Moho as a Clean-Up Tool for Traditional Animators? (Mak… — Transcript

Joel Mayer explores using Moho as a cleanup tool for traditional animation, sharing his experiments and insights from a real project.

Key Takeaways

Moho can be used effectively for cleanup with switch layers and meshes instead of relying heavily on bones.
Drawing multiple versions of elements is often better than excessive vector deformation.
Masking is a useful technique for managing overlapping parts in animation.
Using Moho for cleanup may save time in some cases but is not always faster than traditional redrawing.
Collaboration and learning from experienced users can significantly improve workflow.

Summary

Joel Mayer experiments with Moho software to use it as a cleanup tool for traditional frame-by-frame animation.
He prefers traditional animation over rigged animation but acknowledges rigging's efficiency for fast turnarounds.
Initial attempts at cleanup with Moho using bones and rigs were tedious and unsatisfactory.
He received help from Darcy Woodbridge, who demonstrated a workflow using switch layers, meshes, and point animation without bones.
Darcy's method involves tracing facial expressions on switch layers and using meshes for smooth deformation, simplifying animation.
Masking techniques are used to manage overlapping elements like hair and hood.
Joel analyzes Darcy’s file to understand the workflow and realizes the importance of drawing multiple versions rather than relying solely on vector deformation.
Joel then applies these insights to a new animation project featuring an alien character.
He discusses pros and cons of using Moho for cleanup, noting it may not always be faster than redrawing.
The video blends tutorial elements with personal findings and encourages exploring hybrid workflows for indie animators.

Chapters

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

Speaker A

[Music] Hello everybody. Guten, bonjour. How are you? It's me again. I come to you with a new little video about Moho. Um, short disclaimer: I really am trying to do this basically in one take because I'm far too lazy to edit this thing. And I

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also realized that people really like these unedited things that go on forever because apparently you feel you get more out of them. So that is, uh, very lucky for me because it means I don't have to, um, put in that much work. Hopefully it's

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still as informative as ever or not. Um, but yeah, as you have seen maybe on my channels, I've been experimenting recently with, um, using Moho as a cleanup tool because, uh, first of all, um, you know, I really like doing traditional

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animation. Actually, if I'm honest, I like it much more than doing rigged stuff. But still, I'm always fascinated and intrigued by rigging and by cutout stuff, especially because, uh, you know, at work we have, uh, quite, you know, fast

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turnarounds and I have to produce things quickly. So I'm almost, um, you know, there's almost no way around it, uh, than using rigs. And secondly, I always think, you know, as an aspiring indie animator, you know, are there ways maybe to, um, save

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some time and use these tools and technology to get the menial tasks like cleanup and inbetweening done faster by using tools like Moho. So recently Moho has, you know, posted some videos on their channels. One was for, um, oh gosh, what's

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the show called? Creature Feature. Uh, Scavengers Rain. Yeah, sorry. I haven't watched it yet, but I'm planning to.

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Scavengers Rain has apparently used Moho a little bit in a capacity. And also other things. Um, and that got me thinking that I should really give Moho an honest try in such a setting. And, um, today this, this is not so much a

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tutorial. This is really more like my findings as a first-time, uh, user or in not a first-time user but as a first time trying, um, using Moho as a cleanup tool. Um, and maybe, uh, we'll get right to

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it. So let me just back up for a second and really show you how we got here. So it all started like a couple of weeks ago or maybe last week. I, I have no sense of time anymore because so much is

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going on at the moment. But, uh, anyways, uh, recently I made this little, um, rough animation because I was doodling around on my iPad. I really enjoy animating on the iPad lately. And I, um, you know, just doodle this girl, um, pulling down a

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hoodie basically. And, you know, I liked it. And then I thought, okay, let's go on and let's start cleaning it up. But then I thought, you know what? Maybe this would be the perfect opportunity to try, um, out this workflow in Moho and see

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if it actually works or not. So I went into Moho and, well, failed miserably.

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This is literally as fast as I, as far as I came. As you can see, not very far and it looks absolutely horrible. Uh, um, it's just a really, there's really not much to it, to be honest. It's kind of

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embarrassing really, but it's just a simple rig. I don't really know what I was thinking I was doing here, but I thought maybe, you know, I, I looked at these videos that Moho posted and try to dissect them and thought, you know,

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maybe, you know, some bones, maybe the head can be, uh, somewhat rigged, but I keep it all a bit loose. You know, nothing's really connected. Um, obviously these, these, um, bandanas here, they can, uh, not bandanas, whatever you

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call them, these strings here, they, they could have some bones in them. That's easy enough. And then I would roughly pose it with the bones and then just do tons of point animation, but this was so tedious. I just couldn't fathom that

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this was a good way to go about it. So, now huge shout out to a guy called Darcy Woodbridge who was also featured twice already on the Moho channel with stuff that he did where he cleaned up his, um,

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traditional frame-by-frame animation, uh, in Moho. Um, now his characters, his animation is obviously much more sophisticated than my stuff. Um, but I thought, well, if anybody knows how to go about this then it's probably him. So I

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sent him my rough. I explained to him, you know, my problems that I'm having.

