Ultimate Moho 2D Animation Course - Complete Guide

1. Introduction: Our moho animation course takes you through the entire animation pipeline of the two D animation software moho from creating a character, rigging it, and animating a full shot from start to finish. Moho is known for its ability to easily build and animate rigged puppet characters, and that's exactly what we're going to learn in this course. We'll start by covering the moho interface and basic drawing tools. Then we'll get into the different animation tools Mo has to offer and learn how to use them to rig a character with an incredible amount of control, rarely seen into the animation. The rig will feature a full range of motion, like the ability to turn a character from a side view to a front view and moving the face in all directions. Once our rig is done, we'll bring in a three D background and animate a complete shot using the rig, adding shading, lighting, and different effects to really make the scene pop. We'll also cover hand drawn animation, lip syncing, particle effects, camera movement, and a lot more. And as always, all the rigs and project files shown in the course will be available to you so you can experiment on your own. Moho is an incredibly robust two D animation program that lets you get amazing looking results, even if you can draw. So if you've ever wanted to get started with professional grade two D animation, this is a great place to start. 2. 01 01 Background on Moho: Welcome to the Boop animation course in Moho Animation. I'm David Shutenhelm and I'll be your instructor. Before we get started, I wanted to give you a little background on Moho itself. Moho, formerly known as Anime Studio, is a Toti animation software made by Smith Micro. Moho's main selling point is its ability to easily build and animate with rigged puppet characters. Its particular balance of ease of use and powerful features makes it a popular option for hobbyists, and while it's not an industry standard yet, it has been used on some major productions. Most notably, cartoon Saloon used Moho to create their Oscar nominated feature films, Song of the Sea and the Bread winner. Now, Moho was originally created by a studio called Lost Marble, but was bought by Smith Micro and renamed Anime Studio. They kept that name all the way through Version 11, but then for Version 12, they rebranded back to Moho and gave it a major interface overhaul that was a big improvement. They're currently on Moho 13, which is what we'll be using for this course. Now there are two versions of Moho Moho Pro and Moho debut. I highly recommend Moho Pro. This chart from the Moho animation site shows you the differences between the P and debut versions. The key features that I think make the Pro version worth the upgrade are smart Bones and Smart warp. A big part of our lessons on rigging characters will focus on the powerful ways you can enhance your character rigs with these features. There's also things like size limits and three D objects support that make Pro much better suited for doing serious animation work. For those reasons, we'll be using Moho Pro 13 for this course. So let's get started and look at where you can download Moho and set up your new installation. We'll do that in the next video. I'll see you there. 3. 01 02 Setting Up Moho: So just in case you don't already have Moho, let's look at where you can download it and set it up to get started. The site you want to go to is moho animation.com. This is the homepage for official Moho content from Smith Micro. Now for this course, you want Moho Pro. We can just go to the overview, and then here you can either buy Moho Pro or download a 30 day free trial. Now, before you pay for Moho, look at the Education tab. If you're a student, you can get a 40% discount, so definitely take advantage of that if you're able to. Also, while we're here on the site, there is some free Moho assets you can download. There's a bunch of example art assets and character rigs that you can use in your animations. You can come back and explore these later. For now, let's get Moho up and running. Once you download and install Moho on your system, the first time you launch it, you're going to get met with this window asking if you want to choose a location for your custom content folder. Your custom content folder is a place where Moho will store things like custom brushes, palettes, custom keyboard shortcuts, and any characters or artwork you save to the library so you can reuse them in other projects. To set this up, just click Choose. And I'm going to make a new folder in my documents directory. Then click Choose again, and then it will proceed with opening the application. So when you first launch Moho, you'll get this splash screen. This just links to the resources on the Smith Micro site we already looked at. So I'm going to click Don't Show this again. You might find that it opens one of their demo projects by default. Once you know a little more, these are actually really nice to look at for examples of how different effects can be achieved in Moho. But at this point, they're probably a little advanced. So let's change what happens when we start up. To do that, we need to go to the main preferences, which on Mac are under Moho preferences. Then on the general tab here, I'll change the startup file dropdown to no document. So now it won't open anything when the program starts. Now we've got to create a new project of our own. We'll look at doing that in the next video. I'll see you there. 4. 02 01 Setting up a New Project: So now that we've got Moho up and running, let's look at how we create a new project. We just go to File New, and it automatically creates a new document for us. Now, this is just going to be the default settings for the project. Let's make sure it actually has the settings that we want by going to file project settings. So the most important thing to set right from the start is the resolution. You have a list of options here on the drop down. I'll choose ten ADP, or you can put in custom dimensions here if you want. 24 is good for the frame rate. And if you know how long you want your scene to be, you can specify the start and end frame here, but you can always change the slate or too. Next, there's the background color. This is what will show up as the background when you export if you don't have background artwork of your own covering the stage. Then there are depth of field options here. This is only relevant if you're going to build your scene with three D depth. With this on, you can have a certain level of depth in focus, but have layers of artwork in the background or foreground blurred based on their distance from the camera. The focus distance is the distance from the camera that will be in focus, and focus range is how wide that level of focus is. Max blur radius is how blurry the out of focus parts of the scene can be. You might want to just build your scene first and then come back and set these so you have a better sense of what the value should be. Then over here, you have render style settings. You can get an idea of how these affect things based on the preview down here. You can try these out, but I recommend not even bothering with these because they don't give you a lot of control. Now let's come down here and look at these settings. Sort layers by depth is, again, if you're building is seen in three D. So say if you have a layer that's in your background and you push it farther away from the camera along the Z axis, with this checked, that layer would automatically get moved down to the bottom of your layer stack in the layers panel. Sort by true distance means it will base the sorting on the origin point of the layer rather than the contents. That will make more sense when we get into the three D features. I'll just leave both