Webinar – Animating rigs with a traditional mindset in Moho by Joel Mayer

hi everyone thank you so much for joining us today today's webinar will be about animating Ricks with a traditional mindset in moo presented by Joel mayor before we begin the webinar there are some housekeeping items that we like to go through general information this webinar has been recorded and we'll be uploading it to our YouTube channel you can ask questions using the question panel uh our chat is just for mer information so use the question panel to send us a doubt or a question ER also due to time concern we'll try to answer all of your questions but we'll do our best we have 15 minutes also the panelists are Mari kones myself Victor pares and our presenter Joel Meer also encourage you to tag us in in your Instagram stories doing adding the hash weinar #m animation at Joel Meer art and also at@ M animation we'll be sharing your storic if you tag Us Joel Meer is an animator and communication designer born and living in basil Switzerland he's created director and responsible for animated content in the Communications Department of Migos industry subsidary of migro Switzerland largest retail company and private employer he also does freelance work for Independent animation projects and develops his own intellectual properties so with that I will leave you with Joel and his presentation animating rigs with the traditional mindset in moo thank you so much all right thank you Mario uh let me just share my screen here uh I hope you can all see my presentation so hello everybody uh nice to have you thanks for showing up uh today I'm going to talk about something that actually I myself have only been really getting into over the last like I would say year or something and that is how to get the best of both worlds when you work with rigs but you basically have a traditional um animation background um let me just start off with a short disclaimer I usually do this because you know how it is with these things it's all uh to an extent just a personal opinion it's all based on my own background and also my own goals with my work you know those May differ with you and specifically my goal has always been you know how you know since I I do both traditional and rigged animation it was always about you know ah I wish I had the flexibility the freedom and also the look of traditional animation a bit more with my rigged stuff so that's basically my findings that I'm going to present to you today and different styles interest taste require different methods um with that said let me just take a little quick look back with my history with moo because I think it's it's important to understand the context a little bit you know how we all got here so I'm not quite sure anymore um but I think my very first version that I ever owned of moho back then it was called Anime Studio was probably version six um and that was probably around 2007 so I'm aging myself here a little bit um but back then it looked like this actually so not that dissimilar to how it looks today and the reason why I bought it was because I saw this show real um the oldtimers Among Us will probably remember this um this was all done by a studio called freakish kid and I saw this stuff and I was like I can't believe this is rigged you know this looks so close to frame by frame um gee I I I I think obviously I had you know visions of grandeur and was thinking I can uh basically do Disney quality animation all by myself thanks to you know the rigging process that takes off a lot of the work so my mind was pretty much blown and I got moo and pretty quickly I was like how how do you do this because what I would do and I think this is something a lot of beginners fall into the Trap of I would rig and rig and rig and rig some more because obviously know it's all in the rigging and then when I would try to animate the thing it will you know very quickly fall apart so I still stuck with moo though um I'm I've been using it now probably for over 10 years uh mainly for my for my day job as as Mario said in Communications doing corporate film and so on um because there we have really quick turnovers and we have to produce stuff you know fast and it has to stay flexible so why do we use rigs you know because we have usable parts for example uh we can do more animation in less time it's easier for consistent volumes everybody among you who's also traditional animator knows the problem with you know um keeping volumes consistent from one drawing to the next um that's a big one you know there's no cleanup no coloring process you know there's more work up front with the rigging and everything but if you look at any credits of your favorite 2D animated movie you will see the longest list is usually the cleanup Department Victor can probably confirm this from cartoon Saloon and the flexibility you know because we have clients and we we animate something and then they say well can it be like two pixels to the left if you would have to do this in well I guess that would even be easy with traditional animation but um you know you just have the ultimate flexibility with with rigs and it's easy to adjust things after the fact let's just quickly compare the two workflows you know uh roughly you know obviously this is just a very very broad overview there's multiple in between steps and before and after that but when we look at how traditional animation is usually made the animator starts out with a thumbnail he usually gets a layout from the layout department or just storyboards he does it his keys or his Extremes in traditional actually keys and extremes are two different things but just for the sake of Simplicity we call them Keys then he breaks it down he charts it you know this little spacing in between charts he gives it often in between or inet it himself maybe add some straight ahead fluff then it goes to cleanup and then it goes to coloring how does this compare to cutout just a short uh note here I I'm that old that they will call this stuff cutout you know you can call it puppet animation rre animation when I talk about cutout all I mean is just you know stuff that you would do in a software like moho anyway so obviously you're going to model and design the thing you're going to rig it and then you're going to animate it and you're going to export right and success so obviously here is where all the creative decisions are made right in the modeling and design um stage that's what I thought at least so I was thinking to myself all right so if I want to do um better look moo stuff all I got to do is get better at rigging uh and I tried and tried and no matter what first of all it to be quite honest with you it just simply wasn't very fun to me personally and second of all I couldn't get the results I was really after um then I went back you know to my initial Inspirations back to freakish kid and I found on the web archives actually uh that's the only thing I ever solved and