Quick & Easy 2D Character Rigging

1. Introduction: Hi. Today, I'm going to show you my go to basic rig in Moho. We're going to take a simple anthropomorphic character, a sketch from my iPad, and bring it to life in record time. I'm Julia. I'm a two D animator with over a decade of experience in traditional frame by frame animation. Lately, I've been diving deep into rig characters in Moho, and I'm hooked. Why? Because this software perfectly combines the speed of puppet animation with that beautiful organic look and feel we love in andron work. Moho is incredible because it combines the soul of andron animation with vectors and the speed of puppet animation. No prior knowledge is required for this class. We're going to build it from the ground up. To help out, I've included some great resources. A character template to retrace. If you're stuck for ideas, a Moho quick start PDF, accurated list of further links to keep you inspired. See you in class. 2. Designing the Character: I'm dropping into Moho the sketch that I just made on Procreate. I try to make it as symmetrical as possible, but that's just a sketch. In fact, we will have to redraw it here in Moho. I'm going to scale it so that it fits nicely in my canvas. I didn't draw the ice on purpose in this character because in this class, we are focusing on a simple rig and we don't care, for example, about the blinking. By double clicking on the layer of the image I just imported, I can set the opacity, let's say, to 20% so that I have a nice reference underneath. And here I created a new vector layer and I'm going to start drawing on Frame Zero. This is very important. Frame Zero is our workshop to build the character. So I will start by retracing the head first. In Procrite, I used an inky brush. I think it's called Inca found in the inking section, and it's one of the default brushes. I want to reproduce this type of brush here in Moho, so you could create your own custom brush. But for today, we just use Guash, which is one of the brushes already present in Moho. This is how it looks like, and of course, you can click on the brush settings and make it even better. In order to do that, because it's a style, you would have to go in the main style panel up there, select your gush style, and then adjust the settings. For example, I want less spacing, but maybe more variation, something like this. So when I'm ready to draw, I select down here my style, and it will be updated. And the good thing about styles in Moho is that you can adjust them anytime, even at the end of the animation. We will see it in a while. So now I will start redrawing my character. I will start by redrawing the head first. In this case, as we're keeping things simple and making a very basic rig, I'm keeping the face in one layer because I'm not planning to animate the eyes or the mouth. Here with this tool, you can work on the thickness of the line a little more and customize it even further. For instance, for the ice details, it works for me better this way. Because they're vectors, of course, then you can always move them and adjust them. Maybe I'm not happy with the shape of the head, for instance, so I can refine the line and reposition some points until I'm satisfied with them. So let's say that this is the head, I'm going to create a separate vector layer for the hair because I'm thinking I could put two bones in there and animate a light movement of the hair as a secondary action. By the way, you see when I go in another layer, the program blurs out a bit the quality of the other layer. But no worries. This is just a render issue. It's not compromising the quality of your final piece. Here, I'm going to use my brush to make this kind of a texture. In this case, I do this because I want to have this sketchy look. Of course, you can also use auto fill up here to have a clean field shape. But this lady has a doodly aesthetic. So by doing this, I'm clearly creating a lot of points. It's a choice. It's a style choice. And actually, that's what I love so much about Moho. I can take something very sketchy from my sketchbook and make it vector and animate it very fast. So we move on. I'm going to do the neck next. I could keep it together with the body, but I'm thinking to probably leave it separately just for extra motion. Yeah, you see here, I don't like the thickness at the moment of this line, but I know that we can fix it later. And after all, this is a class about rigging, not drawing, so I don't want to spend too much time on designing. But it's good to know and to remember that you can change the design or the quality of the line later. Okay, now I'm going to create the body and when I say body, I mean the chest mainly. So here we can test the autofil actually. If I select a white fill and tagle autofill up here, while I draw my inky line, M is going to automatically put a fiel, which is not mandatory for such a sketchy look, but it could be useful in animation, especially if you have some overlaps of some element. For example, if the arms go on top of the body. Now I'm going to create a new layer