of these off for now. Next, there's anti aliasing. This smooths out the little jagged stair step pixels that show up along the edges of shapes. You probably want this on. Noise grain will add a film grain effect to your scene. How strong it is depends on this value, and pixelation will run a pixelation effect on your scene when it renders. Stereo rendering actually gives you the option to render a three D movie either to watch with red and blue three D glasses or on a VR headset. So when it renders a three D movie, it renders one view for each eye, and eye separation changes the amount of distance between the two views that it renders. That's obviously a very special case, and again, it's only relevant if you're actually building your scene in three D. Then there's extra SWF frame. This would only be needed if you're going to export in a flash SWF format, but you probably won't be doing that in this day and age, so I'm going to leave that off. So then once we have our settings the way we want them, we can come down and click the Save As Defaults button. Now, whenever we use FileNw, it will make a document like this one. Now I'm going to save the project file. I'll just put it in the Moho content folder we created. So strictly speaking, that's all we need to get started, but there's one more important feature that you might want to use to keep your project organized. Come up to file New Workspace. Now a workspace is just a series of folders on your hard drive to store all the files you plan to use for your project. There are four default choices on the drop down. Let's look at simple. And here in the preview, you can see the folders it's going to create. There can also be subfolders within these. If you check this box, it will also create a new blank Moho project along with the folders. Let's hit Okay, and I'll have it create this workspace in the same folder where I saved my project file. Now notice that we're actually in a new moho project, the one that I just created along with the workspace. And if we take a look at the project settings, we can see that it did, in fact, create it with the defaults that we set. And if we look in the Moho content folder where I saved it, we can see that we do in fact, have the file structure from the workspace that we chose. Now, if you want to create your own custom workspace with just the folders you want, that's one of the things you can store in the custom content folder. To get there easily, we can just go to File, Open custom content folder. And then at the bottom, we have workspace templates, and you'll see these are the four templates that we saw before. All you have to do is make a folder here with the name you want for your template and then make all the folders inside that you want your workspace to have. For example, I could copy the sequences workspace and rename it episodes and then rename the folders inside to reflect that. Then if I go back to Moho and go to set up a new workspace, episodes is available on the dropdown. So Workspaces is a great way to make sure you're being consistent with how you organize all your files. Next, now that we have a project, we're going to run down all of the key elements of the interface here. We'll do that in the next video. I'll see you there. 5. 02 02 Key Panels and Toolbars: So now that our project is up and running, let's get familiar with the Moho interface. It might seem strange how things work in Moho at first. So let's do a quick rundown of the key panels and tool bars so we know what we're looking at. I've got one of the startup demo projects open, so we have some example content to look at. First, the main thing is the stage in the middle here. This is where you'll draw your artwork and see your animation. There are some key things to understand along the bottom that will be important later. You have controls for playing back the animation and navigating. And here you can mute or enable the audio during playback, and these options here let you have multiple views of your stage at the same time. This is mostly important when you're working in three D. We'll look at that later. Then very important to know about is the options here to show curves or not. When you're working with vector artwork on a vector layer, which we'll be doing a lot, this controls whether you can see the control points and curves that define a line or shape. Then next to that is the display quality dropdown list. This controls what effects and visuals get rendered live here in the Stage view. Ideally, you'll be able to keep this on high so that you can get a better idea of what your final scene will look like when you export. But if your computer is getting sluggish, especially when playing back your animation, you might need to come in here and turn some features off. Now, no matter how high you have the display quality settings, your stage view isn't going to be totally accurate. To see what a particular frame will look like in your final animation, you can go up to file, preview, or just press Command or Control R, depending on if you're on Mac or PC. Then that will render the frame in its final state the way it will appear when you export the animation. Next, let's look at the layers panel over here. This is where you manage all the individual elements that make up the scene. There are many different layer types that you can add that each bring their own functionality. We'll go over the different types of layers in another video. But something important to notice is that based on the layer type you have selected, the options over here in the tools panel will change. This is because different layers work in totally different ways. For example, on an image layer, you'll have Bitmap drawing tools. But if you have a vector layer selected, you'll have a bunch of vector drawing tools. And this is very important, too. If you have the timeline on frame zero, you'll have more tools available. Frame zero is where you want to create all your artwork. If you're past zero, you're in the middle of the animation and you're more limited in what you can change on the fly about your layers. Now, there are some tools that remain regardless of the layer type. These tools under the layer label are for moving and working with the layers themselves rather than the contents of the layers. We'll look at what that means later. Then there's the tools under camera. Every scene has a virtual camera that can be modified with these tools. Notice the purple frame here. That's the bounds of what the camera is seeing. That's important for telling the difference between changing the camera with the camera tools and changing your workspace view with the workspace tools. These just change the view of your scene within the program to make it easier to see what you're doing, whereas the camera tools change what is actually going to be visible in the final animation. Now I want to reset this, which brings us up here to the tool settings tool bar. This will be different depending on what tool you have selected. There's a lot of important functionality up here. And also, just under that tool bar, there's a row of texts that will give you important tips on how to use a tool, like what modifier keys like Alt or Command do. Now, when you're using any tool that creates artwork, the style panel will be important. This is where you control things like your colors, your line width, your brush shape, and you can even add special effects. There's a lot of functionality in this panel that we'll go over in depth later. Next, down here is the timeline. This is where you control how the motion of your character and other artwork plays out. If I find a layer that has animation on it, you'll see there are keyframes for each property like position or rotation that are being animated over time. We'll, of course, be going over