Hi folks, I want to show you
a scene that I just completed in Moho Pro that was fairly complex,
because it's got action in there. And it wasn't made any easier
by the fact that I didn't do any storyboarding. All in my head and I thought I had it figured all out
and it didn't work at all and I had to completely rethink the scene
all without storyboard. I mean as long as all you do is
as a one-man show not storyboarding is still I think a viable option. It can result in more work,
often results in less work, but as soon as you involve
more than one person I think storyboarding is a must. So for this pilot – since I'll be doing
all the editing and animation work myself – I just said no, I just don't have time
for storyboarding there's so much other stuff I have to do.
Nah, not happening. I'm going to use this Mac OS function
for presenting shooting continuity camera thingy, because it saves me a lot of work
and I'm really lazy and I didn't want to do all of this in Final Cut.
It's just I don't have the time really. Let's first take a look at
the scene in Final Cut. So this is the whole episode.
I have done this as a radio play. All the audio is in there,
all narration is in there. The red spots here is the music.
There's a little bit of music in there. The green stuff is all sound effects. The tiny dots are all the sound
effects and the music. And what I want to show you is the
second scene. It's this little part here.
So you got the intro with music. I haven't really put in anything yet there. This should have probably
key scenes from the pilot or I'm gonna make a few fake scenes
from future episodes that don't really exist. You know, as you have in your
animation intro. And then at the end of the intro you get the establishing shot here. This is the castle.
The main location. But it's most likely to change.
I have made so many renderings and versions of this background.
Different castles. Different backgrounds – it'll change again. And then there is the scene.
So it zooms in on the castle. And we're in the castle. In the room here.
Cuckoo clock at the back. And there's some talking going on. That was a real bitch.
This tablecloth. And then suddenly out of the bowl
comes this tentacle. And then it's a really crazy action scene. I'm going to show you the whole scene
at the very end again. This is basically done in three files in Moho. Let me first show the anatomy
of this whole thing. For this scene
I made the background in Moho itself. And didn't use to do that.
I often pulled in PNG files. I found that having to
create vector graphics in… Affinity or Illustrator is a bit
of a pain in the butt. And there's a lot of things you cannot do
that Moho can do. For example you have an outline.
You have an outline of an object. Illustrator, it either has an outline or it doesn't have an outline. That's it. So in Moho you can make
the outline visible and invisible… between points. And that's another thing I really, really
want to use for backgrounds a lot. That I couldn't do in Illustrator.
I would have to do workarounds. And it's a pain… Another good thing is
if you do it in Moho… I can set an outline style.
And I can then change the thickness of all outlines the background as I need it.
When I need it. So there's not only this kind of zoom size compensation. If you resize the the background
it'll change outline width You can also simply just
arbitrarily change the width. The reason I didn't do backgrounds
in Moho in the past is… used to – if there was a lot of
vector stuff going on – become very crashy. Very unstable.
Moho of now version 14 is rock-solid. I had maybe one or two crashes.
But that was probably me just doing stupid stuff. It's gotten much better.
So it's much more reliable. It could also partially have to do with
that I switched from an Intel old Mac which could barely playback
anything in Moho to my new M3 Max. Which is just butter smooth.
No matter how complex the scene, playback in the preview is super high res.
Butter smooth. So it could just be that the GPU is just
much more powerful and it just doesn't crash. This time around I actually didn't do
any 3D stuff as you can see here. So it's just all flat. Because I don't need any parallax. And I figured it's just much easier
to just only deal with layers. I've put the whole scene in a in a folder. And this icon here,
this actually means, that the… ’Animated Layer Order‘
is enabled. I can just keep on moving objects in front
and behind each other as I need it During the animation. And that makes life much, much easier… than having to resort to other weird things. This is the scene. The actual part that you
will be seeing in the beginning is… just this part. Only a very small
part of the whole room As you might have noticed This whole room is kind of f***ed up
because right now there's really only a shadow for the table
and not for the chairs and so the chairs look like
they're floating a bit but since I'm not going to be showing
this part of the room anyway I just left it as is never mind. Basically these four chairs at the back
they're behind the table… and the ones at the front
are in front – you'd think! but actually if you're really precise
you can see that part of this chair goes under the table cloth
which is part of the table it's a bit more complicated so only the back of the chair
is up at the very front here and the lower part,
the legs are just here. This is just layers layers and
more layers – you know endlessly. Next thing is the cuckoo clock
which I chose to just make it a rig I thought, well you might have it display
different times. you might want to actually have
the pendulum move or have these move,
or I could stretch them out make them longer, to show
that that they're not wound up entirely. And make it display different times. I have no cuckoo
coming out of the clock yet I'll just switch on the characters here
they're right now all behind the table In reality her arm would have to be
of course in front of her body, duh! But this arm, too, on the table
should be in in front of the table. Same for him. His hands and
lower arms in front of the table. So I made an instance of Frank and put it in front of the table.