that's a behind the scenes screenshot basically and that's from their Nickelodeon little series that they did Clocky the vampire chicken and if you look at these wireframes you know back then the computers were so slow we had to animate in wireframes and then press command R all the time to even see what moho was doing but it's really not a complex model you know there's really not much to it it's a great design obviously but um uh there is nothing hidden up the sleeves uh basically on a technical level not on an artistic one but on a technical level there was nothing to these models that I couldn't do already so uh and the other thing that was kind of you know kind of an eye open is all this stuff was done with moo 5 and those of us old enough moo 5 moo 5 had no smart bones no motion graph no deformers no curvers no Vitruvian bones it really barely had anything it had a vector deformation and it had bones and it had switch layers that's it basically so I was thinking well it really can't be about the rigging then you know because they could get such great animation that still looks good with such you know simple tools and then the Revelation came when I kind of duck through the um the good old moo forums you know that existed since back in the day and I found this Old Post by Stu Gamble from freakish kid and what he said there was when people ask them about how their process was is you know we take the poses from the board the storyboard clean those up to create key frames then we'll animate between the keys to create the sequence it takes longer in prep but the animation is much more defined and quicker I really like that word defined you know I think that's actually something really essential so I was like ah okay maybe I had it all wrong and at the same time something else was happening in my traditional uh workflow I was watching some Aaron Blaze videos um and I saw him do this basically he would start out a scene by just drawing a sequence of little simple thumbnail sketches then he would take those sketches and blow them up on the digital timeline and use those already as his first storytelling key so to speak so I tried this myself and this little cat animation that I did last year was basically it looks I mean it looks somewhat complex but it all really started out with these four drawings I took those drawings like a comic strip and blew them up obviously refined them and cleaned them up and so on but that really gave me the starting point to animate this whole thing so then it got me thinking you know I probably got it all wrong you know because the creative decisions even with traditional animation I mean obviously there are decisions being made after that but really the the the essence of your scene is being made in the thumbnail and layout stages you know all else is execution so what if we take that stage and add it to the cutout process um instead of diving straight in and model and R we start out by planning things out and not only that but we add a few more steps there to really craft our animation you know the secret really is in the planning and not in the rigging and in being a good animator you know nobody can no software can take that uh uh can can do that for you you kind of have to understand the principles to really get you know to a point where where it all looks better and better um the other secret which is probably not so much of a secret is really I I'm not a very good rigger you know to be honest I'm I'm I I can almost guarantee that pretty much everyone in this webinar today probably knows as much about Moo's tools than I do maybe something is I kind of know what I want you know and I know it from the GetGo but how do I find out what I want you know so step one you know since I did some tutorials about moo as well in the past sometimes I have um newcomers ask me you know ah well where should I use a smartphone where should I use this which bone which is the right bone to do there I always say you know close moho close your computer take out piece of paper and the closest drawing utensil that you have um and just brainstorm you know just just draw out um what you actually want to do you know what what shall happen in your scene um these are examples this is usually how I start out my storyboards you know I still do it on paper because it just freeze because as soon as you're going digital you start fiddling around you know you start being perfectionistic and I just really want it's it's not really drawing it's almost like not taking with um symbols um and so let's see how this could work in a moo workflow so I had this little fish character here that I used for an explainer video I did at work and these are my simple story Bo so we have the fish coming in from the right he kisses the uh the claim here uh is like kind of happy and swims off screen all right so what does this tell us you know when it comes to rigging so I know okay the fish has to probably move his fins around he has to have a kissy face he has to have a happy face more or less and he has to I want him to stretch a little bit you know when he when he swims off and there should be some bubbles floating around so after I had this then I would go into the rigging stage and now this fish probably only works in the context of this scene because it performs exactly the actions that I want him to do you know because if I would have just started rigging a fish I would have never thought of giving him a specific kissy face because why would I right so maybe I would have started to do all kind of deformers and weird smartphones to um you know move the mouth around as much as possible but here I just really knew what I wanted so and this was basically the final scene then you know when it was animated KES the the thing and swims off so start up here that's that's the first lesson that I learned you know really forget about rigging or anything start with your planning stage and not here but enough of slides for now um because I'm sure you kind of want to see see uh you know proofs in the pudding so let's let me switch over to moho for a second and let me get this go weinar panel out of the way so I brought three examples more or less today um and the first one I want to look at is this little guy that was recently posted um on the socials and we really getting really start from the top you know so how would I start out I would draw some thumbnails it can be in moo Moa great new um freehand tools uh in my case I usually draw them in another software or my iPad just because I take every opportunity I can to get away from my computer I would import those uh those drawings and time them out on the moho timeline um as a frame by frame layer and then we end up with something like this so the whole idea about this guy is basically you know it's the situation it happens to me pretty often because I'm really bad with names so it often happens Happ s at work that I I'm you know on the phone with somebody