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And funnily enough, or luckily enough for me, he sent me back this. Um, he actually took my rough and started cleaning it up a little bit as a test, you know. Um, just the head and the hoodie. But already I could tell, Jesus,

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you know, this looks actually really cool. Um, I wonder how he did that. But since he sent me the file, I didn't have to wonder. I could just go in and check this stuff out. So, the first thing I

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immediately noticed is there's no bones in here. Actually, this is all just switch layers and meshes and some point animation. And, um, when I went in, let's just hide a few layers and let's go from the, from the top. I saw that he

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basically took the face as a separate thing. And if we look at that by itself and maybe look at it with the rough, you can see that he basically just traced the face here on a separate switch layer and he switches around

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um, whenever, well, there's two things going on. Let me back up for a second.

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Um, let's go to phase two here. You can see what's happening down here is actually it's not only being switched from one drawing to the next, but he basically animates the points until, until there's, there's, there's a moment

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where it won't fit anymore and he has to redraw a new face here. So this is phase one. Okay. All the way here we can use point animation and from here on it's face number two. Up until here is face

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number three. That works until around here. And here it's the, the squashed face number four. And it relaxes a bit and then she opens her eyes and so on and so on. And that kind of, that was kind of the first, um, revelation I had

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that I should really try to draw much more than to just, you know, deform and, uh, and all these kind of things, you know, just not rely on only on vector deformation.

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Then he would go to the next thing and that would be the hood here. Um, the hood that really blew my mind because I couldn't fathom how to do it. But it's actually quite simple. It's as you can

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see in the switch up until here it's this, it's just one drawing. But what he did was he put a mesh over it. Um, and as you can see, uh, he divided this mesh in a way that you basically have this, the

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individual strokes here, um, that you can, uh, pretty easily deform them. You see you can use the magnet tool and this way you don't even have to animate individual vector points. You can do it much easier with the mesh. And then he,

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as you can see, then he would just animate it up to here when she pulls it back.

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And here it would switch to the next one. Boom. Here how it falls down. And then the next one comes in here. And here it just lightly flaps down. And so on and so forth. And then at last but

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not least, he would do the rest of the head basically. And the head and the hair is actually on one, um, on one layer.

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He didn't divide that. And he then just used a few masks and stuff wherever he needed it. For example, since the hood is in, um, is in front of the head, uh, and the hair because it makes sense most of

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the time, uh, he used some masking on the, on the hood basically to, to mask it out where whenever the hair should be in front. Um, just it's really just a mask on a frame-by-frame layer. You can see

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that here. All these scribbles, that's just masks basically making sure that the hood is gone wherever the hair should be visible.

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Yeah. So, you know, that helped me enormously. And again, I want to thank him at this point, uh, for doing this for me because sometimes it's really useful to just see, you know, um, a different way to approach things, I guess. So, you

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know, I thought, okay, let's, let's, uh, let's start from the beginning again and try this whole thing from the start. So, I did this new rough animation of this little alien character eating another extraterrestrial.

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And, you know, I wanted it to be a bit broad, bit cartoony because I really didn't want it to look rigged too much.

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So, I wanted a lot of shape-shifting and stuff. Um, and this is actual

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That's basically it. Because again, I was breaking my brain how to, you know, it was just so hard for me to get to to keep track of all this stuff. Um but then I looked again at his examples and

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I noticed, you know what, he probably really went one thing at a time. Probably he did it exactly as I showed.

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He first really only took the face, did that in a pass, then the hood, did that in a pass, then the head, did that in a pass, and so on. So I thought maybe if I just take it easy, do one thing at a

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time and just try to do the mouth first. And that's exactly what I did, you know.

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So this is basically how my first pass of this animation looked. I did nothing else but the mouth. And you can see I rettimed stuff a little bit. It's not um entirely accurate anymore to the rough.

