Best way to rig a character wearing a suit

[coinman]

My character has a suit on, which is making it difficult to rig correctly. If I separate the arms and legs into their own layers, it leads to the joints not looking natural when moving around, no matter what I do. Does anyone have any suggestions? I wish I could seal the seams, where the layers connect, so they don't pull apart in weird ways!

I just experimented with point binding for the first time, putting more body parts into one layer, but it is not going well. Really stumped.

[alanthebox]

I wish I could seal the seams, where the layers connect...

Have you looked into patch layers? Might want to check those out in the manual.

[coinman]

Thank you! On it now.

[Greenlaw]

My character has a suit on, which is making it difficult to rig correctly. If I separate the arms and legs into their own layers, it leads to the joints not looking natural when moving around, no matter what I do. Does anyone have any suggestions? I wish I could seal the seams, where the layers connect, so they don't pull apart in weird ways!

Back when I was working on Boss Baby, I just happened to draw and animate a lot of 'suits' in Moho for some reason.

Anyway, I almost always draw the arm bisected at the elbow, so I have an upper and lower arm shape in the same layer that renders as a single shape. Then I duplicate or reference this layer and knock out the top shape in one layer and the bottom shape in the other, but keep the entire path for both layers. Keeping the path like this preserves the shapes and insures that they deform as if they were still a single drawing. This allows me to change the layer order of the arm sections so the arm can wrap around the body but still look like a single shape. By the way, this works for any arm drawing, not just a suit sleeve.

Here's an example I threw together...



If you decide to do this, here's something thing to keep in mind: the curve that bisects the elbow can render with a slight gap when you have anti-aliasing enabled. The solution is to add a single point to the elbow curve in one arm section and pull it over the elbow curve in the other arm section. This overlap will hide the gap in render. So, in the above example, the artwork looks like this...



Alternatively, you can render with no anti-aliasing, which eliminates the gap, and then use a post AA process, like OLM Smoother for After Effects, to anti-alias the render. This option can give you additional flexibility for lighting and fx work in comp.

Here's the file if you want to pick it apart...

ArmDemo.moho


Note that this is not a complete arm setup. Normally I would set the armSort Smart Bone to also hide/reveal the upper arm layers too, but this setup only does that for the lower arm layers because I didn't want to spend too much time on this demo. But it should be enough to show how this kind of setup works.

Also, there is a single Shy bone for the elbow which can be revealed using Bones > Hide/Show Shy Bones. This bone has a constraint on it to turn 50% of the lower arm bone's rotation, and it helps maintain the volume of the elbow as it bends. (I normally set this bone to Shy because it should not be keyframed by the animator.)

If you have any questions, post here.

Hope this helps and have fun!

[Greenlaw]

Or, if you don't want to go through the trouble of setting up the armSort SBD, just enable Animated Layer Order and drag the arm section layers up or down to get the desired look. You can do this with fewer layers and no Smart Bone Action is necessary.

This is what I usually do for quick 'one off' animations because it's easy and quick, and looks just as good. A more complicated setup like the one shown above is worth it only when the rig will be used for several scenes in a larger production.

[Greenlaw]

I just experimented with point binding for the first time, putting more body parts into one layer, but it is not going well. Really stumped.

BTW, I'm using point binding for the entire arm. I'm also using it for the right shoulder in the body to keep the upper part of the sleeve pinned. The rest of the body is using Use Selected Bones For Flexi-binding. This makes sure that only the body bones affect the body artwork.

That's a nice thing about Moho bones: you can mix and match the different binding methods in the same rig to serve different purposes.

[Greenlaw]

Oh, I just realized you were also asking about legs.

A leg setup can probably be much simpler. Unless you intend to wrap a 'far' leg around the 'near' leg (like when a character crosses their legs,) it's not necessary to split the leg art at the knee.

However, the 'elbow' bone I used to maintain volume at the elbow joint when bending can be applied to the knee joint for the same purpose.