for the right arm, and I'm going to do shoulder arm, forearm, and even hand together. And I will keep the autofill on for this part, and here at the end, just leave it so that there is no fell in the connection between arm and chest. And maybe this is a good occasion to show you a cool trick. For example, we have a point at the armpit, and then I have a point a bit inside here. Actually, I have more than one point, so let's delete one. In the final look, I don't want to see this section. And with this tool, I can hide a section of a stroke. And then I'm going to continue with the rest of the arm. And when I design, I'm not super precise because I can adjust points afterwards. And here's another trick. I need to move this second shape behind. So using this tool, I can select the shape, then press Shift and arrow down to move it behind the shape I drew previously. Now I can adjust a beat those points, so I'm more happy with them, maybe. And ideally, I would also go layer by layer, and maybe we can do it afterwards and reduce the number of points because reducing the points makes the animation a bit easier. We're going to do the same for the other side for the left arm. And to be more precise, actually, you can duplicate the first arm and flip it horizontally. In this way, the arms are exactly the same. Here we go flip horizontally super easy. I reposition this wherever I want it. So as you can see, the sketch underneath was not as good. I mean, I do like imperfections of sketches, but especially for limbs, I think it's important if they are the same length. Now we want to do the same with the legs. I prefer the left leg here, so I'm going to first draw the left and then duplicate it for the right one. Once again, I will just use one layer with the entire leg together, including the foot, like so, even though probably I would extend it a bit, like so and put a point here, and then hide this part. And then I'm going to go down here and draw the foot, moving it behind the pens. And today, I want to add the sock, as well, which will be like a small rectangle, and I will select it and send it back. But now it's a little too much back, so I'm going to send this one back now. Let's see if it makes any sense. I'm not 100% convinced, so I move something around like this. That's the idea. Now it looks okay to me. The ankle or the sock is not really necessary. You can also skip it and have the foot directly coming out of the pants. Now I'm going to duplicate the layer, call it leg R, right, and then flip horizontally. And then I'm going to reposition it with this tool here so that they are symmetrical. And as you can see, again, my sketch wasn't very symmetrical, and to be honest, I'm not even sure that the head is symmetrical, so I'm going to select everything head and neck and move it a bit more in the center. So this is the character And actually, before we move on to rigging, I wanted to show you how we can add the white feel also, for example, on the head. So let's dry that quickly. Now, this is the head, right. I'm going to select those points and another trick to select all the points of a stroke, you can select just one or a couple of them and then hit the tab key. This will automatically select all the points of a stroke. Then I'm checking if feel is on up here, and then I'm going to select the color white and click Connect and create. Here's a trick. And here, as you can see, it's again on top of everything, so I have to select it, shift, arrow down to move it in position. There we go. For the hair, I don't need to do anything, and for the neck, I do. And here it is. This specific point, I just want to adjust the thickness here. Okay. The only thing I'm really not happy is the mouth because it's very blurry. As I mentioned earlier, at any point, we can edit the style. So we're using guash. If I go on wash in styles up here and we open this panel, we can modify the brush. And as you can see, automatically, it's going to modify our character. For example, now I lower the number for the spacing, and design is much more visible. This could work for me. Then I can, of course, even modify the actual vectors. For example, here, I can go back and say, really, this slip is way too bold and then go like this and tone it down. Actually, I don't dislike it like this. I can even reduce it and delete in some points, and maybe I'm a little happier like this. She's also happier. Walla, that's better. Okay. 3. Rigging the Character: Now, we go to the actual point of this class, which is rigging. We create a bone layer on top of everything, and we call it girl. And then we drag all the vector layers we designed into this folder. And finally, it's time to rig. This is the tool we use to add bones. First thing I create is the pelvis bone, which is the main bone. I can also rename every bone up here. I call it pelvis, and if I click here, I can even show ups, show a label with the name. If you shy the bone, the bone is going to be invisible. Everything we do now is on Frame Zero and on the bone layer. This is very crucial. And now we go on creating