But not the whole character, duh, Only made the front, hand lower arm,
and the back hand, and the lower arm visible If I hide this, you can see
Humbug is not even in the frame right now. He's talking, and there's
a lot of stuff going on here. So there's a clock, as you see
is an animation cycle – the pendulum. You can see those bubbles,
that is basically a particle generator. Where I made one bubble
and just had it bubble a little bit. The cauldron says ‘cauldron and tentacle’
because this thing has a little surprise in it.
There's a tentacle coming out. which is later in the scene. It's not even coming out in this scene.
See, I was lying. I thought I'd do it all in one scene,
in one file and I figured out it's just too complicated
and makes everything too messy because once a certain scene is gone,
there's several objects you don't need anymore so you actually want to take them out just to make everything simpler.
Make it render quicker. These are actually hand shapes.
A hand with a paper and a hand with a letter (envelope). And when he stands up… and puts the paper on the table
basically uses different hand shapes. with flat hands that hold nothing and right at that moment
you switch on the visibility of the letter envelope on the table Here it's invisible.
It's already here, the envelope, too. Just invisible and it just switches. And it looks as if he's putting
stuff on the table in a second. And here when he stands up… Boom – he moves the chair.
So I also also animated the chair, That's just pure layer animation.
Just very simple. Just timed to move with that. And then he talks to Humbug. Humbug comes into the scene –
walk cycle. These red circles if you wonder
are actually armatures If I select Frank you can see
this this bone in the middle. This is basically for the eye. This is like the eyeball
and these are pupil in the eyeball I can control directly. Humbug comes into the scene There's a walk cycle going on. There original version I made
was actually slower and I felt it was unnatural. so I sped it up a bit.
You can easily speed up walk cycles. if you select the whole walk cycle
and you hold ‘option’ I think on Windows that is ‘alt’ and and if you hold option
and you drag the end here it kind of scales
the whole area you had selected You can make the walk cycle much quicker –
just as an extreme example This is actually hilarious. f🎺ing love it! You can also make it much slower
if you want to Hold ‘option‘ you just drag it out. And he'd be like slow motion. And now this scene, this has been
a real pain to figure out how to do it. So he takes this tablecloth… this magical tablecloth,
puts it on the table… and I tried different things like I first had a normal vector object
and put a bitmap image on it. Didn't work. Then I tried
a bitmap image and warping it. Looked like… terrible. And then I figured… Aah, I didn't know that you can
actually take a vector object… and warp that. I can show you how I set this up actually. There is the actual table cloth.
Which is all vectors. Just to prove the point.
With a magnet you can just deform everything. I made the mesh so it has points at
the same areas where there are vector points. So when it deforms the whole object The vector points can deform with it
so it kind of follows those points. This number of points is actually enough
to make it look mostly okay And I start here with a
compressed version of this This is just a vector shape
that deforms the table cloth It's not even frame-by-frame.
Only have these key positions. Where I actually did shape it. And the rest is just
auto key framing. That's the magic of Moho.
That it's really got at. And it looks decent. I would like it to flap up a bit more but then it gets complicated You can't really do this.
You'd have to go 3D, it would make everything more complicated, I thought just go fake.
This one is a bit of a cheat. You know, but it's fair enough. The other thing is kind of complicated is… Humbug is behind the table,
the table cloth is in front of him, except for his fingers not even the hands,
but the fingers only have to be in front of it He's behind the table,
fingers are in front of the table, table cloth is behind the table, the table cloth is in front of the table, And now hands and lower arms
have to be in front of the table… …and they have to be
behind the table again. So a lot of switching. What happens here, you can see it
on the right side the rearrangement The order of the object changes If you go too realistic sometimes
it's just so much more work that it's not worth it
it doesn't really pay off. It looks good enough
and that's it. And then there's this little magic he does… and the bowl appears here. There's the bowl front.
