It's done! See the finished thing here (included a behind the scenes part)
Hellou
So, i wanted to use the christmas holiday to experiment a bit with Moho and to go back to basics and use more of a frame by frame approach to a scene. Most of the work i admire the most that has been done with the software were pretty simple rigs but animated with a lot of replacements and more or a fbf sensibility in mind instead of a million crazy deformers and smartbones that fall apart after a hot minute...
This is still all heavy WIP but i thought i could document it here... i started by VERY crudely and crappily roughing out some keys and a couple for breakdowns on my iPad, importing them to Moho as a FBF layer and timing them out on the timeline mostly on multiple of fours so i will have an easier time inbetweening (except if it really looked better on 2's or 6's):
Then i determined from my roughs, what my rig would need. I somewhat cleaned up the very first frame to use as a guide but otherwise made most of it up and adjusted things while drawing it in Moho. Instead of an elaborate arm rig with a lot of correction Smart Actions, i made quite a couple of vitruvian bones... same with the mouths.
Some people mistook the sunglasses for huge eyes so i changed them. Then i added some light Smartbones for head tilt and some squash and stretch and perspective changes and NOW i'm in the process of adding the first set of keys.
I think it's worth to note that this is the first rig since i started using Moho in 2008 or 2009 that was drawn almost exclusively on my Cintiq thanks to the new freehand options
No more point to pointing...
So far i'm relatively happy with the results, i think it looks quite a bit more expressive than the usual standard stiff rigs i do at work since i'm more pressed for time... i'm not quite sure if this process is faster than if i had just drawn this the old school way but oh well
I'm using solely step interpolation to key everything out. Once i'm done with my first pass of keys, i will make another pass with breakdowns. Then another... and maybe another... until i get to inbetweens and THEN i will use interpolation to pick and choose specific frames that i want as inbetween drawings. Most of it should end up on two's with fast actions being on ones. At the very last step i will go down to a vector point level and do things like easing in and out into the smear, correct some things, etc.
I also don‘t shy away from breaking stuff like crazy like moving bones around instead of just rotating them to get as close to my rough reference keys as possible. I also use the new Prev/Next Key shortcut a lot as if was doing this traditionally. Flipping like a mad man helps to see your arcs and overall flow etc.
This process is the one i would usually do when using Toon Boom and what most people doing cut-out in TV are doing. I always felt while it's obviously more work than just setting two keys and let the computer do the rest, it obviously also looks much better. I think getting decent animation out of Moho has very little to do with rigs and much more with approach and applying principles with Moho's tools... like everything in animation.
I also want to make a sauce dripping from the Sandwich maybe with the new liquid shapes, we will see... Anyways, i hope i'll finish this before the new year so stay tuned
And Merry Christmas!
UPDATE 1
Keys are done!!