the timeline in depth and spending a lot of time here as we create our animation. Next, I want to point out one panel that isn't visible by default, but can be accessed with this button here. This is the library. This is for accessing artwork and assets you want to be able to reuse in different scenes. You'll see here is the custom content folder we set up before. There's no content in there yet, but below that, in the factory content library, you can see examples of the kinds of things you might want to keep in the library, like props or sounds. You can just drag one of these over and add it to your scene. Well, look at how to save something you've made in the library later. I'll just use Command Z to undo that. Lastly, there are a few additional panels you might need access to in specific situations. All the additional panels can be found up here in the window menu. Like, for example, let's look at keyframe window. Now, currently, it's a free floating window, but any of these additional panels can also be docked as part of the regular interface. You just go back to the Window menu and go to docking. And here you can check or uncheck whether that panel should appear free floating or docked in position on the regular interface. So that's our overview of our key panels and toolbars. Next, we're going to take a deeper look at the layers panel and the different layer types. We'll do that in the next video. I'll see you there. 6. 02 03 Layer Types: In this video, we're going to look at the important features of the Layers panel and go over some of the important layer types that we'll use over the rest of the course. To add a new layer, you would click this add layer button to get a drop down where you can select the type of layer you want to add. Now, these first two vector and image are the main types of layers that you would create actual artwork on. Let's start with a vector layer. On vector layers, you use the vector drawing tools to create lines and shapes that are defined by precise points and curves. Vector artwork has a lot of upsides. You can modify the points and curves as much as you want and even animate changes in shapes without degrading the quality of the edge. And it's also resolution independent, meaning it can be scaled up and down or zoomed in and out without ever getting blurry or pixelated. Vector art also takes up less memory and makes file sizes smaller. We're mainly going to be building our characters out of vector art. Next, let's try adding an image layer. That gives us this window. So first of all, if you already have an image that you want to import and use in your project, you could click Browse File and find it, and that would make this new layer that image. But in this case, let's create a blank layer that we can draw on here in Moho. Unlike a vector layer, an image layer is resolution dependent because the content on the image is made up of pixels. So we need to specify the resolution we want this layer to be to make sure we have enough pixels to make a clear image. You'll want your image layers to be at least as big as the output resolution of your animation. But if you're going to need to scale up or zoom the camera in on your artwork, you'll want to be even higher in resolution so it doesn't look pixelated. You can also specify width and height by hand over here, and you'll typically want the background to be transparent unless this is going to be the base background layer or something. And finally, to stay organized, remember you can give your layer a name up here. Then click Create. Then you can use the brush tool and the various brush types here in the tool bar to paint on the image layer. We'll come back to image layers when we talk about doing hand drawn animation later. You can also import a sequence of images. So suppose you already had a series of frames of animation prepared that you want to use in your project. You'd go to Add Layer and Add Image sequence. Then browse and find your images, select them all and click Open. Then we'll add them all as a single layer. And down on the timeline, these triangles indicate where the sequence starts and stops. You can switch it to the sequencer tab to get a better view if you need to move it around. I'm just going to move this layer and zoom in so we can see it better. By default, each image will be displayed for one frame. If you want to change that, you can double click on the layer and go to the image tab where we have a bunch of options. Movie FPS lets us change the frame rate of the image sequence. It defaults to 24, the same as our project, but let's change it to 12 and hit Apply. Now you can see the image sequence lasts twice as long because each image is being displayed for two frames. Now, currently, when the image sequence finishes, the layer just ends. But if you wanted it to hold on the last frame, you could check persist last frame and then hit apply. Then when we go past the end of our image sequence, that last frame is still displayed. But in the case of this fire animation, a better idea is probably to click Loop movie indefinitely. Then the image sequence will continue to cycle for the whole length of the timeline. Now, this sequence looks weird during playback because it's not rendering any of the pixels that have transparency. It will look normal when it gets exported, though. The next option under our add layer dropdown is group. A group is just a folder that you can drag other layers into. This lets you keep your layers organized, and you can collapse a group so the layers don't take up so much space. You can also use all the layer transformations and animation tools on a group and will change everything nested inside it at the same time. Also, as a quick tip, if you already have layers, you know you want to put it in a group, you can select them all and add a group using group with selection, and those layers will automatically get put in the new group. Now, the next series of options on the layer dropdown are basically types of groups that have special functionality. For example, if you add a bone layer, this is for creating a character that's rigged with bones. You would typically have all the artwork for your character nested inside it, and then on the top level bone group, this is where you would add the bones you're going to use to rig and animate the character. You then need to do a little bit of work to make sure the right bone is affecting the right part of the artwork. But then you're able to use the bones to control the motion of the artwork inside the bone group. We'll look at bones a lot in later lessons. Next, a switch is a special group for cases where you have a set of images and you want to only show one of them at a time. You can switch between them over the course of your animation by either right clicking on the group and selecting a layer or using the switch selection panel under the Window menu. You'll see how we use switches as part of our character rigs later. Then the next option on our new layer dropdown is frame by frame. This is how you would set up the ability to do hand drawn frame by frame animation. When you try to add a frame by frame group, it's going to ask if you want to use vector layers or image layers to draw the frames of your animation. Let's just do vector layers for now. Now we have what's basically a group with our first frame in it ready to go. A frame by frame group works basically just like a switch, except it gives us the added functionality down here on the timeline to add, delete, and duplicate new frames. This lets us easily create new drawings as we move along the timeline to create the timing we want for our drawings. We'll have a whole lesson on doing frame by frame animation later. The next set of layer types have more specialized purposes. For example, particle is a cool, easy way to