It's been a while since I sat down to play with Moho beyond it's drawing tools. I had drawn a fish and wanted to try a school of fish with particles but never got it right. I posted the file without the animations to get crits on the setup -the way I divided the body -suggestions on how I should approach it or even examples if anyone wants to play with it. Basically I just wanted to have the school swim across the screen and used a few variations of the fish animation as particles to make it seem natural.
Never got it right. With layer animation this way I occasionally saw the gaps between layers as I rotated the layers and the particles didn't follow nice. I tried with bones as well but mixed results as I have been just trying various things. It would be helpful for me to hear how you would do this so I can see how I should have set this up.
First glance: Too many fish parts on too many layers for me. (But there are lots of ways to bone a fish. Everyone finds their own method that works best for them.)
I will see if I have a fish animation somewhere that I was earlier experimenting with and post it. (Every animator has to start somewhere and fish seem to be the easiest.)
Just like every 3D animator seems to make a rocket ship flying through outer space as his/her first animation....
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Can you make your single fish move across the screen over 72 (or whatever frames)? If so, making a swarm...er, school of fish is just dropping the boned fish layer in a particle layer and playing around with the particle parameters. About 5 minutes work of setting it all up and 20 minutes of playing around with the particle settings.
I can move it simply across the screen but if I animate it first rotating the tail and head in Z and moving the fins and it looks good played like this. When I use this as a particle then the head or tail seems to turn too much and show breaks where they overlapped etc. Maybe it has something to do with the origin? I animate the fish movements in the center of the screen, then move it to the far right offscreen, then translate the layer so it swims across for 72 frames but the head, tail and mouth movements that seemed normal before I moved it to the particle layer are now more extreme so that the head turns very sharply.
As for the particles I can sort of get it but it seems like some of the fish would be bunched up like a deck of cards. Probably didn't help that I also was using multiple versions of the fish with some feeding off the bottom, some coming to the top and the main body swiming aacross.
Post a video of what you have animated, so we can follow along.
Regarding the bunching of the fish, well, that´s the fun of particles.
(One can tweak it a bit, but with so many parameters that can make profound effects, it is tough to tweak it just right.) I kind of like it - sometimes- , it can make things look more random or natural.
I doubt you would be able to create a perfect formation using particles.
If you want a formation of fish, it is better to make duplicates of your fish and choregraph them across the screen.
Regarding you problems with the fish parts not looking right as it moves in a particle layer I would have to see your animation in action before I could make an educated guess on what is happening.
Or you could post your latest moho file.
And another note: I am no expert on Particles (is anyone?) - particles are a bit of hocus-pocus, voodoo magic to me still. Put in the magic numbers and something happens - surprise!!! I am not at the point of I know what I want and all I have to do is do this to one of the umpteen parameters.
One can spend lots of time in particles and get no where real quick.
I found my fish animation test I did awhile back that uses particles and two sets of fish.
As you will note my fish are .png images, not vectors.
Also the swimming method of one set of fish is different than the other. Schools of Fish Swimming
Just 3 seconds long (or shorter) - 1 Mb.
Here's a tip for working with particle layers. This makes it easier to figure out what effect all those numbers have.
1. Create a particle layer and put something inside it (like a fish).
2. Activate the Particle Layer tool (last tool in the Layers tool group).
3. Press the Play button in the timeline to play back the animation.
(At this point, the fish probably won't look like what you want - they'll flow kind of like a water fountain.)
4. Now the fun. While the animation is playing, click the "Particle Options" popup box in the tool options area at the top of the main Moho window. A popup dialog will appear with all the particle settings. Try adjusting these settings, and you will see the particle flow change in real time as the animation plays back. For fish, I would start off by setting the acceleration to zero and the direction to either 0 or 180 degrees. Then play with the Lifetime and Source width/height/depth values, as well as the number of particles.
You may need to zoom/pan the editing view some in order to see both the particle system and the popup dialog, but making changes to the particle settings while the animation plays makes it much easier to figure out what's going on.
@Toontoonz - thanks for the feedback and example. I'll try to post something this week. I did the animations again but for some reason Moho exited on me when I was about done and I didn't have time to do it again. One solution I note is since the fish animation (moving fins, open mouth etc without moving across screen) does work so rendering the fish as a movie and using that does work without some of the problems I mentioned (those not related to particles) but I'll probably rebuild the fish with less layers. I did the same thing on my 'Jeremy' animation and so many layers that weird things happened when I animated -likely in part just because I made it so complex I lost track of something.
@LostMarble -thanks for the great tip. I was playing with the particle values but not in an interactive way as you described. This will give better results.
@F.M. - Doesn't look like 'play' to me. My 6 year old boy -who seems fascinated by the whole idea of stuff getting eaten, squashed, tossed about by monsters- would love the site of the fish getting munched.
F.M> - This is OT but check the Chit Chat forum for suggestions about free web hosting providers. Also double check to see if you ISP provides a simple web page -some allow you a few personal pages at least which you can use as a front endto list your videos of Zippy and put your contact info.
My 6 year old boy -who seems fascinated by the whole idea of stuff getting eaten, squashed, tossed about by monsters- would love the site of the fish getting munched. 