[coinman]

Thank you so much for all of this. After many hours the other day, I do now have something that is generally working, but will likely work to implement some of these ideas as I go forward. Especially the elbow shy bone, and likely the point binding on the arm. My solution does not pin along that shoulder joint, which does lead to issues if I rotate too far - which also limits the comedic potential of the character(s).

Not with animation, but I actually worked a long career in Hollywood, working on more big / well-loved movies than most people would believe. Two of my past projects that people respond to the most are Team America, and about 100 episodes on The Office.

Do people ever use moho on animated studio movies? It wouldn't surprise me too much, but I would think the common programs would be something else. I'm not assuming you used moho on Boss Baby, necessarily.

Thank you again! I am sure I will re-read your messages many times.

[Greenlaw]

Do people ever use moho on animated studio movies? It wouldn't surprise me too much, but I would think the common programs would be something else. I'm not assuming you used moho on Boss Baby, necessarily.

I know that it's used at some large animation studios and at many smaller ones.

For example, I use it regularly in TV productions where I work, most notably Boss Baby, Puss-In-Boots, The Croods, All Hail King Julien, and most recently Fast & Furious: Spy Racers. For Boss Baby in particular, we did all of the 2D animations using Moho. You can see examples of this on my demo reels here: My Demo Reels


And of course Cartoon Saloon uses it quite famously in their TV and feature film productions.

Where I work we use multiple programs to create 2D and 3D animations, and depending on my task, I may sometimes use multiple animation programs on a single shot. Specifically, Moho is my preferred and favorite way to create and animate rigged 2D puppets. For this type of animation, I find Moho is more capable and easier to use.

[coinman]

Fascinating. I can tell the program is excellent from working with it for a short while, but am surprised to hear there is not some highly expensive industry standard. One of the great things about the world nowadays - any schmuck can do really high quality music, video, animation or whatever right out of their house - and for peanuts, really.

Looking forward to seeing the new Puss in Boots.

Do animators just render to png image sequences and then studios use a compiler to do the final fades and whatnot?

[hayasidist]

...
Do animators just render to png image sequences and then studios use a compiler to do the final fades and whatnot?

speaking personally - every shot is a separate .moho and yes - to .png and then into a compositor.

layer comps (I personally don't use them that often, but other do make much more intense use) also allow multiple output sequences of the same scene -- a trivial example: foreground and background action where some other source will provide mid-ground and those three streams go into a compositor.

layer comps are very powerful and can do a lot more than "just" separation by depth. e.g. create masks for lighting added in a pre-composting step. .. waiting here for Dennis to say more

[Greenlaw]

My typical workflow is to use Moho's Layer Comps window and Moho Exporter so I can render my Moho project in multiple layer passes (Moho Exporter has a 'one-click' button specifically for this.) Typically, my layer passes would be a layer for each character, and any background/fg layers and props that may be animated, and sometimes for special matte passes and FX. Then, using Moho Exporter, I render the layers to PNG image sequences.

The downside to this is that many studio productions these days use 16-bit color or higher, and Moho is currently limited to 8-bit output. Occasionally, this limitation prevents me from using Moho and it will probably become a bigger issue in the future.

After the layers are rendered, I'll composite the layers in a program like After Effects, Fusion or Nuke, where I can add lighting and FX animations, and combine the animations with elements from other sources. Working with a composting program also means I can minimize the use of 8-bit output from Moho to only the character passes, and use the original 16-bit color artwork for the background layers. (The backgrounds are where you're most likely going to see the difference, primarily in skies and in underwater scenes, or anything 'atmospheric' with subtle gradients.)

The final output from the compositing program is a lossless movie file that will be sent to editorial and imported to a video editing program like Premiere, DaVinci Resolve or Vegas.

This is a typical workflow at every studio I've worked at when creating 2D and 3D animation, and it's also what I do for my personal projects.

I've gone into more details about this in past forum posts, which should turn up in a search. (Note: Currently, there's a problem with the forum's search engine so you might try using Google to call those up.)

I really should put all the info in an online article I can direct people to since the question comes up often.