There's the cereal front. And there's cereals back. There's the milk and the bowl back. And I just animate that so it looks a little bit
like cereals fall into the bowl. The cereal and the milk are invisible
and I just resize the layer. So it looks like it's popping in Then the milk becomes visible And I just move it upwards
so it looks like it's filling up And I do a little bit of
squash and stretch here to sell that. Procella, there's one more thing going on. Where she has this green thing
which is Japanese seaweed. So this is the hand shape
with a with a squiggly green thing. And then I switch her hand shape
from this to an empty hand. This is just layer animated, basically,
to go into the bowl. It goes in there an it vanishes then. I have a bit of a spill here which is actually not frame by frame,
but it's just this vector shape that I'm just deforming
with a few keyframes Part of the spill flies over to Frank
That just lands on his face And it's where this animation ends. Later on could just copy
that vector into Frank's rig. and it's part of his head then,
so then when he moves the spot stays in position.
I even had to fix the head turn animation To make sure it stays always on the forehead. There's two tentacles. The first one is just with a bunch of bones. If I try to animate this it's just as bad… This is using the ‘arc IK solver’
somewhere on the tip. This used to be Moho's way of
trying to make, if you have a chain of objects (bones)
to make them resolve in an arc. It always tries to resolve in an arc and it gets really flimsy and weird
and never really works well. I thought: there's got to be better way.
And then I just remembered… There was actually a demo of Victor Paredes
showing the new… What they call this? Curve… curve… modif…
curve what is this thing called? arc warp, curve warp – I forgot. You could just have a line
that acts like a bone. Or like a deformer, so it's like
you have a line that has several points. vector one-dimensional, and it has
a strength like a bone this light blue thing here, and that chain
just can deform your thingy and what And what you can do on top of that
you can actually have… a bone in there… you can bind that line,
this arc thingy to the bone so you can use the bone to animate stuff
which is much easier than having to look for some Bezier and stuff and
everything gets deformed in a weird way And it works much better. It's still not perfect, there's still
a lot of weirdness going on I also used a target bone,
but I gave up that didn't really work… So he has the thing on his forehead,
says to Procella ”Seriously?” she's like “sorry, I”
And you can see already… see the outline the tentacle is lurking
behind the the mask The bone pushes the tentacle up. into the visible areas of the mask.
And a little bit of wiggling here. And next scene here it gets
really complicated gonna switch off the camera
it makes it easier to follow what's going on This is not in scene so it doesn't matter
if it's not aligned Here is where I switch the camera
you can see here the step at the bottom. So I'm gonna switch the camera
and that's it, that's all I'm using for the scene because I did the whole action
scene in here with this setup and it just didn't work out
so that's why a lot of it is not aligned I just abandoned this I just cut here
and said ‘forget it‘ Just to show you what's going on here.
I have a separate Frank which is just his head and one leg and
I think the the arm in front of the tentacle and that's it. Looks like it's wrapped
around his neck That's the whole trick. This scene I found that somehow
this wasn't funny because he seemed too… too much suffering, in a way,
you know what when he's pulled up like this Rather than a comical over-the-top way,
it seems a bit too realistic that he's actually almost being hanged here
that just seemed It's not funny, it's just a bit too much.
That was funny, but here again… This struggle here didn't really work
so I didn't like that part And then Humbug comes around
and he pulls it out and pops it off That was originally what I thought
would be happening, then he takes the bowl and
throws it out the window but it all just didn't work out, because
he lands far away from the window. Is he gonna take this thing
and run to the window? What's he gonna do?
It didn't make sense. So I abandoned this part and remade it This is the latter half now of this scene She's taking notes. That worked for me. I think was comical enough. He's kind of cool going back to business, And she's just like
“yep everything back to normal” Another day at the office. What happens with Frank
is kinda complex here. He starts off with his hands in front of the cereal.
The cereal is important actually… You might have noticed that
actually the serial also moves in the action scene
and I thought it's kind of funny that it never drops or spills. it just it just jumps a bit around
and moves on the table but it never spills. Originally I planned to have it
spilled, but that would be too too much like what would normally happen and I thought it's funnier to have something
that is just very unlikely and stupid. Frank has his hand and arm in front of the cereal. The rest of him is behind the table. Let's go through this
frame by frame. His head has to be in front of the tentacle. So it can wrap around his neck. That's where it goes around his neck. This is a bit of a failure here
I honestly – if I would be super precise about this I'd want the tentacle go on top of his shoulder
but I thought it's one frame Come on cut me some slack!