that I'm talking to for the first time and then comes the moment to say goodbye and like Goodbye Mr R and just hope that I kind of fanatically more or less was you know was on the right side um anyway so he's here ah yes thank you yes thank you fine goodbye starts hanging up the phone Mr har drops the phone Smith and then you know as a ultimate humiliation his speech bubble pops flies away so you see I mean these are really you know if we're honest crappy drawings basically but they already tell me so much you know because now I know okay I want him like this character to me is kind of kind of a flamboyant guy right so kind of almost like an English gentleman uh I want him to really have that nice mouth shape here when he opens it um he needs to have a phone in his in his hand I need a chair a table and the phone has to be able to drop onto the onto the handle in the end and I probably need around three or four eye positions so I don't need to bord with you know rigging up pupils or anything like that I already know what I need you know and then you end up with something like this um so this is what I came up with I took those poses from my thumbnails and I had a a battle plan now you know and I knew what I needed um so he had to be able to oops he had to be able to uh to smile and to frown I had different different mouth shapes for just random um really just random letters that I thought looked good you know the and and this is the this is again the special case you know the because in the end when he when he just gives up saying the name he's go just goes like so I I just had his tongue tongue coming out here uh and this is like his um gesture and this is the second quizzical when he's when he likes uh looks up and sees the um sees the speech bubble FL flying away same thing here with the with the phone um I knew he he will hang it up by the end so I knew the phone would have to turn like this but you see it's really not a complex rig I just added some stretches and some Target bones just for convenience sake um but but other than that there's really not that much to it the only thing I like to do is like um sometimes I like to rig my eyebrows instead of putting them into a smart problem because honestly the eyes are basically where most of of the of the expression uh happens you know where most of the acting happens I mean you can smile in lots of different ways and um your your eyebrows and your eyes really give away what you really mean you know is it an a sarcastic smile or is it genuine and so on another example I can show is this little beach girl here this I drew on my iPad and as you can see I only bought it to clean up the first frame somewhat just so I had a rough you know idea of what she would look like but basically you know she's at the beach takes out a huge sandwich and eats it and that's really how far I have gotten and then I ended up making up some stuff after that but I'll show you that show you that later but as you can see it's really not pretty drawings those are really just for yourself you know to get an idea but I already you know with her I already did a few more poses and um when she comes back here I already watched a little bit that she has nice arcs because I I knew I wanted to get this um emphasizing this what I usually even do is before I rig anything I make myself a little plan you know I I analyze my my thumbnails again and I just write it down you know okay I need these smartphones I need these hands and arms I need these mouth switches and then I just work my my way through it you know until I end up with a rig in this case it looks like this uh Y and again here I didn't bother riging the eyebrows um but therefore I bought it um whoops I bought it with uh I knew I wanted some funny Expressions when she's like chewing you know very unladylike um so I I put some pin bones in here to really be able to manually uh you know make some funny some funny Expressions there it's really you know every every case is different it really it really is whatever works then I put some pin bones in here as well because I knew she would be looking down a little bit so instead of getting that all to work with smart bones I thought that's just easier if I just sculpt this you know basically with a couple of pin bones and make sure that it works um I knew the head would go up and down because you would probably look down at the basket she would look up then since she has sunglasses I knew I couldn't get that much expression going on so I thought you know what I will just do a squash and stretch on the sunglasses here and there uh same with the eyebrows and obviously with the business you know same thing if she bends down then it has to kind of work in perspective all right and this one was a this one was kind of funny because I animated this like probably like two or three years ago and only the only thing that survived is this little movie file here this was basically just a crazy giraff walk and you can see there's a black frame flashing because the movie file was actually corrupted so I didn't even have the whole thing anymore and this is super super rough you know but again it pretty much tells me everything I need to know what I need to rig so I need I see okay I need a I need a um a stretch thing here when when he bangs his head down um he needs to be able to bend his necks in certain ways and you know you end up with something like this with this guy I did a little experiment because I was thinking back to you know moo 5 and all that kind of stuff and I told myself you know what I'm going to try to do something without any sort of smart bones so what's actually happening here is this guy has a this guy just has a huge deformer on his head that I'm basically that I ended up stretching around uh you can see it looks really it looks really kind of scary uh that I just ended up stretching around to get these um you know to get these stretch motions uh to be honest looking back on it I wouldn't really suggest doing it that way now I probably would just do a Vitruvian bone and do a second pair of neck and head because it's just um faster to animate but yeah here we are all right so let's go back to this guy for a second um so we have him all rigged up what's the next step well you can see down here I already have a set of key frames so what I usually do is I go through and in Step mode without any interpolation I just do my main key frames and if it works in that stage then I can be pretty sure that it will probably work once it's in between so why do I do this in Step mode well honestly if you start animating with moo already interpolating stuff you kind of lose sight of the big picture in my opinion because already you're like fighting against the computer and oh what is Moo doing there why is this weird this is falling apart so just starting out in Step mode and really taking things no pun intended step by step um is really helpful to just not you know to to to