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So I will uh uh not show it in this um case. But that's basically that was basically the secret source number one so to speak because once I um started breaking stuff apart and doing it in passes suddenly it seemed feasible. So

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let's still let's look at the whole thing for a second. It's really nothing fancy. Um, if we maybe maybe take a look at the rough again, when you look at it, I was just really analyzing, okay, how would I

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do what? So, I would definitely need a switch layer for the eyes. I would need a switch layer for the mouth. I could probably get away with a little rig for the body because that one doesn't move that much really. The the most

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complicated thing is when he does this jump here and suddenly has has has um this pose. But that could be easily done with a um betuvian bone. And obviously the antennas I could, you know, you know, put a curver on them and have some

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nice uh overlapping action going on there. And that was pretty much the plan. And that's pretty much exactly what I did. So I have my head layer here. Head layer consists of a switch layer of these eyes and the switch

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layers of these mouths. Uh I have a separate skull layer that I basically just animated. If I um hide it, you can see he doesn't really have a an upper head and it's really just a green blob that I animated point uh where I

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animated the points. Um the antennas are as I said they're curvers but I put bones in them so there would be just bit easier to manipulate instead of going in and you know using uh using the curvers themselves. Curvers if you don't know

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are these little deformers here. They are new since um Moho uh 14. Yeah, that's them. And I would have this little body rig here. And it's really very simple. It's not even attached to the the head is actually not

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attached to the to the whole thing. I did that separately. Probably in hindsight if I would do it again, I would try to find a way to attach the head really. I just thought I I have more flexibility that way. And

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since I'm doing everything in passes, I could really do it separately. But I pro if I would do it over again, I could probably save a lot of time by just, you know, um still try to at least attach

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the skull and the the the switch layers of the eyes and so on uh to the body and then um take the plunge and animate the neck um in the first pass as well, so the rotation of the head would match.

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But never mind that. Anyways, it's just a standard your standard uh rig with target bones. And maybe the only signific significance about it is that it has some vituvians for when he jumps up because again the rough tells us

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everything we need to know. Um I cheated a bit with the with the tail because that was by the end of it and I was really getting tired. The tail really just has a dynamics in them. And uh you

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know the all the um all the secondary action or the overlapping action of the tail flopping up and down is basically you know it's just slight bone dynamics.

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I just have one little smart bone here where I can unroll the tail because I want to have so when he when he when he like um gets tense it just bo kind of fudian fraudian but whatever. Anyways,

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so um as I said, I would go through and just take one thing at a time and I show you exactly what I did. I will actually demonstrate this afterwards, but um just to uh you know to to show you the

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concept. So here is my mouse switch layer and you can see down here wherever there's the little square you know it switches to another drawing basically.

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So we have this one switches up to this one. Switches to this one. Switches to this one.

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Here we have some nice um uh some nice uh uh um Oh Jesus. Sorry, I cannot speak anymore. Some uh some nice swipes, stretches, whatever. Some uh some smears. Smears. Sorry. Sorry. I talk German all day, so my English is I first

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have to relearn English for for a moment there. Anyways, here is a nice smear when he goes down and it switches to this one. Switches to this one. But what's happening in between here? Why is it still moving even though it's it's

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just this one drawing? Well, exactly as with Darcy's um example, if we open this, you can see it's a ton of switch layers. All these folders are separate mouth pieces. And here we have number one. And number one has tada

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a little um mesh deformer on it. And with this mesh basically all I did was take my rough as a guide and have key number one h and it goes to key number two. And then how do I want

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to in between this? And I in between it by using these meshes and by using the magnet tool. So I could basically do anything here.

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But that was basically the you know basic concept. When it was really um when it was a bit more um simple shapes like with the eyes, I did that a lot.

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Then I wouldn't even use meshes. Then I could do the points directly. Eyes would by the way be this the second thing I did. So you can see same concept. Switch switch.

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Um, deform switch switch. Deform switch. And I think here, for example, here he has a little bit of a pop. Boom. And let's see what's happening. Let's open this up. Oh my god. 28 eye layers.

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And here we have, as you can see, this eye shape has a little bit of animation on it as well by manipulating the points directly. So that in in a nutshell, that's basically the whole trick. You know, you you mix and

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match different things uh to get the desired effect. You can also use bones, for example. I didn't do it that often, but with this mouth, let's go back here. With this one, I knew I wanted a nice little um a nice

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little uh moving hold. And the easiest thing was to just put it into a bone layer because, you know, you can also put a bone layer in, switch, whatever.

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It doesn't matter. And all it does here, as you can see, is opening that bone and closing it again. And then there's a tiny bit of uh point animation as well, probably. Yeah. To start the smear, so to speak. And here you can see the same

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things happening with the eyes. The eyes are, you know, probably this is switch and this is switch number two. And then bo, this is switch number three.

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Squashed it out and then animated the points to go in. That's basically the whole the whole idea behind it, you know. And then I would just go through it part by part, you know. I would add the skull, I would

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add the two antennas. Um, I would add the uh neck. Um, boing. The neck. The neck has some bones in them actually, but which I don't see for some reason. Here's the neck. Oh, no. I didn't even have a I

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didn't have bones in the neck. Sorry. I just had a I just had a um a curver.

