Animating 3D characters in Moho

[LeviEnton]

Hey everyone,
now that Moho 14 is out and looking better than I could have ever imagined, I want to show off this little Moho experiment I’ve been doing for about a year, involving animating 3d characters in Moho.

Reasons for using 3D:

Since Moho has very advanced bone tools, for your everyday character acting scene 3D would not really be of that much use. However, for complex action shots with a lot of character movement 3D can save you a ton of time it would take to draw the characters/props/set-pieces frame by frame (and managing to make it look smooth and consistent).

Are there any reasons to animate 3D characters in Moho instead of a dedicated 3D software?

No. There aren’t. Moho’s 3D features are incredibly outdated and I don’t recommend anyone to try this, I just did this as a fun experiment.

So, here are 2 of the animations I created in 3D with Moho:

The first one is of this Ninja duck, performing an action stunt. I drew a lot over the model frame by frame to make the eyes look more expressive.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qH6zz6 ... drive_link

The second one is this Attack on Titan fan animation. In the series the soldiers fight the giants with a special equipment that lets them fly around the buildings. For this animation I actually assembled the city inside Moho out of the models I made in Blender. It was very difficult to make, since Moho 13.5 lagged a lot with all these 3D objects and really liked to glitch out or crash.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CH8TJW ... drive_link

If anyone is interested in the Moho files, I could upload them in my cloud although I didn’t put much effort in keeping the files organised.

If Moho’s 3D support gets updated at some point, I would be happy to actually use this for a full project, but currently the only use for 3D characters would be to quickly layout your 2D animation with a simple 3D puppets.

[Fuzatoon]

That's better than what I figured was possible with 3d in Moho Did you animate individual body part meshes in Moho? Or import animations with FBX or something? ...Laying out an animation, like you mentioned, sounds pretty interesting. Especially for big sweeping shots that involve a lot of perspective changes.

Thanks for sharing this! If you get a chance to upload the files, I'd love to check em out... messy or not

[LeviEnton]

That's better than what I figured was possible with 3d in Moho Did you animate individual body part meshes in Moho? Or import animations with FBX or something? ...Laying out an animation, like you mentioned, sounds pretty interesting. Especially for big sweeping shots that involve a lot of perspective changes.

Thanks for sharing this! If you get a chance to upload the files, I'd love to check em out... messy or not

Hi,thank you! I'm happy that you are interested in this project! And yeah, i animated each mesh individually in Moho, mostly without bones - since bones can only rotate in 2 dimensions.

Here is a link to the duck animation (which is a little bit less complex than the other one). The 3D background was constructed and animated in a different moho file than the final one with the character in it (Building_withKevin.moho) to avoid the program from crashing too often. Unfortunatly, trying to open them in Moho 14 just now made me realize that the new graphics engine is not made for the old 3D tools. It is very unstable and for some reason, the live preview cannot have 2 models intersecting each other anymore - instead the models will just follow the layer order. (this is only a problem in the live preview, the render looks normal, so this is probably just a bug).
So to look at it properly you will have to open it in Moho 13.5.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HOCNmx ... sp=sharing

[Daxel]

That's cool! I like the direction, specially the duck's one.

This is usually achieved using Blender or Maya to export an image sequence with the 3D scene so you can then work inside Moho with that sequence.

[Fuzatoon]

Shame about 14 Hopefully it'll get fixed in the next update... Thanks for uploading tho!
I think utilizing 3d models has a lot of potential. In blockouts/animatics for sure.

[LeviEnton]

That's cool! I like the direction, specially the duck's one.

This is usually achieved using Blender or Maya to export an image sequence with the 3D scene so you can then work inside Moho with that sequence.

Thank you! Yeah, it is smarter to not do it in Moho since the 3D features aren't properly maintained. Which is understandable, since they are not the focus of the software. But I wish it would be at least returned to the standards of 13.0, since those would be the absolute minumum controls for professional work.

[Daxel]

I think utilizing 3d models has a lot of potential. In blockouts/animatics for sure.

I do this a lot but I use Blender and sometimes DAZ studio. Doing it in Moho is like trying to animate using paint. You can, and it may look simpler because it has less features so there are less buttons. But in practice, it is way, way harder to do than using dedicated software. Blender being free and at the same level as top propietary 3D software, I don't see any reason to use Moho for 3D aside from doing it for fun or to experiment.

Do you? Maybe I'm missing something.

[Fuzatoon]

I think utilizing 3d models has a lot of potential. In blockouts/animatics for sure.

I do this a lot but I use Blender and sometimes DAZ studio. Doing it in Moho is like trying to animate using paint. You can, and it may look simpler because it has less features so there are less buttons. But in practice, it is way, way harder to do than using dedicated software. Blender being free and at the same level as top propietary 3D software, I don't see any reason to use Moho for 3D aside from doing it for fun or to experiment.

Do you? Maybe I'm missing something.

I was thinking of it serving mostly as a guide when doing shots with more complex camera work... I could see it being useful for creating pieces for more complex environments or props with painted maps to match the style of your vectors -- IF it works well enough. I've never messed with it at all and it sounds like that's not practical at this point But yeah I'd go with Blender and grease pencil if I wanted to do something that was primarily 3d

[Daxel]

I was thinking of it serving mostly as a guide when doing shots with more complex camera work...
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Yeah that's what I mean. That's what I do with blender and DAZ, just references, animatics... when the camera, poses or geometry are complex like those two cool shorts. But the end product is a 2D animation made in moho using those 3D image sequences just as references.