just concentrate on the essential things basically um but we will go into more detail afterwards as well and same thing yeah well her first frame is is is now um unfortunately not the right one anymore because I played around with it but same thing with her oh what I should have mentioned is with her I actually did a lot of different arm positions because she has some smears as well you know so I here I did what I should have done with the giraffe BAS basically and I'm it's just V druian bones and I'm switching them around but again from the thumbnails I knew exactly what I needed you know so and here we have the the sandwich and then I I came and then I thought you know what this is just not enough let's let's have another you know kind of J position of of her and let's have her do a huge burp and that's basically the mouth or mouse or all switches and I think I uh um I think I looked at some I always liked in the older Simpsons cartoons when they would burp you know how their lips would flap would would do these wavy motions so how I achieved this here is with the new liquid shapes actually this is actually nothing else but just the liquid shape um cutting into this into into a red blob so to speak and then I just turn it around a little bit to get that and she goes back into that position and again I knew which mouth positions I needed I knew okay now she should look a little bit you know a little bit embarrassed and then you know have like he yeah exactly all right so this gives us really good starting point um but what is the next step you might ask um well now I have to go back to my presentation for a second because I just I think this is actually the second really important thing the first one is to plan your stuff out the second thing is breakdowns now what is a breakdown a breakdown to me is basically a drawing or a position or a frame whatever you want to call it that describes the transition between two key poses um you know God I mean Richard Williams once said you know I can almost say I made my living with the breakdown drawing uh that's a quote from his animated survival kit which you should all have on your shelf um in the chapter on flexibility so if you're interested to read up on that but here's the thing a lot of beginners or even me myself included um think well a breakdown you know you just put it Smackdown in the middle breakdown is basically the middle drawing so and here's the other re Revelation um I have a nice example here from another great book it's from Eric Goldberg's um character animation crash course and this is exactly the thing you know we have this dog you know looking from the right to the left and you could do a breakdown just in the middle position and you would get smooth transition everything fine um but it would look pretty boring what happens if we put a breakdown into timing wise in the middle but it is actually not the middle position but it favors another key you know uh it favors the first key basically so he stays much longer in the position of the first key and then switches over to looking to the left and then eases into it and it's not and you can do multiple breakdowns it also doesn't mean that you only can do one breakdown but that is really the secret source of of I think okay animation to uh something that looks a bit more magical you know um this is more or less known as the Disney approach to animate scene uh I guess a lot of people do it that way but let's say we have two key drawings or two key positions in moo here so what would be the next step Next Step would be we break it down once you know so we we descri we just start fleshing the thing out you know what we describe how the character goes from one position to the next then we can go in and do a second set of key of breakdowns between the key and the first breakdown and then we go in and we generate our inbetween so you break it down into smaller and smaller pieces basically until your animation Works without any inbetween and then we go to tweening the problem with you know the problem with cutout animation is since the computer can basically Interpol interpolate so nicely for us um it's really tempting to just let him do much more of the work uh than it really should you know and especially now uh where everybody's talking about Ai and so on I think it's more important than ever to really show you know what what actually the human capacity is when it comes to that uh and that is really what we leave to Moo you know it is not this and everybody starts out like this I did that too you know you do two keys and then you set it to smooth and then you do let moo do the rest um another Richard Williams quote is really there are no in between drawings you know every drawing is important and I think that's also something you kind of have to know every position of your animation by the end of it you know uh so let's try that out right um let's go to this little guy and I mean considering we don't have that much time but I thought I definitely have to show you how I would go about this so let's just take this first this first phone this first um syllable here basically so he goes ah yes thank you so let's just do the r and I usually I mean if I'm alone in the room I usually act things out you know I I really go about uh how how how would I because I already think about timing and spacing you know so the first thing I do is I take all of these key frames and I colored them red here so you can you know you don't get confused in the end what's a key now and what's a breakdown and the in between so I I let's just take these few uh key frames here and we go over here and change them from step to linear another way to do it is command or control one um up here on the right in the right corner you can you can see what shortcuts I'm pressing by the way um um and now let's look at it how it how why do by the way that's linear interpolation I I usually with at least with the first few stages I don't use smooth interpolation because again smooth moo already adds some easing to the stuff and I just want complete control over what I'm doing you know so I usually do linear anyway so let's see what moo has done for us uh okay well I mean it works it's smooth all right but it really has no character character you know so this guy to me he would really go like ah you know like like the porch people at parties so okay that already tells us something that tells us we basically want to be I want to have this pose here show much longer than this one here so now the trick is um let's go here I go to this key frame go one frame back press command F to free them and it generated some new keys for me and now I take those and push them back ah and you see it's snap it's much more Snappy now he snaps into this ah okay that's our first breakdown you know and we didn't even have to do anything manually but we can add to this I think um let's maybe move it a little bit forward and we remember the chart