make a particle effect. Makes a group, and then we need at least one layer inside it, and we'll just make a simple circle on it, and this circle will be our particle. Then on the settings for the particle group, there's a tab for particle. And on these settings, the particle layer automatically spawns and animates copies of the layer inside the group. If you put multiple layers in the folder, it spawns copies of all the layers in it as particles in turn. This is a very versatile feature. Depending what you use for the particle and the settings, you can use this to make all kinds of things like or snow or speed lines. Then the next type of layer you can add is a note. This is just a piece of text you can place in the scene to leave instructions for team members or reminders for yourself. The nice feature of notes is that they show up in the stage, but won't be visible when you render, so you won't have to worry about hiding them when you're ready to export. Next, you can also add an audio track. You need to browse for an audio file. Then you'll see the waveform show up on the timeline. And on the sequencer tab, you can control its position in time. Then a patch is a special type of layer, we'll use when rigging. In cases where you have parts of the body made up of two layers, you can select one of the layers and add a patch and target it at the other part. Then if you position the patch, it will automatically disguise the stroke so that the layers look like they're connected. If you hide the original layers, you can see the actual patch itself that it's generating on the fly. So that's a very handy feature. Next is a text layer. When you create a new text layer, it automatically brings up the layer settings and the text tab, which is where you'll actually enter the text and do all the formatting. You can even add a word balloon to your text down here. And once you have the text layer created, you would position it with the transform layer tool. The last type of layer you can add is a three D object. If you add this, it's going to ask you to browse for a three D file, specifically an OBJ file. Then click Open and now that three D model appears in the scene. This is where being able to have multiple views is helpful. In this view, we can use this tool to rotate our view and get a better view of the model and use the layer transform tools to position and scale and rotate the model to make it look how we want over here in the camera view. So that's the final layer type. Now that we know all the different types of layers that might go in the layer panel, we need to go over some important features of the Layers panel itself and the key ways you'll work with layers. We'll cover that in the next videos. I'll see you there. 7. 02 04 Layer Pallet Features: So now that we know a little bit about the kinds of layers that go on the layers palette, let's look at the settings we have here on the palette itself. I have one of the Moho demo projects open because they're a good example of how complex a moho project can get. So far, all we've really looked at is the add layer button here. But let's take a look at the buttons next to it. First of all, I'm going to use the layer visibility setting here to hide everything except one layer so we can focus on it. So the button next to add layer is duplicate layer. This takes whatever layer or group you have selected and makes a copy of it. I'll just move that layer over so we can see it. Next, there's the reference layer button, which is similar but different in an important way. This will make a copy of the selected layer. I'll move it so we can see it. But in this case, the layer is still referencing the original. You can see the original gets this red dot when I have the reference layer selected. So that means any change I make to the original layer will show up in the reference copy as well. If you ever want to break the reference, you can right click and choose break layer reference, and now it's just a regular duplicate. And of course, we can use the delete button to delete layers. Now, something important to note about duplicate and reference is that they work on whole groups as well as layers. For a good example, let's find the character here. Now, this is a complex character made up of a bunch of layers rigged with lots of bones. But if we go to the main group, we can create a reference. And we have a copy of the character complete with all the animation that's already on it. Now, something key to know about animation that's referenced is if we alter the animation in the original, it updates the reference. But if you change the animation in the reference, it won't affect the original. So you can customize the animation in a reference. If I want to get it back to how it was, I go to the main character layer with the bones, which was what I changed. Then I right click and choose sync all channels to original. So that just reset all the channels to match the original, including its position. So let me move that again. And there you can see it's back in sync. While we're talking about channels, let's look at this column here. These boxes enable the timeline visibility for a layer. So normally the way the timeline works is it only shows the animation channels for the layer you have selected. But there are times when you may want to be able to see keyframes you've set on a different layer. If you enable timeline visibility in the layers palette, that layer's channel will stay visible in the timeline, even if you have something else selected. You see it's labeled there. But if you want to make it even easier to tell your layers apart, you can assign them different colors over here on the layered palette. You can assign the layer color by clicking on the square in this color column. That gives the layer a color in the layers palette and in the timeline when you have its channel visibility on. So those are the columns that are visible by default, but if you right click, there are some other columns you can turn on if you want. You can turn on comments, which are text notes that you can leave for yourself or team members to understand what the layer is for. There's also tags, which are terms that you can attach to a layer to use to search for it later. We'll look at searching in a second. The last here is kind, which just spells out for you what kind of layer it is. So you can enable or disable whatever columns you need. When you have a column enabled, you can actually sort the layer stack using that column. By default, layers are arranged by the order, they're stacked visually on the stage. But if you click this arrow in the corner, you're able to click the column names to sort based on that column. So sorting might help you track down the layer you're looking for, but what's really going to be helpful is filtering, which is like searching. You choose what you want to search for on this drop down here. For example, we could search for kind contains and then type in bone, and it will only show bone layers. So you can do a search using any of these characteristics, including tags or comments, which you can add to layers yourself if you need a really specific way to find a layer. The next thing to know about is layer comps. Layer comps are basically a way to save the visibility state of a set of layers. So say, I hide everything and I just want to have the background visible. I can define this state as a new layer comp with this button here and click New Layer Comp and name it. Then I can also hide or show all layers again from this menu. Then if I ever need to go back to just the background layers, I go to the layer comps menu, and then you have a choice between show layer comp or exposed layer comp. Show layer comp will turn on visibility for the layers. Exposed layer comp will turn on the visibility for those