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This was basically how I animated the neck after the fact. So, again, I could have rigged this a bit more elaborately and probably save a lot of time. And I think any any sort of weirdness that you would make out in this animation is

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probably probably because the neck doesn't attach very nicely to the head. Um here is the same thing. If we look at this frame by frame, this is basically just this is all one drawing. Let's go in here. Yeah,

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this is all one drawing. I um there are no eyes here, so I just um uh put an an empty drawing into the eye switch layer, activated that. And then I just, as you can see, it's all just mesh deformation.

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It's all just the mesh that lies on top of this whole thing. And I animated the points so that it made sense.

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And then you know this happens. And here, this was actually pretty cool because I got I could very easily get some really nice overlapping stuff going like that.

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He doesn't land with all feet at the same time. But here you can see the vituvian bones in action.

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Just lifts up. He has some stretch in his legs. Boing. And it switches to the vituvians. We put the we know we lift the vituvians a little bit more in the air. Have a nice moving hold. gravity kicks in and he lands and stands up.

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That's basically the whole thing. Um the uh little the little alien actually that was probably the easiest thing. He wasn't he wasn't really animated in that way. He was literally a rig that I made in 10 minutes. That's basically his old

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That's basically his loop. Yeah, there we go. Then I would have some frame by frame overlays. I tend to do that a lot actually because it always helps to give it a little bit more oomph, you know, like here spit that

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flows out or um what else do we have? Yeah, when he comes out some impact and just some unidentified stuff flying out of his butt when he poops the pink alien out again. All right, this is really pretty much the basic

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concept and there's really not one set way to go about this. Um, all I can say is, you know, you have to decide from the get- go what do you want to rig and what do you want to redraw. In

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hindsight, as I said, probably I would rig a tiny bit more. I would make sure the head is connected. I would just make sure this part here basically um you know is is is actually uh you know working and not just a fake. Uh can I

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somehow can I some Yeah, this one here. um you know that that the head is really connected to the body so that I could just at least move the the head um in general uh and wouldn't have to

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reconnect it to the to the neck all the time. And I would maybe try to rig the eyes more with smartphones instead because I realized after a while I was redrawing very similar eyes all the time. is I think I could have gotten

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away with with some smart bones because the only really weird eyes are these ones here. Boing. Um and there I could have just switched to them.

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Yeah. Um the frame by frame overlay is also useful if you really have stuff that you you know for example here if I could have made the effort really.

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Uh this actually didn't happen in the final thing. I don't know why it's happening now, but uh I hope this didn't happen at least. Um but you could basically also just have a frame by frame layer over top of everything and

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clean up any um you know, ugly things uh that you want to get rid of. Uh let's see.

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Just, you know, frame by frame to to hide some some nastiness here and there.

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Yep. All right. Um, I think that's all I have in my notes for this part. Let me just check for a second. Uh, I guess, yeah, no, that's pretty much it. So, let me just from the start show you how I would

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do this or how I eventually went about it. And I will just show it with the first two keys basically for the mouth.

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First things first, it's always a good idea to have um let me just reset everything here. To have your styles set up in advance, you know, I always have a separate one for lines because I want this line boil and to easily um adjust

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the line boil after the fact. And if I would have animated everything already, I could just go into the line style and change it and it would change over the whole thing. Um and then in style two, you can use the

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fill color. So in this case, since we want to do the mouth, it would be main skin, for example. All right. So let's look at our rough.

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Um I usually put the rough on top of everything and put it uh uh make it transparent. Let me just go in here, make it transparent. And also I activate ignored by by layer selector. So that's just so if I want to, you know, with um

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uh with option right click um if I want to directly select the layer, it doesn't select um this video file all the time.

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Another little learning probably if you do it, I would suggest import your rough as an image sequence and rettime it on the Moho timeline because I'm somebody I very often change my timing, you know, on the go. Um, so since I only had a

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video file in the end, it really didn't match anymore because I shoved around the timing a lot when I was cleaning it up. But that's beside the point. Um, so let's do the first two mouth keys and I

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show you exactly how I went about it. Let's make a new vector layer and call it mouth one. Uh, that's a pretty easy one. All right, so now the dreaded freehand tool. So Moho is pretty nonstandard, you know, when it comes to

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drawing. I mean it's workable, it's doable, it's fine, but it just, you know, if you're coming from tune boom or anything and you expecting you can just do this to a Okay, now I take the fill tool and then do this.