from before okay that's our first breakdown now let's do the breakdown in between the breakdown because maybe it would be funny if he drags his no he has a big nose you know how about he drags his nose a little bit when he goes up so we move him down and maybe I mean counter movement is always a good thing to try out and the nice thing about moo is obviously I mean you can really experiment with this with this stuff you know I'm I'm far I'm not a good enough animator to really get it all right in the first try so for me it's really helpful okay let's just say let's just say he goes down first and then comes up ah and you see it's it's very subtle we can make it maybe even a bit more extreme and have him and since his head goes down I'll pull his arm up and let's see ah and you see how nice of an arc this already gives us uh and now he closes his mouth again and I think I think actually that's that's all the breakdowns I need so again you don't have it you you don't have to have sorry you don't have to do it that way like my chart showed you know whatever it takes you know for it to look good but in this case I think well no I think it's fine um okay now he goes now this is basically when he ends saying R but I still want him to stay as long as possible on this R so I'm going to again generate a key frame here I move it forward so that he's it's almost like he he crashes down basically his his big mouth is is falling down you know and snapping shot oh H I think we can even make that more extreme oh yeah you see oh boom and now we go in between here and I would really like it if his contrary thing from before if his nose drags a bit upwards and therefore I give him a few more frames maybe so it doesn't just oh well let's see how it works no I think I actually want it to be Snappy yeah uh uh so so just to this is really I mean this is really a super simple example right but just to just to show you the difference let's take all these frames that we now did manually cut them out and let's see again what the what the original thing was versus so I'm not saying this is the greatest piece of animation ever but I would argue that it probably has a lot more character than than what we had before um and basically that's how I go through a whole scene you know I take it one step at a time I take two keys and I do my breakdowns and then see what moo gives me and basically moo is nothing else than my assistant you know he does the inbetween for me but I tell Mo you know break it down here and then ease it in here is is it out there it's also nothing of this stuff is set in stone you know if you feel like you have to retime one of these Keys no problem you know because in the old days before computers we used to do pencil tests and then adjust our timing accordingly it's all fine and that's the great thing about moo right that it's so iterative it's so easy to adjust things so you really have a lot of room to play with at this at this stage it's really like playing with dolls basically you know make them move in a cool way um and once that all that stuff is done um it could look like this Mr Point Smith and then speech bubble flies off uh let's let's look at it one more time all right um I usually also set the stuff I mean that's another trick you know um if you if we look at if we look at these the final Keys you will see some of them are on twos some of them are on ones it's a good idea I mean at least in Western animation usually the rule is you know you do like you animate on twos which means you know two drawings being held uh so 12 drawings per second for normal actions and you animate on once so 24 drawings per second um for fast actions you know if you if you are more into anime or limited animation that's a whole lot of that's a whole other whole other kind of worms but uh yeah so I usually also you know mix that up a little bit and set certain things on twos certain things things on ones um and the next thing basically the last step I do now is okay you know the scene is standing basically now comes what I call the fluff stage you know everything to embellish the whole thing so um one easy thing to do in moho is uh adding something called overlapping action which basically means nothing else than don't have everything stop at the same time which I'm actually I think I'm a bit um a bit guilty of in this particular example but let's for example look at this this is a nice nice easy thing so we have him here when he hangs up his phone and you see how his eyebrow goes up here and the eyebrows stops basically at the same key frame pop as the head so if you want to you know I mean it it's okay with this character because he's a bit little bit of simple thing anyway but we could just select those um those bones that we want to change and in moo you know you see the red channels or now the bones that you have selected so let's take those and just move them a little bit maybe like few frames forward well maybe a little bit more even more actually yeah it's it's subtle which it should be but just so you can see it you see now now the eyebrows basically don't stop the same as the head you can see with the arm it's actually happening already so his head stops but the arm is still moving a few frames and this is especially uh if we look at the girl again um um I also like you know some things are basically just too complicated for me to animate you know in a key pose way basically and one really good example of overlapping action um is this sandwich here which basically had its own set of of of Bones which you can see here and all I did basically at the beginning I mean it's it's it's tied to the to the hand switch and at the beginning I didn't bother animating this sandwich at all I just animated the whole thing with sandwich moving and then I went through and you can see here it's almost every frame I moved something around and I just animated it straight ahead so straight ahead means you don't first do key poses then inet then then breakdowns then inet you just go you know like you would in your mouth book at school you just go one frame after the other and move it around so usually that's nice for hair or fluffy things now you might ask well why didn't you just use use any sort of um like um uh um what are they even called um uh dynamics of bone Dynamics or something like that well there's just two problems first of all as I said I like things to be on twos here and there because it just looks more traditional and second of all I don't want things to be physically correct I want them to be you know emotionally correct basically so a sandwich would never move I mean if it would move like that you definitely wouldn't want to eat it but a sandwich would never move like that so um yeah that's why I that's why I did it by hand all right I think I have to go back to my presentation for the last part before we go to questions so just a short recap you know this is the process I worked out for myself so