Any tutorials on how to get a hand drawn look?

[NealF]

I've got Moho Pro 12.
I do most of my character creation in Clip Studio because I don't like the smooth line look and want to get a hand drawn look to my animation.

I've avoided drawing in Moho and have mainly used it for cut out animation and lip syncing.

Is anybody making hand drawn type animation using Moho? Love to see a good tutorial.

Thanks.

[alanthebox]

i've experimented with trying to get a more organic result in moho. i'm by no means an expert and not sure if my results are even that convincing.

on most of my cartoons, i just use textured brushes and add a slight boil by enabling noisy outlines, noisy fills, and animated noise in the vector tab of each layer. it's very low effort, but for me, it's okay.

on the cartoon below, i exclusively used looping frame by frame layers to varying degrees of success, sometimes adding them to bone layers. if i recall correctly, these looping fbf rigs could get a bit unwieldly, and would sometimes require me to point bind multiple fbf layers. for example, if an arm rig was made up of 3 looping vector layers (to give an organic, natural jitter), i would have to point bind each of those layers individually. i believe i also animated everything on 2's.



sorry, not sure if any of this is helpful!

[Greenlaw]

IMO, it depends on what you mean by 'hand drawn'.

If it's textural or line quality, I get hand drawn looks by using hand drawn textures, images, and bitmap strokes. You can see examples of this in my 2017 demo reel or my 2018 Puss demo reel, notably the Thighsander Plunderhorse scenes from King Julien and the 'choice point' scenes from Puss-in-Boots. These were mostly vector art with image texture fills and strokes. Some of the Croods stuff is Moho too but that animation was intended to look more 'cut out' style.

If you mean the way the character is posed, and how it moves between key poses, like traditional frame by frame animation, that has everything to do with rigging to allow for strong key posing and the quality of the animation. For examples of that, look at any of the Boss Baby scenes in my 2019 demo reel.

A great example of animating a puppet to look like FBF is Majid Shir Ali's Robin Hood rigging and animation demo.

Some beautiful recent examples can be seen in Cartoon Saloon's My Father's Dragon on Netflix.

If you are already doing any of the above, you might also try animating at different frame rates, like on twos or fours. Moho has options for doing that but if you have After Effects, and easy way is to use the Posterize Time effect to drop the fps of footage rendered at 24 fps to 12 or lower. This will make the animation drop frames and hold the frames it keeps for an extended duration, causing the animation appear to be drawn at different frame rates. (My old Boss Baby footage was always animated on ones but lately I've been asked to make my animations look like it's on twos or lower.) The neat thing with the Posterize Time tool is that you can vary the frame rate during the animation to suit the action (kinda like what happens in the new Puss In Boots movie.) Note: Be aware that you can lose important key poses if you're not careful with this tool.

Hope this helps.

[slowtiger]

I use TVPaint and Moho within the same projects and like a hand-drawn look, so my style has to be possible in both programs.

- Line quality: this is the easiest part because of Moho's brushes, to which I can also add my own. I can have lines both from TVP and Moho within the same character and you wouldn't know the difference. Take care to select "minimize frame-to-frame randomness" in the brush.
- Line dynamics: easy as well because you can adjust line width at any point, have nicely tampered line ends or blobs, just as you like.
- Line continuity: there's two ways to do that in Moho. One is to switch off line segments completely, but this unfortunately is not animatable. I use line width set to zero (by hand, not by text input), this I can animate, and for further adjustment I can slide points alalong the outlines.

This is just about style. Achieving a frame-by-frame look depends on your animation skills.

[Greenlaw]

Great tips slowtiger!

- Line continuity: there's two ways to do that in Moho. One is to switch off line segments completely, but this unfortunately is not animatable. I use line width set to zero (by hand, not by text input), this I can animate, and for further adjustment I can slide points alalong the outlines.

Actually this is possible in one of two different ways...

1. used stacked shapes for the line segments, and use Animated Shape Order to change the order. You can use segments that have the same color as the fill to 'hide' the segments. This can be controlled using a Smart Bone Action to shrink and extend lines. For example, I sometimes use this method to 'erase' the underside part of the shoulder line when a character raises the arm. It's not really animating Hide Edges but the effect is the same.

2. use Synthsin75's Animated hide edge tool. This method actually uses Hide Edges, is easier to set up, and it works great! Be sure to read the instructions carefully.

I would lo love to see a method that uses Stroke Exposure, but that would require Stroke Exposure to be more flexible than it currently is. (I've been able to make that work but it's easier to use the animated 'hide edges' tricks above. I've also used the 'stretchy' end points trick you described, so we have some good workarounds for now.

[NealF]

i've experimented with trying to get a more organic result in moho. i'm by no means an expert and not sure if my results are even that convincing.

on most of my cartoons, i just use textured brushes and add a slight boil by enabling noisy outlines, noisy fills, and animated noise in the vector tab of each layer. it's very low effort, but for me, it's okay.

on the cartoon below, i exclusively used looping frame by frame layers to varying degrees of success, sometimes adding them to bone layers. if i recall correctly, these looping fbf rigs could get a bit unwieldly, and would sometimes require me to point bind multiple fbf layers. for example, if an arm rig was made up of 3 looping vector layers (to give an organic, natural jitter), i would have to point bind each of those layers individually. i believe i also animated everything on 2's.



sorry, not sure if any of this is helpful!

Love the video. It does look hand drawn. Thanks.

[NealF]

IMO, it depends on what you mean by 'hand drawn'.

If it's textural or line quality, I get hand drawn looks by using hand drawn textures, images, and bitmap strokes.

