Moho instead of Flash

I've seen a few 2D skellital animation pieces- the animated bits of American Splender spring to mind. (as well as monkey-dust) It's kind of spotterble, but I don't surpose that's the point. It seams perticulaly good for charactors talking and justiculating. I may try it out sometime.

As for the head turning that is a big weakness in Moho. You have to flip the heads...

Spoooze!

From what I've read you can draw your usual head rotation and use the switch layer to run through it when needed. It's a good feature--same thing that does the lip synch--but I just couldn't get into it myself. 'Course, I didn't give it much time, so...

But the switch layer is one of the powerful features of Moho besides the bones. You can set up a character with a set of switch layers that allow you to do a complete rotation as necessary.

Automated lip-synch is a weakness to me (that isn't to say I want to do full lipsynch but I want to have control of where I put the mouths in dialogue and expression and have control to throw in a unique expression once in a while).

You don't have to use automatic lip sync if you don't want to... It's there as a feature (it's actually a different app. for that). I don't use any automatic in Moho, I do my own lipsync and I don't let the program do any inbetweens, you got great control of everything if you want to.

As for the head turning that is a big weakness in Moho. You have to flip the heads, Who knows? The may come out with a 3D head turn in the future.

No, you don't, it's up to you as an artist to add as many inbetweens as you like, you can use switchlayers and have different drawings of the head you're turning or you can animate the lines and shapes of one drawing to get the impression of a turn (just as you can do in flash).
Moho is not an 3D application although you can import 3D objects so it seems highly unlikely that Lost Marble (the company behind it) will add such a feature.

Moho is a great cut-out animation software, it handles bitmap images really well and it's not just for web animation (I'm using it for a cut-out project with hand drawn scanned images for film output (2K) and it runs with no effort at all, it would be impossible to do such a thing in Flash, my other real option would be to get a ~6500$ licence of Cel action, Moho come at 99$...).
If you want a traditional "cel"-animation tool for the web then Flash or the Tab would be a better choise.
But for cut-out I think Moho is unbeatable.

I played with Moho two or three years ago. But I could work faster in Flash at that time.

But with the changes to Flash now and the increased prices I may rethink it in the future. I still like outputting to vector for the pure size reduction, but since it's been so long since I played with Moho, maybe it can do that too. I'll have to fire it up again and play with it.

Pat

Hi everyone!

ToonBoom animation lanches in next months, a version of Harmony for independent and small studios. They promisses it will be a great software. have Ikbones, reuses library, in-between morphing, glue resources, export formats for HDTV, DV and others. The Harmony todays costs US$ 16.000,00. And this version will arrives with cheap price.

I personally use ToonBoom in my first animation(link below) :o and after I change to Flash.

I try to use Moho too, but in Mac, Moho is very very slow and the larner step is completle different what I see in other softwares.But I like so much.

Claudio. :D

I've fiddled with Moho on a few occasions, and it's generally very impressive. You still have to do cutout animation for the most part, but you don't have to put together nested symbols in Flash in order to make it work. I've recently redownloaded the demo, and will be playing with it more in the near future.

Whaddayou, on comission? :D

Seriously--I messed with it but when I couldn't grasp it immediately and immediately get results I liked (yeh, read that impatient), I gave up on it. I recently saw a terrific example from it, though, that would have me thinking twice were I not learning 3D at the moment. It's pretty awesome, and pretty cheap, too.

is it what they use for monkey-dust?

does it export swf's?

What we need is an open source Flash-esque variant. I've heard that someone is working on an animation variant of Inkscape, but I haven't seen any details or progress reports in a while.

I think the concept of bones and a camera are neat and needed. Although I've yet to see a Moho demonstration that knocks my socks off that isn't a sillihouette.
A 3d camera in a 2d program can look wierd. What you wind up with is a fly- through in cut-out/standee land. I think emulating multiplane effects it could be good but I haven't seen that demonstrated.
Again alot of cool concepts but as of this point I have seen Flash demos that do knock my socks off. And when I have to ask myself "Is that Flash or traditonal", even for a few seconds, It has succeeded.
I will eventually try Moho and make it do what I want it to do...I'm just a little weary of learning a new program. I didn't have to learn new pencils in the old days.

good points Graphiteman, I was thinking the same thing.

Seems like it's hard to do actual traditional looking stuff in MoHo where you could draw out the keyframes and everything instead of doing cutout animation - even if the cutouts are deformed with bones. I could pretty much do the same thing in my 3D software package.

Anyway, looks interesting nonetheless and I'm gonna give it a shot and see what I come up with.

Can anyone post a link to some good animation done in MoHo?
I can't say that I've ever seen something done in that program, at least that I was aware of.

..........where you could draw out the keyframes and everything instead of doing cutout animation ......

Even without drawing a succession of frames Flash's symbol animation has potential to look like really good limited animation. As far as smoothness, I don't want perfect mathematical interpolations. We'll see....I don't want to prejudge based on the demos...Heaven knows I've seen not only Flash but 3d dismissed back in the day.

Thanks, James.

Those are great examples of Moho in the hands of pros. Still, it really shows its strengths and weaknesses. It's just that the pros are better at letting those limitations dictate a visual appealing style. Its strengths are the 3d/ camera and bones. It was interesting to see that animation with the heiroglyphs becasue that's how I thought to myself characters tend move and look on a plane in Moho. Heiroglyphs are well-suited. Automated lip-synch is a weakness to me (that isn't to say I want to do full lipsynch but I want to have control of where I put the mouths in dialogue and expression and have control to throw in a unique expression once in a while). And I've yet to see a character's head turn (not flop/pop left to right or vice versa). It just seems from here what one gains in techy things one loses in the character dept.
I promise I will poke around and find out more. I don't wish to be prejudicial.
Perhaps I think it is a better program for someone going from a 3d interface who wants to do 2D web stuff? Or used complimentary with Flash?