far um start out simple by drawing your thumbnails take it easy you know don't sweat um time those thumbnails out on moo and you're already half the way there you know that that's the difficult work then plan and build your rig according to the action you know make a list if that helps you do your keys in Step mode you know really uh break that stuff down so you don't break your brain basically um go in do those breakdowns and in between them take one thing at a time every frame is important you know just that's that's the main thing I I want you to take away from this and then you can go over the whole thing again add additional embellishments play with the timing you know offset bones for overlapping actions at frame by frame extras which I haven't even shown you yet um but I can show you that afterwards if if we have time you know sometimes I do a frame by frame layer and just add some you know uh speed lines or something like that and also remember and this is really something people in the industry will also tell you a rig is never really finished you know there is not such thing as a finished rig it's only ready for the next scene basically so make sure your your rig is ready for the scene you want to animate and get animating um just the last few tips um tip number one I like to think about I mean the great thing about moo is really there's just like I would say five six seven Concepts that you have to learn and then you basically know moo you know now the question is just how do you use these tools and and Concepts creatively and uh if you think about all the things that make um animation look great you know like weight overlapping actions arcs exaggeration you know backwards engine ER them you know with the tools that moo offers you you know thanks to Target bones and ik we can get easy um you know weight a sensation of weight by having character properly Place their feet on the ground for example offset Keys as I said earlier um flip a lot you know as in traditional animation to see your arcs um use mesh deformers and curvers for example for exaggeration I did a little test here with the new curvers um just to see how much flexibility I could get get into you know just a simple armor I mean this whole thing took me like half an hour to do but you know just to prove the point um this is probably a little bit um a little bit controversial uh point but I'm pretty convinced that cutout and traditional are just two different techniques they're part of the same medium but they're just a different thing you know so I would say designed to cut out animation strength for example um I have a I have a project with this um green girl that you always see pop up on my socials sometimes uh I plan to animate her one day I just didn't have to time yet and I used to draw her like this basically you know it's an okay drawing but the problem is just that would be a hell of a lot of work and and probably much too much of a headache to build as a moo rig so I've been thinking you know if I would do this as a moo R how would she look you know and I came up with this design so it's really think more about shapes than forms I mean obviously form you know informs how your shapes look but um you know it's it's it's it's it's this weird um mixture between graphic design and illustration but therefore complexity instead of you know a lot of lines can be added through texture you know and um I mean there were some great webinars and examples um recently of that because we don't have to redraw every frame so yeah um tip number three and I cannot tell you how much I learned from this forget about the software forget which software is used um YouTube is full of great cutout animators you know showing the process and uh there's many great shows on TV you know that use rigged characters and all this stuff can be done in in in moo without problem you know obviously moo is the best choice and our favorite but I'm just saying um I learned a lot about these processes from watching um animators who do this professionally in the TV industry um work they didn't all use moo but pretty much all the concepts are applicable to Moo as well some of them are actually even easier to do than in other softwares and it's really more about the methodology than so much the the software yeah and this is funny because for some reason I I I I I was the same for a long time and I don't nowadays I don't know why but it seems sometimes when I watch people rig or do stuff um start out with things they want to avoid drawing anything at any cost you know so they spend years on on perfecting their handri that can do a 360 degree and you know whatever you know really animation at at least 2D animation will always be about drawing no matter what so embrace it you know again now it's much easier thanks to the new freehand Tools in all and it's the solution to most problems to be honest for example Vitruvian bones versus over complicated limbs you know because because all these rigging things they are great and everything but you always have to think about the the stage where you have to animate that thing you know again like with the giraffe you know I had to move these points around lose my lose my mind you know digging around in layers and timelines if I just had a Vitruvian bone and had and which I could switch with basically one shortcut it would have taken me like a fraction of the time and lastly I would always recommend um try our traditional animation even it doesn't have to be anything finished but just even just some pencil tests or just play around it's still the most direct and uh and uncomplicated way to learn more about animation and you will learn a lot of stuff that you can I mean that's actually a fun part I think to really um you know learn certain Concepts in one technique and then think about okay how could I you know apply this to something like moo and again moo has some really cool new frame by frame tools so you don't even have to switch software for that anymore and with that I'm actually at the end um so thank you very much uh and uh I hope this was a little bit helpful to you and I'm looking forward to see you work well thank you so much Joel this has been an amazing presentation um people loved it so let's see are you still there Mario I don't hear you anymore but oh sorry I thought I was my phone had a problem now it's working well thank you so much H Dave um Joel sorry there was a lot of people uh watching us from all over the world thank you I know there are different time zones for example from Indonesia daa Ingo from Germany mik from Michigan Tanya also Germany California Benny Italy Nico Arizona Dan UK so thank all of you and let's go with some questions we have limited time for the Q&A we'll try to do our best H Tim Croy said ER what was the hardest part of animation for you whether it will be physical animation software process or pre-production and planning uh specifically moo or um the hardest part