Great animation. WAAAY out of my league. I'm really a songwriter who makes his own music vids.
I think the look I'm looking for is like the cave men example you have.

If I understand, the textured fills and pencil like lines are done in a raster program? Imported to Moho for animation. Is that correct?

Thanks.

[NealF]

I use TVPaint and Moho within the same projects and like a hand-drawn look, so my style has to be possible in both programs.

- Line quality: this is the easiest part because of Moho's brushes, to which I can also add my own. I can have lines both from TVP and Moho within the same character and you wouldn't know the difference. Take care to select "minimize frame-to-frame randomness" in the brush.
- Line dynamics: easy as well because you can adjust line width at any point, have nicely tampered line ends or blobs, just as you like.
- Line continuity: there's two ways to do that in Moho. One is to switch off line segments completely, but this unfortunately is not animatable. I use line width set to zero (by hand, not by text input), this I can animate, and for further adjustment I can slide points alalong the outlines.

This is just about style. Achieving a frame-by-frame look depends on your animation skills.

Very helpful. Thanks.
I can see I've got a bit of work to do. I can draw well but till now have only dabbled in animation.

[Greenlaw]

Hi NealF,

...I think the look I'm looking for is like the cave men example you have.

If I understand, the textured fills and pencil like lines are done in a raster program? Imported to Moho for animation. Is that correct?

Yeah, the Croods stuff is mostly straight forward binding of imported bitmap layers. I worked on that show quite a while ago, and from what I recall most of the artwork was painted in two sets for each character, a front view and a side view, with the body parts and facial features were split out into layers in Photoshop.

To animate head and body turns, I would just slide a bone with the face or limbs artwork halfway across the front pose body--this was to cheat a three quarter view that didn't actually exist--and then switch to the side view. This happens very quickly but what makes the animation look smooth is having the character perform into the turn rather than simply switching artwork with a Switch layer.

IMO, just because it's a 'cut out' puppet animation doesn't mean it has to look bad.

When exporting the artwork from Photoshop, I liked using a free script called Photoshop Export To Layers Fast. This tool has many useful options for saving out the layers as PNG images, and is far more capable then Photoshop's native layers exporter. But if you're using Moho 13.5.5, you can also reliably import a PSD file with layers provided you give your layers sensible names.

I really like the 13.5.5 improvements made to the layered PSD system, but I'll still use the third party script sometimes because it's very reliable and flexible.

I also like using vector art that's been styled to look like bitmaps, and I'll often take a hybrid approach so I can have the best of both worlds.

[Greenlaw]

Oh, and if you're not using Photoshop, you can actually use any paint program that supports the standard layered PSD format. The script I mentioned only works with Photoshop though.

If you use the free Krita paint program, it comes with its own script for batch exporting layers. This script isn't as robust as the Photoshop script but it does the job. But Krita's layered PSD works fine in Moho too so long as you follow a sensible layer naming convention.

[NealF]

Hi NealF,

...I think the look I'm looking for is like the cave men example you have.

If I understand, the textured fills and pencil like lines are done in a raster program? Imported to Moho for animation. Is that correct?

IMO, just because it's a 'cut out' puppet animation doesn't mean it has to look bad.

Thanks for the info. What I like best about the Croods example is the rough lines and textures. I don't know if I'm weird, but many times I like pencil sketches more than the finished product. Something about the sketchy line.

I don't have Photoshop. I use Clip Studio Paint EX for my raster art. It also has some animation capabilities. So I'm trying to learn as much of both programs to see which to use when.

Love your work.
You've been very helpful. Thanks.

[Greenlaw]

Clip Studio Paint is a great program! I use is for my comics work but it's a great paint program too. I haven't tried CSP's PSD format for Moho yet but I do export my comics to layered PSD for final prep work in Photoshop, so I'm pretty sure it's the standard PSD format.

BTW, you can get 'rough' pencil and other natural media lines using Moho's vector tools, and there are some advantages to doing it that way. Just mentioning it as another useful option.

[Greenlaw]

Re: FBF animation, I haven't used CSP for FBF animation but if CSP can display an audio waveform on its timeline, that's a big advantage over Krita's FBF workflow.

[NealF]

Re: FBF animation, I haven't used CSP for FBF animation but if CSP can display an audio waveform on its timeline, that's a big advantage over Krita's FBF workflow.

CSP exports PSD file with no problem. It also does let you import wav or mp3 files. One thing it doesn't do is let you scrub the audio. That's why I do lip sync in Moho.
Actually haven't used the audio, though because of the lack of scrubbing. Just too hard to land exactly where you want the mouth to change. Maybe it's me, though. But the lip sync is so easy in Moho, so I just stuck with that.

I played a bit with the vector brushes. Bought some natural ones. They look good. Just haven't had enough experience yet.
BTW, CSP lets you draw with vector layers or raster. So you can draw freely and correct your lines if they're vector. Especially handy for us folks who need the help.

[Greenlaw]

I played a bit with the vector brushes. Bought some natural ones. They look good. Just haven't had enough experience yet.
BTW, CSP lets you draw with vector layers or raster. So you can draw freely and correct your lines if they're vector. Especially handy for us folks who need the help.

Yes! This is the reason I do all my comics in CSP...the vector tools there are quite stellar. When I'm drawing Brudders, for example, I do all the line work using CSP's vector brush, and the fills are bitmap. The advantage is easy editability but also I get reusability for props and certain character poses...because it's vector art, it's fully scalable with no loss in quality. (CSP's library is handy for reusability too.)

However, you can't export vector art from CSP to Moho and retain the vector data. Not a problem for me because I mainly use Moho's native tools for vector art (and sometimes Illustrator,) but some Moho users who want to import SVG have brought it up before.