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Yeah, you can see what's happening. You know, it just does some weirdness here. So, forget about the fill tool for the rest of your life. At least until maybe Moho one day does does a bit more of a

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standard thing. um with Darcy and others I've seen that use more illustrative styles. I also seen Victor Paredes demonstrated like this. They basically just do a separate fill layer. Um and they have their lines on on one layer and then they would do a

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second layer and um then uh you know do uh whatever and and fill it um and fill it here, stuff like that, that's all fine and good. But if you do something more standard, you know, like I do here,

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like something really standard, cell shaded, whatever, uh my suggestion would be, or at least from what I've seen, the quickest way to do it is just to learn to draw with shapes instead of lines.

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Basically, you're drawing lines and fills at the same time. It takes a little bit of lateral thinking, but one gets used to it. So, which means we have our freehand tool. I have my line and my color set. And I have my auto stroke.

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And now I also want my autofill. And what's happening now is this. When I draw whoop whoop. Aha. Okay, that's more like it. So that means um we can just turn with um command control right click. I can turn my canvas with command

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while turning it and then pressing shift as well. I can turn it in increments. so I can uh easily get it back. And also this one is handy. You can also flip your canvas. Probably you already know that, but I just thought I'd mention it.

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So let's just try as nicely as possible trace this first part. Then press T to get go into the transform mode and with A you can add points. As with any software, I would suggest to try to learn some of these shortcuts because it

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just really speeds you up, you know, and and time is of the essence. Um, all right. But here we have our first little part. So, since this is frame by frame and we're not really building a rig here

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that has to, you know, hold up for the for 30 seasons of a series, you can be a bit more sloppy about how you um how you draw this stuff. You know, for example, here I would just go in and turn off

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autofill and just make an additional stroke. And here we are. Turn autofill on again. And then maybe do this cheek number one.

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And now comes the trick. With Q, I can select shapes. And with down arrow, I can move it behind the green here. Okay, here we are.

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And now let's do the same thing on the other side. Maybe from here. And I always keep in mind, you know, later the eye will be layered on top and the head will be on top. So it it would work if I now just

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do this basically. All right. Something like this. And then I could just go in Hide edge. Hide this edge. And also here hide this edge. So it would have a nice um seam Q.

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Move it to the back. Um you know what? This is actually nonsense. Sorry about that. But as you can see, I have to I would more suggest doing this in one shape. Actually simplify your shapes.

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It's an it saves you a lot of headaches later. So, let's do it like this. Right, that's better. And then we can see where we need some points. I will add one here so I can hide this one.

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And I think there was uh let's turn off autofill. And let's put this on the top actually. Um there we go. All right, that doesn't look half bad. But I think it's good enough for now. So now let's draw the

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teeth. I just change my fill color to my teeth. And I do tooth number one. Oh, oops. And autofill on tooth number one.

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Tooth number two. And again, select the shapes and move them down. There we are.

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Turn this on. Okay. Amazing. So that seems good. So, let's look at our first two keys. This is basically our first one. And we see this would be our second one.

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From what I can tell, this would work. Now, you have to be analytical about it, you know. So, this would work um with the same drawing pretty much because it's basically the same thing just squashed together.

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So, I think we can get away with um with using the same one. So, I will be on the vector layer. make um make a a um freeze the keys with uh command control F.

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Freeze the keys again around here and then go to the next key like here. And you could now if you wanted try to adjust all these points to look more like this. And you can see you probably could get there after a while, but it's

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pretty much a hassle. So that's where meshes come in. And these are really easy to do. We go to frame zero. We group this command G. Um, call it mouse actually. And then we group this one again and call it mouth one. And while

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we're at it, we put we convert this into a switch. Right. Have that done as well. And now we add a new vector layer and we call it mouth one mesh.

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And here we now uh we can turn off autostroke if you want. It doesn't really matter because it it deletes any sort of style afterwards anyway. So now I just draw some general shape around here how I think it would be good.

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Not too many points, not too few. That's let's say that's fine for now. Then I go to draw triangulate 2D mesh. And now it already made a mesh out of it. You see?

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So it's much less points um to deal with. Uh now all we have to do is tell this layer which one is its mesh. So we go double click on mouth one vectors select warp layer mouth one mesh. Um

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oops. And uh you have to go to frame one to see it happening. And as you can see now it's far easier to deform this thing. Now you can make this as detailed or as simple as you want. The simpler the better

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usually. But I think what you can try sometimes is maybe try to separate some elements. You know, for example, here I'm going to try to just, you know, make a little separation between the the closed mouth and the the the chin. So

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just so we have a little bit more um room to play with. With X, you can get to the magnet tool. It's over here. And if you hold down alt or option, you can open or um make it bigger or smaller.

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All right. Anyways, so that looks good. Okay, that means let's try again. This would be our second key. Okay, let's make a command F here and a command F here.