uh to be honest the hardest part was basically getting over myself because um because I I would just over complicate stuff I think I think I have a hard time with um you know I just I'm somebody for example I don't really I don't really like for example do a lot of um correction smartphones even though they're great but simply because they would give you some um sometimes they could they could give you some you know um unexpected things weirdness going on so I would always try to to make things work as much as possible while I'm rigging it and if something really wouldn't work I would go in and do Point animation basically that's always you know your last resort if something doesn't work out go in and animate the points and I think with espe especially with the giraffe I was that was a big struggle because if if you if you look at all the all the layers basically that are animated in here um and keeping I mean the more of that stuff that you have the the harder and harder it gets um to rtime things so I think just keeping things simple I like to dig around in layers as little as possible and just concentrate on the timeline once I'm animating I don't want to see these layers anymore I really just want to concentrate on the timeline so yeah yeah that that is maybe one of the hurdles definitely but I I will say planning things out definitely made it all much more um approachable so awesome well Joel here's another question regarding to like animation the on traditional animation you mention uh one book if you can repeat it and also if you want to add some others uh yes I can definitely repeat that of course um maybe I have an affiliate link no I'm just kidding um where where was it where was it oh here so one of them is is the animator survival kit uh by Richard Williams and the other one is uh pretty underrated I think but just as great is the character animation crash course by Eric Goldberg and Eric Goldberg is the guy at Disney who animated genie for example um so those two I can really recommend other animation books uh let me check my shelf um to be honest nowadays I think these two books oh well well I mean one of course I mean the the cartoon animation by Preston Blair of course uh basically taught me everything I know about drawing um but to be honest nowadays you know these three books basically are the ones are all you need about animation and nowadays I mean there's so much information on YouTube and watching people do stuff is is most of it is even free um really makes things a lot more clearer again if I wouldn't have I mean I'm not from the US I've never been to an animation school you know so a lot of this thing is still kind of hard to get the information but if I would have never seen Aaron blae in one of his video tutorials doing that's that thing with the thumbnails and blowing them up I would have never thought of that you know so there's an abundance of anim of of information everywhere so you know pick and choose definitely and and here's another interesting question from Dave um I like that you plan ahead the only read uh and only R what you need but if you know that your character will need to be in more than one shot do you design and rig each shot separately from scratch or do you build more complexity into a single rig that can do everything yeah that's a good question I mean that's also I mean all of this obviously this whole thing that I presented as one little one little footnote and that is that I did this all by myself you know if you work in a studio environment and you do a series for example then obviously you have a rigging Department you have the animators and then obviously it will be more complex rigs because that's the whole point of it um personally I think if I would do a short um I would again storyboard it all first then I would determine from my storyboard okay you know what we have 50 shots here or whatever hopefully not 50 but we have a lot of shots here with the character standing in a three4 post so that can basically be the same Master R you know so I would do one rig that is maybe a little bit more complex but for example if you then have um if you then have an upshot or something uh something from from a worm's eye view I wouldn't try to to shoehorn or to brute force that that Master rig into that perspective but I would just you know do a new little rig that does exactly what it has to do for the scene and who knows maybe later in the in the in the whole thing you have a similar shot to that as well it gets easier the more the more scenes you have it gets easier because you can cannibalize stuff again you know I wouldn't have to redraw all that stuff basically I could just take the the layers out of my master rig and just you know resculpt them a little bit and um you know be off what I often do as at work is I do I mean there I do much much simpler stuff you know it's unfortunately um a style that is often want to do something like this but I would basically I I wouldn't spend that much time on reading I mean she can basically turn her head and she can turn her body and then I would just start animating and then I would start adjusting and adding stuff with every scene because suddenly I have a SE and see oh dear I guess she has to have a second mouth here so I would add the second mouth and then I would go to Scene Three and import the rig from scene two because that rig basically already has more features than the first version and by the end of it I basically end up with like 10 different versions um and just you know for me just for me personally it's just important to get animating as soon as possible because I get really you know uh I kind of get impatient with um if I spend too much time really and here's another question do you have to rre the breakdowns with smart bones or can you just animate them on the Fly uh no you can again it really depends on what you're doing I mean smart bones are just a tool for you to use if you you want to have like if you know you have if you basically want to deform the vectors into something uh for example the mouth or whatever but I mean all these smart I mean the the breakdowns I didn't do anything with smart bones I mean I used smart bones to get to the breakdowns but um I basically do it on the Fly I think I think there's two different things mixed up a little bit here but um yeah just again again always go back to your thumbnails see what you need and whether you you best achieve this with switch layers because you want to have the mouth different mouth positions in a switch or you want to do it with smart bones that's totally up to you that's all your creative choice so there's no there's no moho police you know um Victor is not bursting through your door and saying you did that wrong or something like that it's all it's it's all your your choice basically whatever seems to Project based MH and here's another interesting question from dant to Bret hold where do you get your inspiration