the next bone from the pelvis. I want a bone that goes up. And now the pelvis is selected. You see, it's red. So it means that whatever bone I create next is going to be parented to the pelvis. So I create a bone for the chest, and now the chest is red, so I go on with the neck and then with the head. And from the head, I want to put two bones for the hair. So one is here, and the next one should not be parented to the other here, of course. But then in order to have it parenting to the head, I press on option for Mac and At for Window and click on my headphone. And we're going to do the same for the arms. I'm going to select the chest. Of course, the arms are parented to the chest. Same thing other side. And then I go back to the pelvis because the legs are connected to the pelvis. And here I have a knee, and for the shin, I'm going to go until the ground and then at the foot. And the same goes for the other side. Note that for Moho, it's quite important that the legs bones are not super straight. In my case, the legs have a very generous bend, but it could also just be one degree angle, and that would be enough. And then once we've done this, I want to option click on the canvas so that there are no bones selected, no bone is red, and I will add two little bones attached to the feet. And remember option or I'll click on the canvas before drawing each one of those mini bones. Those will be our target bones. And now let's rename a couple of bones, the shin R and shin L. And then also the foot and foot R. This should be enough for a basic rig. This tool here shows the bone strength. You see that every bone has a sort of aura of power and what it means is that each bone will affect the drawings in those areas. So you can test the rig by going to any frame in timeline, not zero and clicking on the Manipulate bone tool. Then you can try move things around. Note that we are on the bone layer and not Frame Zero. So they do move already, but you can see that when I move the arm, for example, the head is affected, too. And that's because for now, they're just following those strength bubbles, right? The character is moving already, but it's not great, right? There is a bit of distortion. But it's nice, for example, that the feet are lifting. So this is already something. But if I move this, nothing really happens. And if I move the pelvis, also nothing happens because I didn't set the target bones yet. I personally don't use the bone strength much, so I select everything, go to the bone strength and drag it down so that there is no bone strength. Once I do this, nothing is happening because there is no bone strength, and we didn't attach the drawings to the bones yet. So don't be scared. That's what we're going to do now. But it's good for you to know that you could also use the bone strength. So before we move into binding the drawing to each bone, I want to set the target bones, which means telling Moho where the ground is. I select Shin R. I go in bone constraints up here, and for the target, I choose target R. This is an important trick that now I learn by heart. Same stuff other side, Shin L, target L. And finally, and I don't have to close every time, but I do it, I go on foot and I tagle independent angle on the other side as well. And by doing this, just the bones are going to move but bear with me. When I do this, you can see now that when I move the pelvis, the legs and the feet are on the ground and it's working as I want to. But now let's connect the drawings to the bones. I said before, I want to reduce the points as much as possible. Again, for the purpose of this class, I'm not going to do it in detail, but I'm going to show you how binding means we're going to connect each bone to a portion of the body. We select the bone with the select bone tool. And with this other tool here, bind points, we select the points we want to connect to the bone and then press bind points. By doing this, these points are going to be connected to this bone. But to make it easier or a bit more dynamic, you could just reduce points. So what I just did, for example, and adjust your design if you want it differently so that it's a bit less chaotic. I'm also going to do this one and bind points and then next bone and bind points. And then finally, for the foot, I'm going to bind all the other ones. And of course, I don't bind anything to the target bones so other leg, same thing. I bind the points like so. And then when you select the other bone, you can see the points that have been already bound to the previous bone. They have the same color. So you know more or less where to bind. And if you bind again a point that was already bound, it's going to automatically be unbound from the previous one, which means every point can be bound to only one bone. So now we move to the neck. Here you can see there are a bunch of points. The neck could also just have four points, and those four points could be bound to the chest bone and the headbon. But here we have a little more, so I select only the central ones and bind them with the neck bone and