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And now let's make our magnet really big. Start broad and go to the details later. And as you can see, it works surprisingly well and fast.

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And the thing is, and you see, you can even connect these things again a little bit. And since we did this extra line, we have a little bit more room to play with here. And the thing is if if you

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for if you are really um if you are really perfectionistic about things and you really really need to get things even closer, you can still go in and make a key here. Whoops. Make a key here and make a key here on the mouth layer

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itself and still adjust the vector points individually. You see? So you can get as m as detailed as you want, you know, but the mesh really helps you to um to get to the broad strokes faster.

Speaker A

Maybe I would need a little bit of more definition here actually. But I think for now we will just call this good enough. But as you can see, I well I probably could use some strokes here just to get that upper

Speaker A

part of the nose. Yeah. Okay. Sorry. I'm going to do it again now just so I can put that upper part of the nose a little bit closer to where it's supposed to be. But you see, even though

Speaker A

I have to do it again, it still goes relatively fast. I'm going a little bit faster than I would now because I don't want this to take too long. And I think by now you're getting the picture.

Speaker A

All right. So let's say for now this is somewhat good. So well let's just say this is good for now.

Speaker A

Oh oops. So B. And now we have our little. And you can play around with the timing here. You can also do what I always do.

Speaker A

Make a key frame here close to the second key. put it on the front or the other way around. Well, actually make this a bit longer.

Speaker A

All right, so that's all well and good. However, um let me just try to get this a bit nicer.

Speaker A

Yeah, that should be okay. And maybe you can you can even maybe do a little bit a thing like this, you know, put it a little bit down. See?

Speaker A

Boom. Yeah. Obviously, we would have to play around with that ease a little bit more to make it look nice because right now it snaps up quite quite a lot.

Speaker A

All right, good enough for now. So now we have uh this is all well and good of course but what do we do now you know because here definitely we won't get far anymore with our um current um with our

Speaker A

current drawing. Let me also here actually I often put this on hidden in editing view so it doesn't distract us.

Speaker A

Um so here would be the point where we need a second mouth for sure. So let's go here. Um, make a new vector layer, call it n two, and group it because we probably going to need another uh mesh

Speaker A

layer, and it just keeps things a bit more organized. One thing I should mention, um, make sure that you have this option here.

Speaker A

Ah, here, um, enable drawing tools only on frame zero. uncheck this so you will be able to draw on other frames at only zero because otherwise we would have to go back to zero all the time and move

Speaker A

our story or roughs so we can see so we can trace but this way now we can draw on any frame so okay same spiel freehand tool autostroke autofill um the main skin is the color that we want and I'm just going to

Speaker A

do this very quickly probably like this. Oh, let's connect it like this, maybe. Uh, how to do this best? I think I'm going to do it like this.

Speaker A

And autofill off. And just complete the stroke here. And now I probably have a mouth inside color. I actually did it.

Speaker A

Yes, I was so good. Okay. Autofill, auto stroke, and whoops. And we have an inside of the mouth.

Speaker A

[Music] And uh a tongue. Tongue. Tongue. Tongue. Yeah. here [Music] and just add a little um a little stroke like this. And now let's draw some teeth again. These teeth uh teeth um autofill teeth number one. Teeth number tooth number one. Teeth tooth

Speaker A

number two. Put it behind. Put it Oh, put it behind. And put this one behind that. All right. Uh, let's turn this off. So, here is our second mouth.

Speaker A

Okay. Um, actually, I probably did something. Um, well, first two things. Uh, first of all, yeah. Uh, let's just clean this one a little bit because I don't like how that looks.

Speaker A

Like that. Like that. Like that. There we go. As you can see, since we shoved around points now, it also created some point key frames here. So, that's something you really have to take care of because now um you can see stuff

Speaker A

is happening. That probably doesn't matter that much right now because we're going to show this mouth from here anyway. So, it's going to be at its right position. But it can um yeah, first of all, it messes up your

Speaker A

timeline. It just makes it a bit more messy than it really needs to be. And second of all, um it can lead to confusion. So you could either take these keys, cut them, and paste them to the front,

Speaker A

but this takes ages. So what I prefer to do, let me just put them again here.

Speaker A

There is a handy little script and it's called move selected keys to frame zero.

Speaker A

It's available on mohoscripts.com. This is one of the scripts that I really like and I actually wish Moho had something like that from the get- go, but we have this script at least with this. I just have to select these key

Speaker A

frames, press it, and the stuff is all in zero. So that's the standard how it will look now. All right, I did one little mistake actually because you can see actually this is an overshoot and this is the settle. I would suggest to

Speaker A

um actually if you have something like this do the settle and then animate backwards and stretch it out you know but it will be all right and this is just a demonstration. So let's do the whole thing again. Go to frame zero make

Speaker A

a new layer call it mouth mesh mouth uh two mesh and draw some points. Oops.