layers and turn everything else off. So that's what I want in this case. Notice, you can also do the same with timeline visibility, too. The last thing I want to point out is the layer setting window. You can get to that either with this button here or just by double clicking a layer. There's a lot of settings here that will cover as they come up, but you'll see a lot of things we already covered like the layer color and tags and comments and the layer name itself. You'll also have different tabs up here depending on the layer type with a ton of extra settings. I just wanted to point this out because Moho puts a lot of functionality in here more than you would find in other programs. So if you're ever trying to figure out how to do something, don't forget to check the layer settings to see what options you have here. The only thing I really want to point out at this point is this visibility checkmark. This is not the same thing as the layer visibility here on the palette. It's easy to see the difference if we switch the timeline to the sequencer view and come out a little ways on the timeline. So look at this layer. If I hit the eyeball, the whole layer goes away. But if I change the visibility in the layer settings and hit Apply, it just hides the layers contents starting at that point on the timeline. I can even go later and turn visibility back on in the middle of the animation. Just keep those two kinds of visibility straight and don't use one when you mean the other. That's it for the layer palette. Next, we're going to quickly cover the layer tools in the tools palette. We'll do that in the next video. I'll see you there. 8. 02 05 Layer Tools: So while we're talking about layers, we should make sure we know some of the cool things we can do with them. First, let's run through the tools in the tools panel under the layers label. An important thing to note is that these can be used on vector and image layers as well as on groups. In which case, it will change everything inside the group at once. We've already seen a little bit how to use the transform layer tool. You can use this to move, scale or rotate a layer. Always keep in mind that this is just transforming the layer itself, not the drawings on the layer. The position scale and angle can always be reset by these controls up here and you can enter values by hand if you want. Before you start using the transform tool, you might want to make use of the next tool, the set origin tool. You use this to reposition the origin point to the position that makes the most sense for the drawing. This is important because when you rotate or scale, it's going to be centered around the origin point. That's also important if you use this tool, the rotate layer X Y, which rotates the layer in three D around both the X and Y axis centered on the origin point. The last way you might want to transform a layer is to shear it using the shear tool. Now, all of the transformations you do with these tools can be animated. For example, I'm going to take the layer transform tool, and I'm just going to move the shape to a starting point. Then I'm going to come out to frame one and click, and that automatically creates a keyframe for the layer translation property. Then I'm going to come out later on the timeline and move the shape, and that automatically creates another keyframe and animates between them. If you want to change the path that the layer takes as it animates, that's what this tool here is for the follow path tool. You start on a fresh layer without animation on it. So I'm just going to select all the keyframes we made and delete them, and I need to reset the position of the layer. Then on another vector layer, I'll name it path. I'll draw a path for the layer to follow. I'll just use the free hand tool and make sure the stroke is off so it will be invisible. Then on the layer, you want to follow the path, select the follow path tool, and it makes any invisible paths visible so we can click on the path where we want to set our starting point. Then we come out later on the timeline and click where we want the layer to end up at this point. And now the layer follows the path. One last thing to know if you want to use this tool, if you go into the settings for the layer, there's an option hidden down here, rotate to follow path. With this on, your layer will orient to follow the direction of the path as it moves. So let's quickly finish going through the rest of these tools. This next one is actually a really handy tool to know about the layer selector tool. This is going to be important layer when you have more complex scenes with lots of groups and layers. When you want to edit a piece of artwork, you need to have its layer selected in the layers palette to be able to interact with that layer. But often it's hard to track down what layer is what. So with the layer selector tool, you can just click something on the stage, and it will automatically select the layer of whatever you clicked on. Once that's selected, you can switch to another tool and edit the artwork on the layer. Next, there's the insert text tool, which is the same as adding a text layer like we looked at before. And lastly, there's the eyedropper tool. What's special about this version of the eyedropper, as opposed to the ones in the style panet is this one. If you use it on a vector shape, it will sample all of the shaped style properties at the same time. So the fill color, the stroke color, the stroke width, and any effects you have applied. So if you want to reuse all the style attributes of a shape, you can easily get them all with this. Great. So that's it for the layer tools. The last very important piece of the interface to understand is the timeline. Now, we've got to see a little of how it works already, but next we're going to cover it in more depth. We'll do that in the next video. I'll see you there. 9. 02 06 Timeline: In this video, we're going to look at the timeline in Moho. Notice that the timeline has three different tabs for three different modes. We're going to start out in Channelview. One important thing to make sure you remember about the timeline in Moho is that there is a frame zero. Even though you can see by this green arrow that the animation doesn't actually start until frame one and on. When you're on frame zero, Moho is in designer mode. Everything that you do in Moho besides actually animating should be done on frame zero. So this is where you would do all your drawing, character rigging, and scene setup. In fact, you might want to go up to the main preferences, and then the timeline tab and turn on highlight frame zero. Then the stage will get this red highlight when you're on frame zero in designer mode. Next, let's talk about setting keyframes on the timeline to create animation. Keyframes are placed on the timeline at a specific frame and define the state or value of some property like position, rotation, color, line thickness, basically anything. Pretty much anything you can control, you can animate with keyframes. Let's try an example. You've seen me do this a couple of times. I'm going to make an animation of this shape sliding over. Here on frame zero, I'm going to use the layer transform tool to move the square into position for where I want it to start its animation. Then starting on frame one, I'm going to just click on the square to set an initial keyframe. So that automatically makes an animation channel and gives us the first keyframe. You can tell by the icon, which looks like the layer transform tool, that this is a channel for the translation property or position property of the currently selected layer. I'm also going to set a keyframe for the rotation of the layer because I want to animate the shape rotating while it moves. So still with the layer transform tool, if I come out