select this part here. These points can be connected to the body bone, and those points on top can be connected to the headbone. And then I go to body, and for sure, all those points belong to body. We do now the right arm so I select again my bone and here upset Daisy. Let's try like this. I don't think there is a perfect science for this. In some of the characters I've been working on in the past months, I had a rule for myself there was, at this point, at the junction of two bones, I would have two points for each side, so that one would go with the previous bone and one will go with the following one. But I'm not sure that that's the best idea because sometimes I only have two points at the junction and they work better in the bending. So I would say it depends so much on the character design and brush. Do your experiments. In this case, we can test this quickly. You can always fix those issues with Smart Actions, even though I think ideally you try to solve these problems earlier, as much as possible in the rigging phase. And then with the Smart Actions, you can fix some extra stuff or yeah whatever you couldn't fix earlier. So ideally we don't postpone the problem. That's what I'm saying. So here, again, very straightforward for the hair. Yeah, each side of the hair is connected with its bone, like so. So now that we did it, we're going to test it. We go somewhere in the timeline, for instance, at 6 seconds. It doesn't matter as long as it's not frame zero, and I have to be on the bone layer and use the manipulate bone to. We don't need the timeline, so we can see a bit better. Now I can test some movement. Of course, I cannot move the hair too much, but because now the head is filled with white color, I could actually complete the hair behind it, and we're actually going to do this in a second. You see, those testing phases are useful to spot problems. I mean, she could ask pigtails. So let's keep testing. This is moving. Here there are issues with the outline, and of course, we have to fix it. This bends quite well. Actually, I'm quite happy with this. And then the pelvis works like so, and you see like automatically it bends. But it creates some mistakes. But maybe we like those mistakes. Actually, I don't dislike this style, but we can fix this with a smart action later. And here I can use the target bone to move the foot. And here we have this independent angle, which is very nice and useful, especially for walk cycles. And by the way, I have a class on walk cycles, too. The ankle is actually moving not too bad. So after this test, we can just delete those keyframes and go back to Frame Zero. As we said, we can fix the hair. I'm just going to turn off the head for now. And of course, now I'm adding points. So I will have to reconnect and rebind those points to the bones. Let's do it like this. This is the hair. Alright. So what we have to do is to go on the hair layer, and here we decide how to bind those points. So I would do it like this. Let's look at this bone on the left. Now, the red dots are the ones we already connected. We're going to select half of them and pin points and then select the other bone and bind the other half more or less. Now, let's test it. It works, so I think it's not that bad. Of course, the anchor point is not ideal, but in this case, what I want is just a little bit of subtle movement. So for the purpose of this class, this is more than enough. Let's have another quick test. Op. That's how we spot mistakes in a rig by testing it out. Whoop whoop whoop. I'm keeping this in the editing of the class on purpose to show you that it's a back and forth process in which we go in frame zero to build and then in the timeline to test the movement and so on. What happened here is that there are most likely some points that have not been bound properly. So I have to re select everything and bind my points one more time. Now we're good. Okay. So the main rig has been done, which is the main part of this class. But I also want to show you very quickly how we can polish some movements using Smart Actions so that the rig works perfectly. It's not perfect now because, for example, here we see the white patch, or here the line is breaking. This is not perfect, but it's a great start. So let's learn what actions are. There is this panel called Actions. If you don't see it, you can open it by clicking on Window and then Actions. When we create an action, we basically create a sort of small animation. If you know animate or the old flesh, it's a little bit like symbols in the sense that it's a separate timeline, a separate parenthesis in which we put an animation. In this case, we use it to fix some bone movement. Like, for example, now, I'm going to test this arm. If I bend the arm like so, it's not working, right? Or if I pull this arm up, this doesn't look great, either. So we want to solve this problem. And in order to do this, we have to create a smart action. Firstly, I'm going to rename some bones because each action is going to be connected to a bone. I call it shoulder lm, and this will be shoulder