and ideas from when you're storyboarding this has always been a sticking point for me yeah Al look the thing is about the creative process is really um what I learned is you have to free yourself from any expectation you know you just have to G you have to get into the playful mode and that's why I like to board in these tiny little boxes basically because there's absolutely no expectations to myself to do any sort of pretty drawing and I would throw out a lot of drawings but it gives me the the the chance and the the freedom to experiment you know you can always do the pretty drawings later you know but just start iteratively you know start at a stage where you really have absolutely no uh no pressure or anything and get into that creative flow you know because it takes me two seconds to make one of these storyboard drawings I don't spend you know two hours on a panel and then I realize well I guess it doesn't really fit that well you know better start out small and simple and um try it out you know what works best it's also nice doing it in these boxes because nowadays um you know story boards are mostly also done frame by frame but the the I mean the anime story boards are still kind of done like this just vertically but the nice thing about this is almost like a comic strip right and you you get a nice sense of the flow of the whole thing so yeah just you know be kind to yourself definitely H another question is do you use the graph mode uh no I don't use the graph mode um because uh yeah actually I heard from a actually even I heard from other cutout animators that they in their software don't use the graph mode either and the reason why they don't use it is because they're not the only ones ever touching um that animation you know they they they animate it then it goes goes off to another department and these departments they have to see at a glance what is going on if you have easings and and C going on within the graph mode it's basically all hidden from you um for me it's just easier and the same thing for me I just want to see what's happening I don't want to switch over there and then uh what is this curve doing what is going on graph modes for me are nice for Motion Graphics are nice for camera movements and stuff like that um again it comes because I'm a frame by frame animator for me I just want to see boxes and spots all the time basically are not not curves yeah and here's a a doubt uh how do you add those yellow markers and text on the timeline uh these ones uh yeah that's pretty simple you just oh yeah I should have actually mentioned that I I these uh these markers just basically tell me what he's saying at any specific point very simple you just go to whatever you you move your playhead to whatever frame you want you go over here add marker and you say great webinar F and click okay and here it is and you can also change the uh uh you can change the color let's make it green yeah those are pretty helpful as well just to you know to keep an over viw of where you're at or for lip sync especially and here's a question from Rodney AR key to make your work look feel more like traditional animation are you always animating on twos or threes uh personally on twos uh because I'm I'm really very much um too I'm too shoehorned into the Western tradition basically I wish I was I wish my influences were more on the anime side growing up but unfortunately they just simply weren't it was really old you know Western cartoons so for me it's all I think in twos I Time stuff in toos um but if you look at anime I would always recommend you know going on YouTube looking at your favorite animation and use the period and comma key to go through it frame by frame and the anime people I mean they are really Masters at varied frame rates because they would have some stuff on threes and the next frame would be on one one basically and then it's a five and it it all works you know when played back at 24 frames per second it suddenly all works um I'm probably just too uh simple-minded for that so I just keep things on twos and ones well fortunately our time is limited but I'm going to leave you if you want to say a last tape or suggestion to our audience uh go out and create though um I I think just uh you know moo is really I had I have a few friends now who I who I um turn to moo and um it always looks daunting at first you know but really don't get too to intimidated of all this technical looking stuff it's really not as technical as you might think and in the end it's a creative tool approach it from a creative side and not from a from a technical point of view and then it can really be a great addition to your uh tool set well Joel thank you so much for those wise words ER people loved your presentation a lot of messages like for example roxan thank you Ingo thank you that was great Lauren thank you Cynthia fantastic webinar so thank all of you who join us live I know there are a lot of time zones uh now people watching it on the afternoon morning or late at night so thanks all of you for watching us live thank you and before we go I'm just going to share one last bit of information well the future is today moo is a powerful 2D animation software that combines the most powerful animation technology with state-of-the-art professional animation tools draw rig and animate easily you can create your characters directly in moo with Spector tools optimized for animation or import images or photoshop files keeping the link and layering structure for more information visit our website moo animation. comom also we invite you to join our socials our community is really active also on our Discord lbar.com Discord and also our Forum h join us on socials also for more information about Joel don't forget to follow him on Joel mayor art on Instagram Joel mayor PRS on Twitter X or his YouTube channel Joel mayor prods and his website and as many of you as this webinar it's been recorded and we'll be uploading it to our YouTube channel um as moo animation so don't forget to subscribe and please stay tuned in our socials for more webinars information also uh Community animations so stay tuned and we hope to see you next time thank you so much Joel for this amazing webinar if you're still around I'm sorry yeah thank you sorry I was distracted for a second drinking a glass of water so once again thank you so much thank all of you and see you next time bye-bye see you bye

Channel: Moho Animation Software

Views: 9,456

Keywords: mohoanimation, mohopro, mohodebut, animation, 2d, 2danimation, rigging, comparison, moho, tutorial, introduction, rig, bones, smart bones, vitruvian bones, traditional, alternative, frame by frame, frame-by-frame, keyframes, motion graph, madewithmoho, fast, professional, tool, animation software, software, animation app, drawing, photoshop, compatible, vector, bitmap, easy

Id: xr05DdVQgTw

Length: 62min 34sec (3754 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 29 2024