Speaker A

draw some points. There we go. This is a bit close here. This should be fine. Uh maybe I take it a little bit further away here. And then go to draw, triangulate 2D mesh. And then add some more points maybe here.

Speaker A

[Music] All right. And then put it on hidden in editing view and mouth number two vectors. Select war player mouth 2 mesh. All right.

Speaker A

And yeah, let's actually take this settle. Well, first of all, uh let's just check. Okay. As you can see, um, right now we also have to make sure that really at the beginning it has the mouth one.

Speaker A

Mouth one has its animation and you can see it switches to mouth two and mouth two has a little settle here. So, how I would do it now is basically we need to have a transition from this mouth, a

Speaker A

little bit of transition from this mouth to this mouth. Since it's a pretty fast um motion here, because he really snaps up, you know, and um and his mouth then settles, we only need a tiny bit of ease

Speaker A

in from this position. So, we can maybe I already, you know, play around with the timing now, but I'll take the mouth number one mesh again. Uh, and just activate the onion skin. And with the onion skin, make sure it the selected

Speaker A

layer only is off so I can see the next one. You can have it as outlines, you can have it as as this. It doesn't really matter. I like to have it as outlines sometimes. Now, this is something else that's a bit weird about

Speaker A

Moho. For some reason, it gets quite laggy if you have onion skins across um layers. That's a bit annoying, but uh we can. It's still workable. Okay, let's make our magnet a bit smaller. And just move this one up ever so slightly towards

Speaker A

towards the next one. Doesn't have to be much. It's really just All right. And then go to the mouth number two mesh. Activate onion skin. And let's see where we're coming from. Basically also make maybe a key frame here and move it

Speaker A

forward. So we already have that end position. I'm again on the mouth number two mesh. Now I can make it really really big and just move the whole thing down like that.

Speaker A

And that this can be much faster. Then we have to overshoot and then we have to settle into this key frame here. So can move it all down.

Speaker A

Oh, lost the tooth. Here he is. This. And close the lower jaw a little bit. Like that.

Speaker A

And now let's watch the whole thing. You see it works surprisingly well. And with a bit more work, it would even look better. Yeah, the this one looks a bit That one looks a bit bad. But I think

Speaker A

you get the point. That's basically all I did with the whole thing without feeling watched. So I could take my sweet time and um just merged it from one layer to the next basically, you know, move points around, move bones

Speaker A

around, move meshes around. Um I hope that kind of demonstrated to you basically. It's not a rocket science, you know. It's it's really just using Moho's tools that are pretty easy to learn in different ways or in creative

Speaker A

ways. So, let me get to the let me get to the end of it. Um, the question now is, is cleanup in Moho faster? Um, well, and the answer to that is, as you probably don't want to hear,

Speaker A

um, it kind of depends, you know. Um I think where it really shines is with these detailed illustrative styles that as I said that you know Darcy Woodbridge does that um Victor showed um other people show you know um with the new

Speaker A

vector tools in Moho those have become really popular. Um I think with that it really you know because redrawing that every frame would every drawing would be pretty much um yeah quite a hassle. So there it really shines you know going

Speaker A

the Moho route. The truth is this is my first real um attempt in doing it that way and as you can see even I have to you know still a lot to learn and I still um you know encounter some hiccups

Speaker A

here and there. So the truth is I really need to investigate a little bit more.

Speaker A

Um the aspect of fun though should not be underestimated and what I mean by that is you know since animation is a lot of work and we're talk I mean I'm talking here out of the perspective of somebody who does his own stuff not for

Speaker A

something that you do as work at work but if you do your own things you know I'm thinking people don't talk often enough about that stuff should really be fun to you to do you know it should be

Speaker A

fun for you to make question is have you having seen me do this does this really seem like a lot of fun instead of just drawing basically um the truth is for me the experience was not that fantastic to be honest um I

Speaker A

still have some gripes with Moho's timeline for example it's really hard to rettime stuff there I find when it gets more complex um the frame by frame layers for some reason they removed the interpolation of points there Um, I

Speaker A

don't know why, but that's why we have to work with switch layers. I think it would be easier to bring that back into frame by frame layers because um, you know, then I wouldn't have to name everything all the time. I think I think

Speaker A

somehow it would be much easier if there would be sort of a um, allin-one layer uh, where I could have a mesh on it and uh, you know, I wouldn't have to have tons of layers. Anyways, that's beside

Speaker A

the point. The truth is you have to you need to figure out if it works for you.