to the corner, the tool icon changes to rotation mode, and now if I click, it adds a keyframe for rotation on its own channel. Then let's come out later on the timeline, and we're going to define the end position for the shape. Let's say we want this animation to take 2 seconds. Since the frame rate we set for our project is 24 frames per second, 2 seconds would be 24 times two or 48. So let's find 48. By the way, you can use these buttons over here to zoom in and out on the timeline to see more or less at once. You can also see by this orange region along the top where the end of your animation will be. We can animate past that, but it won't get exported. So let's zoom in, so we're roughly looking at frames one through 48. Then with playhead at 48, I'll just move the shape to its new position and also rotate it. Now, it will store the total amount you rotate it. So let's say I want to turn three times as it travels, I would just rotate it one, two, three times. Up here, you can see the total degrees something has been rotated, and we can play the animation. Now it's going to keep playing for the whole movie. Let's temporarily change the endpoint of the movie to 60. Now when we play back, it will go back to the beginning and loop shortly after the end of the move. Now, after you have keyframes, you can move them around. Say you want the position change to finish before the rotation, you can just click and drag the end keyframe earlier. And if we want the shape to return back to its original position, we can select those two original keyframes using Command C to copy and come out later and Command V to paste, change our end frame since we're out of range now. And then when we play, the shape goes back exactly where it was. Now, let's say the whole animation is good, but everything is positioned incorrectly on the stage. Well, to fix that, we would need to adjust the position of all the keyframes by the same amount. That's what this relative keyframing setting is for. With this on, you can select keyframes, and then any change you make will get applied to all of them. So let's click the channel, and that selects all the keyframes. Then we can move the shape, and it gets moved the same amount on all the other keyframes. Just make sure to turn it off when you don't want to use. You'll also notice a checkbox for auto freeze keys. That's mostly relevant when you're animating a character rigged with bones. So I'm going to hold off on talking about that till we start animating with bones. We'll get into the nuances of how to do animation with key frames later. Right now, I want to cover some features of the channels themselves. These are things that could be handy down the line but aren't obvious. First of all, the layer translation or position channel is a special kind of channel. Remember, the position is actually three different values, the X, Y, and Z coordinates. By default, they're all keyframed on the same channel. But if you want, you can right click and choose separate dimensions. Then you get three different channels, which can be helpful if you want to make those changes at a different rate or offset them like we did with position and rotation earlier. If you don't need them separate, right click and rejoin dimensions. In fact, if you want, you can do something similar with all channels for a layer. You can right click and choose consolidate layer channels. Then all the channels for the layer get condensed down to one. You can still see the timing of wherever a keyframe is, you just can't see what property it's on. To separate them again, just right click and unconsolidate layer channels. Next, you might have noticed this green dot next to each channel. This lets you double click to mute and unmute a channel. When a channel is muted, the animation of that property will not be visible on the stage. So you can see we mute the rotation property on our first shape. That would let us focus on just the position animation, or we could do the opposite and look at the rotation without the position animating. And one last thing about channels. Remember that by default, only channels for the selected layer will be visible in the timeline unless you check the channel visibility for the layer, then it's animated channels will be visible even when another layer is selected. This lets you reference the keyframes on another layer while you're animating the current one. Also along the top, there are drop downs for the default interpolation and interval. We'll cover those concepts in detail when we get to animation. But basically, interpolation is the easing or the acceleration and deceleration between keyframes, and interval is a way to basically change the frame rate between keyframes. So you can specify that animation playout every single frame, every two frames, three frames, et cetera. The important thing to know is that these drop downs just change the default for when you make a new keyframe. To change the values on an existing keyframe, you right click on it and you have the easing and interval options here. You can kind of see by the spacing on the dots on the motion path, how the different interpolation settings will change the speed as the shape travels. So in this case, it's a little unclear because it's going back and forth over the same path. If you want a clearer visualization of the easing between your keyframes that offers a lot of control, you can switch over to the motion graph view. This view shows the change in values on your channels with a line graph. The steeper the curve, the faster it's moving, and the less steep, the slower it moves. Now, depending on how big your value changes are, this graph might be going off the screen or maybe be too subtle to see. To fix that, you can use the scroll wheel on your mouse to change the vertical scale of the motion graph. Or you can try the Auto Zoom button. Also, you could specify the scale of the graph here. So if you put in 20, the graph now goes from ten up top to negative ten at the bottom. And right now, we can see the center of the graph is at zero, but if we want, we can come up to this box and change that. But an easier way is to just right click and drag and that will let you scroll the center point up and down. Now, you might run into a situation where your graph is too busy with too many curves from different properties. So you can disable those and just focus on specific curves at a time. So for example, I'll right click and do separate dimensions, so we see X, Y, and Z value separately. And you can see they each have separate channels. If I only want to look at one of them at a time, I can click to hide the graphs for the other ones. Eventually, we'll spend some time here on the motion graph, and you'll come to understand how powerful it is. But for now, let's go back to the channel view and keep going over these settings uptop. The next option you have here is onion skinning. This lets you see faded versions of the previous and later frames for you to reference while working on the current frame. Now, enabling onion skinning by itself won't do anything. You have to make sure that you click to enable at least one marker down here on the timeline next to your playhead. You can enable markers on up to eight frames, any ones that you want, either forward or backwards, and it'll show them on the stage. On this drop down here, you have the options that control how onion skinning is displayed. You can set it to outlines to only see outlines, or you can disable the red and green color fills it puts on then there's the option relative frames. With this on, the onion skin markers follow your playhead as it moves around. With it off, the markers stay where they are, and it always shows those specific frames. Then there's selected layers only. If you turn this off, it's going to show onion