right, of course. Then I select the bone that I want to create an action for. Note that I have to be in my bone layer and on Frame Zero. And in the action panel, I'm just going to click on this icon to create a new action and hit Okay. And the action is going to have the same name as the bone that we already created. Don't ever change those names because it's going to make a mess. When I do so, you can see that we enter a different timeline, which is blue. We are inside of the action. Then I go around 4 seconds and I move the shoulder bone up like probably the highest I would move it in animation. And to do so, I use the transform bone tool. And now I need to go in the vector layers and fix this part. Right. So I'm telling Moho every time this bone does this movement, the arm, so I go to the arm vector layer, the arm should do this. And as you can see here, I drag this point down, and now I'm going to drag this point up. And actually, I will have to make this section transparent on frame zero. Now you can see that as the arm goes up, the outline is going into position, but it's still not perfect. So I'm going to add another key frame at 1 second, fix the vectors, and also actually reduce the thickness of this line a bit. Let me check the movement until 4 seconds, the arm pit is working. But let's fix what I meant before for the shoulder, so I go back to the main line with double click and I go back to Frame Zero, and I go back to my left arm vector layer. So first thing I see is that it's not connected nicely. And then probably this could be a thinner line too. And then this one here, I'm going to put it a little more inside and make it transparent so that when so that we have a bit of a transparent section here. Now we go back to the action shoulder, so you can see that this section became transparent. This is what we moved earlier and now it works. So I'm going to quickly zoom out and show you what we just did with this action. With this action, we're telling Moho every time the shoulder bone moves up, adjust basically those two connection points. And you can notice here the shoulder is not perfect. I want to show you that in an action, you can add keyframes in multiple vector layers. For example, the chest, let's move it a bit. Like at 4 seconds, I could adjust even further and select this point in the shoulder and move it so that when the arm goes up, also the chest is a bit affected. So, yeah, you can decide how your character will move and the body parts will react, but this is the idea. So in order to finalize the rig, I would go on and create a smart action for each bone that needs some polishing. I go back to the mainline. Remember when you are inside of an action timeline, the timeline has a different color, and then you have to go back to mainline to actually animate. So here, for example, we are in the mainline. If I animate always on the bone layer, of course, you can see that when I move this arm, it's fixed now. This is the action we just made. While this other arm, we didn't. So you would have to create an action for every arm or for every bone you want to fix. For example, let's see the leg. Let's try to fix the leg. I want the leg to bend better when it does this kind of extreme movement. I want this to be fixed. And actually, this is a perfect occasion to show you a very important trick. I'm doing the other side because there is the pelvis bone in the way, and that's confusing. So you can see here this movement breaks the rig of it. And this happens every time I move this bone up, but also when I move this other bone, the shin down. So it's a combination of bone movement. And this I found very tricky when I started because usually an action is linked to one bone only. So here's a trick. It's a very weird one, but bear with me. Let's first rename this bone to thigh left. Now, with this bone selected, I create an action, and here comes the fun part. We go again at 4 seconds, and now we move this leg up, and by moving just the first bone, I already have an issue to solve, which is here at the groin. Let's fix it right away, so we do it gradually. We go on the leg and we're going to connect the outline with the pelvis. So this is solved. Not the top though. So the top may be like this. All right. So this is not a problem anymore. Of course, the other leg will have to be fixed as well. But we want to fix the knee bending. I go back to bone layer. I'm going to select the other bone, the shin, always using the transform bone tool. I do the biggest bending that I would do in animation. And just to see better, I turn off the arms. So now that I did this, you can see that the stroke of the leg is messy. I go back on the leg vector layer and I want to fix the points. Here, there are a bunch of points, and this doesn't help. And of course, as I said earlier, the smallest number of points you have the better. But basically, I have to unravel this mess and find a shape of the leg that would work for me for this position, right, for this action. So she has baggy pants, and I think something like this could work. Then we test