I would have to add another instance Frank doing… so it's just too much
and so I thought f👹k it. I think this is around where I'm switching…
now he pulls him over the table and I decided just to
leave him behind the table until it's easy to put his belly
on top of the table. He's pulled over… this is a bit weird here, because
he's behind the edge of the table doesn't make much sense but it's really just one frame
so I thought again I can get away with this and the next scene you can see his belly is now
finally on top of the table It looks like he's on top of the table,
but it's only the belly the belt and the lower abdomen
are still behind the table And he's tipping the the bowl…
it's already kind of being shaken He's being smashed on the table, It pulls him up and this is the moment
when his front leg becomes visible. that is: in front of the table so we go here,
he smashes him down here His belly here, if you look very closely His belly's behind the table,
it's actually a wrong rendering but again: cut me some slack! it's just one frame. And then the leg is here,
and the bowl is being pushed a bit more towards the chair. One reason is of course,
I don't want the bowl to be spilt so the only thing it can do,
is move away from him, kind of. so it doesn't get knocked over. Now we have one arm, one leg in front of the table, behind the front chair,
and in front of the cereal And again. The bowl is moving again. For Humbug now… He's like ‘oh, I'm going away’ but actually supposedly
he's just in a moment moving to the other side of the table. He's a gnome, he can do that.
He can just go whoosh-whoosh-whoosh from one corner to the next
in an instance. Don't tell me his continuity is wrong here. He comes up at the chair and this
movement doesn't have to be that correct, because he's outside the frame. We really see the tip of his leg. So I thought as long as
it looks fine it's fine. He goes up. At this point his back leg is
behind the table, his back hand only is in front of the table, He climbs up, his front leg
is in front of the table, And now, I think, next frame
I'm gonna switch him all in front of the table Boom – he's in front of the table. Walks over, does a jump Tons of instances going on… partial instances that show only
one part of the body… absolute hell… And the worst thing of
this whole stuff is… In middle of the animation,
of course you very often notice ‘Oh, I need another hand shape!‘
you add one, Then of course if you add
that hand shape to the original, all the instances will say: ‘Oh, I'm out of sync!
I don't have this hand shape!‘ So you have to sync them again and sometimes then suddenly
movement goes out of sync and you have to sync every layer
with the original And the all your hiding of layers is
of course also (re)-synced Which means, all layers are visible
as in the original and you have to go back in
and start animating all the hiding and showing
of layers that you had, and so you have to redo
this scene over and over as soon as you change
anything fundamental in the original rig. You say: ‘oh I'm gonna
rebind this point, re-layer something…‘
you just have to go back maybe kill all the instances create new instances, re-animate the visibility
of the layers within It's hell. This is something that
doesn't really work well in Moho yet and I'm not really happy that somehow
instances tend to sometimes for no reason whatsoever
go out of sync with the original and then you have to tell it
to go back into sync with the original but that syncs EVERYTHING, even including the stuff that you
intentionally didn't want to sync. Mostly like layer visibility
and I think that's just a pain. There's got to be a
better way of doing this. I used to have this technique
when I do a body turn to hide and show layers
and avoid layer animation I can show you this actually a good example would be
Frank I guess… When I show you the body turn here… You can see the arm
goes behind the body Many people would do this
just with a layer animation. But that's a really bad idea,
because if you do that your layer hierarchy will be locked. If you animate, and you
at some point decide I have to change the order of layers his back hand has to go
in front of his face although the arm is
behind his body, or something… then you're screwed,
because you can't. It's all locked. It's locked in. So I tried to figure out
a way to simulate this. Going in front and behind
without using any animation I put everything behind the torso, Then I make instances
of all the limbs… That I might want to
go in front of the torso and make these instances invisible. If I need them showing in front
I just make them visible. There is this ‘arm upper F instance’
which is invisible (I misspoke) and as soon as I go here
it becomes visible when I make this movement. And I thought for a while
this is great, it's awesome this way I can have my nice
layering simulated, If I do an animation, I want to
change the actual layering of the thing I can change it to anything I want,
because there is nothing locking the layer animation. But it turns out, all too often these things go out of sync. Or if you make an instance of this rig, It somehow doesn't create an instance
of the instance, but it kind of creates an instance of the original – it's messy. it's just so all the instances
that exist within your original rig are fine but then if you make an
instance of the original rig then the instances of the instances
in there actually refer back directly to the original rig,
and things get really messy. So this is not a good solution either. I'm at this point almost giving up,
and saying I'm just gonna make a body turn without ANY layer animation
and have to do it manually every single time
I want to do a body turn So it just moves, twitches the bones a bit and then you have to go in manually re-layer everything.