skin views of all your layers at the same time. Then the last option is draw behind, which makes sure the onion skin views are always behind the current frame. And if you want, you can use this button to clear all enabled onion skin markers. So the last button here we haven't tried yet is the add marker button. This lets you add a text label to a particular frame. And you can specify whether you want it to be a document wide marker, which will be visible on the timeline no matter what layer you have selected, or if that's unchecked, it will only be visible on that particular layer. You can move your markers, double click to edit them, or hit Delete to delete them. Now the last few we haven't looked at in this video yet is the sequencer. This displays your timeline and all of your layers in a way that's more like how you'd find in a video editor with each of your layers as a track on the timeline. You can move around your layers to make them start sooner or later. And if you want the contents of your layer to disappear entirely at a certain frame, you can go to the layer settings and toggle the visibility. And the track now has an end. Now, where the sequencer is really going to be most useful is for audio. So I'm going to add an audio layer and find my audio track and you can see it adds it where I had my playhead, and I can move it around so it starts whenever I want. And if you look back on the channel's view, the waveform shows up there so you can animate to the audio. By the way, notice we have a new channel and keyframes here. This is from when we changed the visibility back in the sequencer view. I'm just going to delete this keyframe here where it switches to invisible to make it visible again for the rest of the timeline. Now on the sequencer, there are a couple buttons here specifically for dealing with audio. There's the Restart audio button. We've got to make sure we have that audio layer selected. This lets you come out past the end of your track, and then if you hit this, it will restart the audio. Then there's the audio level button, which lets you specify the volume level for the track at a given point. Now, keep in mind what it's actually doing is setting a keyframe for the audio level. If we go back to the channel view, you can see we've got an audio channel now, and this is the keyframe we just set. If we were to come out later in the sound and then switch back to the sequencer and adjust the audio level again all the way down, now when we go back to the channels view, we can see between those two keyframes, the sound is actually fading out. You can tell by the waveform. And of course, you can delete the keyframes to get the sound back how it was. Lastly, I want to point out a particularly good use for the sequencer, and that is to divide your animation into scenes. For example, in the built in example project, Zorbitron, you see the layers are organized in a few top level folders, which each contain a scene. Then on the sequencer, the folders are dragged out and the visibility of those scene folders is turned on or off to make it cut from one scene to the next. So that's it for the timeline, and that's it for our overview of the interface. Next, we're going to look more closely at our drawing tools. We'll do that in our next series of videos. I'll see you there. 10. 03 01 Vector Drawing Tools: In this video, we're going to look at the vector drawing tools over here in the tools palette. These appear when you have a vector layer selected in the Layers palette. You might be familiar with vector tools from other programs like Adobe Illustrator or Animate, but the tools here in Moho work a little differently. So let's look more closely. This tool here is the free hand drawing tool. We're going to be taking a special look at this in a separate video along with a couple other features. For now, let's run through everything else. Before we start, it's important to note that before you start drawing, you want to make sure that the playhead of your timeline is on frame zero. It's best practice in Moho to do all your art creation and character rigging and scene setup on frame zero. Let's start really basic with the shape tool. Up here, you have the options for the tool. Let's just do a simple rectangle for now. Also keep an eye on the messages under here for modifier keys that let you do special things with a particular tool. One thing to note right away is you can use this setting down here below your stage to turn on and off the visibility of the actual vector points and the vector path that defines the shape. I'll just leave this on so you can see better how these tools work. It's set to automatically give whatever we draw a stroke or outline and automatically give it a fill color, assuming it's a closed shape. You can uncheck these to get just a stroke or just a fill. The colors for these are controlled over here in the style palette, and you also control the width of the stroke here. If you want to modify these for a shape you've already drawn, you need to use the select Shape tool to select whatever you want to change and then adjust the style settings. Also, if you have multiple shapes overlapping, you can use the select shape tool and then use the up and down arrow keys to change the layering of the different shapes. There's more you can do to style a shape, but we'll look at the style palette in a separate video. Now, if you want to delete a shape, you actually don't want to use the select shape tool, you want to use the transform points tool. This will actually select the vector points that make up the shape, and then you can hit Delete to delete them. More on this tool in a second. So let's say we want our shape to have a stroke, but we don't want the stroke to be a uniform thickness. We can control that using the linewidth tool. Then hold command or control to get the selection tool, and then you can select the points that make up the shape and just click and drag horizontally to increase or decrease the width of the stroke. This lets you create a custom width at different points of the shape. You can select single points or multiple points and control them simultaneously. Notice up top that this change is indicated as a percent. So if we wanted the stroke back to normal, we could just select all the points and set them to 100%. Then the width is back to whatever it is in the style palette. One last thing, if you put the line width tool in magnet mode here, it will snap to whichever point is closest. And you control the range of the snapping effect with the magnet radius. Okay. Now let's look at how we can create more complex shapes. The first thing we can do is use the transform points tool. This does a few things. First of all, it lets you click on shapes to move, scale and rotate them or you can flip the points of the shape horizontally or vertically with these buttons. You can also click on individual points and move them. Or you can hold command or control to make a selection of points and move, scale or rotate just those points. Also, if you have a shape with curves instead of sharp corners, you can use this option up here to enable and disable what are called Bezier handles. These let you more precisely change the shape of a curve. Also, if you hold Alt, you can break the handle and create a sharper turn. This other toggle here changes whether the Bezier handles are fixed or not. When this is on and you click a point to move it, only it moves. But if that's off and you move a point, the adjacent curve will flex along with it. This could be useful if you're trying to more naturally reshape something during an animation. And if you have a shape with a sharp corner and you want to make them curved, you would use the curvature tool. You select a point and then click and drag to increase or decrease its