it. It's not bad. I think it works quite well. But now here's a trick. I cannot just go back to mainline like this because I moved another bone inside of the thigh bone action, right? And I don't want to tell M that every time that I move this thigh bone, also the shin has to move. So what I have to do, and this is the tricky part is to go back to the bone layer inside of my action. Select the shin bone, which in this case is already selected. But it's important to know that once you select a bone and it's red here, the red line in the timeline and the keyframes correspond to that bone. So I need to select the shinbne and then go on its keyframe and delete it. Crucial part here, delete it. This looks horrible now, but it doesn't matter because we are inside the action. Now, we basically tell Moro, Well, every time this tie bone moves in that direction, the points are going to move this way. And I'm going to show you in the main line that nothing really broke. Now, if I move this leg up, you see what happens. First of all, this part is fixed. We already solved it, and then it's following much better. And of course, if I stretch it too much, then it's not nice. But then this is a problem for this other bone. Like, I should create probably a smart action for the shin. Let's maybe do one more. I want to show you that you can create multiple actions for the same bone. Why would you do it? You would ask? Here's why. Let's say you finished your rig and it's time to animate, or you're testing the character and all the poses that this girl can strike. Let's start with a resting pose, and then you go 1 second and you find a nice dynamic pose. And this is funny because I have another class about dynamic poses. Let's say this is our animation. Tara she's funny. Earlier, we created a Smart action to fix the shoulder movements when it goes up. But we didn't create the action for when the shoulders goes down, like so, so we see here when the arm goes down, and maybe this is the maximum it will go. This part is broken, right? We already created an action for the shoulder L, and you cannot fix this in the same action. You would have to create a new action. With the bone selected, you just create a new action, and it will be automatically called number two. And then you just go in the other direction, move the bone first at 4 seconds. Um then again, I go on the vector layer and sorry, I did the leg, but I need the arm quickly, I'm just going to show you that we can fix it. Now I'm doing it super fast just to show you. I go back to main line and yeah here is my frame, and as you can see, we fixed it. Great. So this is the point. Do your rig, fix your broken usually limbs. Those are the ones that need some Smart Actions, and then you're ready for animation. Here, as we said, we did a very, very basic rig. She has no eyes, no blink, no mouth animation. Of course, you could also animate a blink. Maybe I could do a separate class about controllers and how to animate the blink or a mouth or even the head turn and maybe even on the same character, so that we can go on with the same character and improve the same rig. And also fun fact in case you already have a small action or animation and you want to play around with key frames, you can, of course, select them, right click and play with the easing. At the very end, last but not least, I want to share an important trick for my favorite feature in Moho, the boiling effect. One of the reasons I love this software is that even though it's a vector puppet, it simulates that brushy traditional feel so well. To do it, simply open the brush setting of your style and toggle line boil. Now look at the randomness interval. You can choose zero if you want it to boil every time the line moves or set it to three to mimic that trees effect. Here you go. Enjoy that beautiful sketchy look. 4. Wrapping Up: And that's it for today. We took a sketch from a sketchbook or from the iPad, and we brought it into Moho. We redrew it with a brush that looks pretty much like the one we used, and we rigged the character in a way that it's working. So this character now can do a bunch of poses and can move very nicely. I hope this was useful and you can have fun with this and you can fall in love with Moho as much as I did. I can't wait to see your Rig characters. When you're ready, share your rig in the project section. Here's how to do it. Option one, take a screenshot of the character with all the bones visible. So we can see your skeleton. Option two, the plus point, screen record a quick video of your character moving or you testing it and save it as a Jif. Or if the video is too long or too heavy, share it on social media, tag me and link it in the project description. Either way, I'm so excited to see what you build, and I hope you have a lot of fun with your rig. That's all for today. And please let me know if you want to see more Mohawk tutorials because I'm hyped, and I will be very happy to do it. I love how easy and intuitive this software is. Happy creating. I'm looking forward to see your Rik and talk to you soon.