Speaker A

You know, every case is different. you know, um you've seen me do it now and I'm pretty sure knowing Moho as I do that probably one of the guys who was um was featured there will relatively soon maybe have a webinar about it and then

Speaker A

you will probably get a much more informed um opinion about all this stuff than from me. Um but all I can say is you know try it out and see what you learn and and and how it you know how

Speaker A

how it works for you. Um, all right. Uh, just remember, um, and that's also something I have to tell myself because, you know, the question for me was, is this faster than cleaning up traditionally?

Speaker A

Maybe in some ways, yes, and maybe in other ways, no. In some ways, it's more flexible. In other ways, I still often just wish I could just draw the stuff.

Speaker A

But the truth is, um, both speed and excellence just comes from experience. This was my first time um that I really seriously um you know completed a little scene like that. And if this would have been my 100th scene done like that, I

Speaker A

would have probably been faster in it. And the same for you. So I think speed really can only come with experience. So I don't think it will be much faster out of the box. So, if you if you're for

Speaker A

example right now um a traditional animator who's maybe seen some of these videos and now watches this to see what Moho can bring to the table, yes, probably it can speed you up in certain things, but it won't do that right off

Speaker A

the out of the box. You have to invest the time to learn the tools um to gain the experience to make the mistakes from which you learn. You know, that's just part of the process. any but nonetheless I want to leave you with some key

Speaker A

takeaways that I think I learned from this whole project. Number one, it is really good to have a solid rough. To be honest, the more solid the better.

Speaker A

Really have your keys figured out and most of your breakdowns to be honest. Um you don't want to with the Moho Vector stuff, you really basically only want to be cleaning up and tracing. you don't want to fix um uh uh um you know um

Speaker A

proportion issues or anything like that. So the more solid your rough um it doesn't have to be super clean lines or anything but just this the stuff has to be figured out you know. Um number two really think in advance you know what

Speaker A

what's worth to rig and what is worth to draw what takes what gets you to the finishing line faster in in in which part. You know, again, looking back, sometimes, you know, your your tip might be wrong. I think again, that's

Speaker A

something that comes with experience, but um a lot of the time it's probably fast to redraw stuff. That was my first mistake of this first little thing I showed, you know, where I thought, "Oh, I just draw it once and then I can

Speaker A

squish and squash it into any sort of key that I want." And then I saw how Darcy did it and he basically just drew four five faces and um therefore it worked. So yeah, that's really something you have to you have to gain the

Speaker A

experience and be analytical about. Um, number three, um, that was also a tip by Darcy, by the way. Um, really use these meshes. I think that actually really speeds you up. It takes you a moment longer to set up, but um, with complex

Speaker A

uh, parts, you know, like this mouth, um, it's definitely faster, you know, to you've seen how how how quick that was for me to to merge that from one thing to the next. And that one was the biggest learning. Basically, do one

Speaker A

thing at a time. Don't try to do the whole thing at once. Break it down. Um, in my case, I decided to do the mouth first, then the eyes, and then all the rest one by one.

Speaker A

I mean, unless you are unless you are just basically smarter than me, which also is is very hard to imagine. Um, but for me, I just I just was completely overwhelmed trying to um clean up every drawing um at once. So, I really had to

Speaker A

break it down into parts. Um, and that's basically it. I really hope this was informative for you. Sorry for rambling.

Speaker A

Sorry, uh, slight technical hiccups I hope you forgive me for that. And also, sorry that my example really didn't come out as great as I was hoping. Where is it? Let's look at it one more time.

Speaker A

Let's Let's look at this terrible at this terrible overshoot. Boing. Kind of looks like a kind of looks like the mountain from Nightmare Before Christmas. But um anyways, I hope it gave you kind of the idea how to go

Speaker A

about it. And um please if if you if you use these techniques, if you find something out that's cool or that's interesting or that would help me to get better at this stuff, then please let me know. And hope to see you soon. Take

Speaker A

care. Bye-bye.

Topics:Mohotraditional animationanimation cleanupframe-by-frame animationvector animationanimation workflowDarcy Woodbridgemesh animationswitch layersindie animation

Frequently Asked Questions

Can Moho be used effectively for traditional animation cleanup?

Yes, Moho can be used for cleanup by utilizing switch layers, meshes, and point animation instead of relying solely on bones, which can simplify the process.

What are the advantages of using switch layers and meshes in Moho?

Switch layers allow animators to switch between different drawings for expressions or poses, while meshes enable easier deformation of parts without animating individual vector points, making cleanup more manageable.

Is using Moho for cleanup always faster than traditional redrawing?

Not necessarily. While Moho can speed up some menial tasks, depending on the project, redrawing may sometimes be faster or more effective, especially with experience.

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