It's a pain! You always want the flexibility for you hands and arms to go
wherever they want There are scenes
where you want your hands in front of your face, or under your chin for something, or you want to have your arms
suddenly behind your body both of them or even if the shoulder is in front you get caught by the cops… You have a side view,
yes your shoulder is in front but your lower arm has to be
behind the body. God knows what!
You need the flexibility to move the layers
individually within your rig. I'm giving up. I don't understand why Moho
doesn't allow overriding if you do a smart action,
with layer animation. It should allow you to just override that. You can override
bone angles and everything. Just layer animation is
the one that gets locked. And you're screwed.
I'm not entirely happy with this. This was also difficult, because of… the tentacle… It's so difficult if you have
two objects interacting with each other. The tentacle itself has a bone. And the main the main bone
at the bottom here, that's the root. …a combination of layer animation
and bone animation. And it gets really, really complicated,
because they screw up each other. So the layer is being turned.
If I say, ‘oh I want this to go a bit more down‘ What I have to do, I can't just
pull this down, because if I pull this down it pulls the whole,
it's the root bone. Ah, I can't move this either,
I have to go reverse. This has to be more flat. Now I move the bone down,
ah, this is the right shape… but what happens now is that
the previous and the next frame are screwed up. So I have to go back and fix everything again. Making this was absolute hell,
and it's not perfect… It never is.
But it mostly works. Next time I probably do two rigs. Will make my job much easier. One rig that would be
with a root bone at the bottom. and the other rig would be
with a root bone at the top and then you can just go and… and have it pulled from the from
the tip of the of the tentacle. Things you learn! And then I'm moving back behind the table. He falls off the table. This also was complicated, because
I'm using target bones. a lot for the hands. And I didn't really wanted to
give up using target bones in this specific case. I can switch it off you know, bone targeting.
There's ‘hand target ON/OFF‘ If I just switch it off, see
his hands would just be moved only by the actual bone angles. So if you have target bones and,
say, oh he has to move with the arm up here, of course his limbs mostly stay in place So if you start moving you have to go in and say ‘I've got to move this and this’
and the leg points here… and his butt… and then you can finally move it,
move him altogether. But it gets really complicated
if you have to turn/twist (rotate) him. He makes a twist in the air –
are you going to just move the layer? Isn't it gonna screw up everything,
where he's located? You could also just say
I'm just gonna twist the the root bone. But it only moves the upper body –
might be more natural, but again there's so many
adjustments you have to do. It is nightmarish. Was a lot of work. So he's throwing the dude here. In the back wall I have this
back window switch layer. There's the broken and the
fixed window. That's all. This is like alpha transparent,
so I can put in a different background. If I want to. The tentacle has two masks. I'm just switching basically
‘mask none’ ← → ‘mask window’ ‘mask none’ means it's just huge. This is the ‘mask none‘. So it's basically just a huge frame
showing everything. It's a mask that acts as if there is no mask. And the other one is the mask window. So it's some of the shards,
the broken parts of the window plus the rest of the left side. So when it flies through the window
it seems to be appearing to be vanishing through that hole. Yeah, here. ‘Make none‘ becomes invisible. And now the only mask actually still active is ‘mask window’ and as long as the tentacle
is in this area it's visible Of course I have to make sure
that the twiddling of the… this flapping of the of the tentacle never goes outside of the mask. It cannot go here up here
or it'll be cut off. That's a bit finicky, just to make sure that, it's just about, just about in the right area. So this is how I animated
a fairly complex scene in Moho I'm kind of happy that I
had to do this at the beginning. It's probably the most complex scene
in the whole episode. I'm happy to get this over with, and have ‘smooth sailing’ from now on
to animate the rest of the episode
