yet powerful.

I have i question tho. If i wanted to draw my own images and scan them and then import them into moho, how do I get the image only. I mean, when I import the image it contains all of the background which is usually just the white paper, from the drawing, and i am unable to animate it properly. i've tried different things in photoshop to just get the charecter without the extra background, but no luck so far.

In short, I want to be able to draw a charecter on paper, scan it, import it to moho then animate.

Thanks for the help.

[bupaje]

I'm a new guy here so someone correct me if I am wrong but you just need to designate the area you wants as transparent in your 2D program and save it as a PNG with any option checked to preserve transparency and MoHo should open those ok. I don't have Photoshop but there should be a few ways to designate the transparent areas from creating a mask, or selecting the area outside your character and deleting them or even make colors matching your background color transparent but someone with Photoshop can answer better.

[Burn Toonz]

yep, got me on the right track. I was just reading on some rastor to vector software that will do somethin like that automatically, and converts it to a vector image so it seems easier.

I'll keep trying the transperant thing in photoshop tho.

[Burn Toonz]

Brilliant, looks like i wont even need rastor to vector software. It wasn't layer transperancey, but you could select "hide selection" which hid the background, then saved it as a PNG file. Excellent, thanks mate.

[bupaje]

Glad you figured it out. Unless your image is very complex you will find using an image and tracing it in Moho is a good way to go. I don't think you really need raster to vector for most images as Moho's vector drawing tools really are very straight forward and easy to use.

[avolux]

If Photoshop I choose Save for Web and use PNG-24 instead of PNG-8. PNG-8 will give you a matte line around the image, even if you choose no matte. Later versions of Photoshop allow you to use Save As for selecting PNG, and PNG-8 is not even an option when done that way.

[minimacman]

I'm very interested in this as well. My question would be that once I upload the image into moho, can I color it with moho? Or would I need to do this with photoshop?

[Rasheed]

You can color it with Moho, put some color gradient on it, add brush effect on the line, etc. etc. However, some of this will not be exported into a SWF file.

[JCook]

How can you color an image in Moho?

Jack

[Rasheed]

Trace its outlines to make it a vector image, then use the Moho tools.

[JCook]

Yeah, that's the way I would do it, I just thought you meant that it was possible to actually color an image in Moho. Thought I might have missed something there.

Jack

[Lost Marble]

You're probably better off coloring your drawing while it's still in Photoshop. Moho isn't a good tool for editing pictures. Also, importing some pictures for backgrounds or parts of characters or props works great in Moho, but if your plan is to draw your animation frame-by-frame and import them into Moho, then I should tell you that Moho really isn't designed to work that way. It can be done, but if that is how you plan to create your animation, you should probably look into an ink & paint program instead.