curvature, and you can see it gets Bezier handles then. And you can also hold Alt to get a selection tool to select multiple points and change all their curvature at the same time. Then you can customize from there using the Bezier handles. And up here, you can switch points from curves to corners if you need to. So that's how you modify existing points, but what if you don't have enough control points? First of all, if you know you need a lot more control points, you can use the Select tool to select points on our shape. And then this split button up here will add additional points halfway between the points you have selected. But if you want to manually add points in specific spots, you can use the Add Point tool and click to add points to a shape. Just be aware of whether you want to add a sharp corner or not. And you probably want your Bezier curves locked. Otherwise, adding point will change the existing curve. You can also use the Add Points tool to draw a shape from scratch. Before we try that, make sure autofill, auto stroke and auto weld are checked. You'll see why in a second, and you can choose whether you want to draw with sharp corners or not. I'll draw with curved points. Then you can click and drag to draw stroke, then click the endpoint and drag again to make another segment. We can keep going and come back around to the start. And because we have the auto weld setting turned on, it will automatically close the shape and add the stroke and fill. If Auto weld was off and you tried to draw shape, it wouldn't close automatically. You could weld points manually by using the transform points tool, drag the endpoint over the other, and press Enter. Lastly, you can also use this tool to subdivide a shape or add interior lines. However, notice these paths don't actually have a stroke yet. So we need to use the paint bucket tool, set it to add stroke, and then it will add a stroke to those paths. So with a combination of all the tools we've looked at, you can make any shape very precisely. But what we haven't looked at yet is how to make a shape with a hole in it. Like say we wanted to make a doughnut shape, let's start by drawing two circles. I'll hold Alt to expand it out from the center point and hold Shift to make it a perfect circle. So now I have two separate circle shapes, but that's not what I want. I just want to use these two circle paths on their own. So what I'll do is use the delete shape tool. And now I'm left with just raw paths, and we'll turn them into a new shape. I'm going to the paint bucket tool. We can use this to add a stroke or fill or both. I'll do both. And then click in this space here, and now we have a doughnut shape. So using that same technique, you could make a hole of any shape within another shape. The last tool for making a shape is the blob brush, which just lets you paint an area, and that area will become a shape. So we've looked at various ways of making shapes. Next, let's look at the other tools we have for modifying our shapes. I want to draw a grid with the shape tool so you can clearly see what these tools do. We've already looked at the main transform points tool for moving, scaling, and rotating, but down here, we have some more. This is the perspective tool. You click and drag to make it look like a shape has turned in perspective, either horizontally or vertically. And remember, for each of these, they work on a sub selection of points as well as whole shapes. Next is the shear tool, which lets you skew or tilt a shape. Then there's the bend tool, which lets you bend a shape around a central point. Then there's the magnet tool. This is a more organic way to distort a shape. When I click and drag, it pulls on the points within the radius of the magnet. The points nearer the center get pulled harder than those towards the edge. So assuming you have enough points on your shape, this gives a sense of stretching something soft. This can be useful when we get into animating shape changes later. Then last on the bottom row is the noise tool. This lets you add irregularities to a shape to make it more organic and less geometric. Let's say we wanted to make a ground plane. I'll make it a rectangle, then select the top and split to add some extra points. Then select everything and use the noise tool to randomly offset the points. Then I'll use the curvature tool to round those. And there we've got a nice organic ground plane. Next, let's take a look at the curve profile tool. This one's pretty cool, but it's not at all obvious what it's for or how it works. The best way to explain is to show you. So I'll make a shape. Then I'm going to make another path that will apply along the curve around the shape. It's best to do this on a separate layer, so I'll make a new vector layer and call it curve profile so I don't get them mixed. Then I'll use the ADPointTol to just make an invisible path. Then back to the original shape, I'll select it and grab the curve profile tool and then select the curve we drew, and it gets applied all along the outline for the shape. And the connection is still live, so we can go to our curve profile layer and edit it, and the shape around our path gets changed as well. And if we select the main shape and go back to the profile tool, we can adjust how often the profile gets repeated along the edge. So that's what that tool is for. Now let's look at a couple tools that you might use for a similar purpose. So here I have a face with the nose as a separate shape on its own layer. And suppose I don't want this line on the outside edge where it's supposed to be connected to the face. There are a couple tools that will help us get rid of it. I can use this tool, the hide Edge tool. Now, don't confuse this with the delete edge tool. The delete edge tool will actually remove the edge, making the shape open, so you'll lose your fill. The hide dge tool just hides the stroke between two points. So you'll still keep the fill. Now, there's another way to do a similar thing that gives you a little more control. We can use the stroke exposure tool. If we click and drag, it changes where the stroke edge ends. You may need to edit the values up top to also change the start percentage so your stroke starts and ends in the right place. This has the advantage of not needing to end or start at a control point, and this is something that can be animated on the timeline. So say I have animated the head turning, I can animate the stroke exposure over the course of the turn so it shifts from one side of the nose to the other. Lastly, I wanted to end by looking closely at the selection tool. I've been using this casually, but here are some important features to know that it has. First of all, by default, the selection tool uses a rectangular marquee selection, but you can also set it to Lasso mode to make it easier to select specific points without selecting others. Then we already saw that you can use the split button up here to add additional control points between the ones that you've selected. Next to that, we have the opposite, which is simplify. If you have a shape that's made up of more points than is really needed, you can try to use this feature to reduce them. Just be aware this might change the shape slightly. You need to enter a value here for how aggressive you want the reduction to be. Higher value will remove more points, but change the shape more. Let's try 20. Then select what it is you want to simplify, and the button is now active. So we click that and it reduces our points. Next, there's the weld crossings option. If you have two shapes overlapping, select them and hit weld crossings. We'll add welded control points at the intersections. Note that these are still separate shapes. I can select them separately and move them separately. Built just well together at those specific points. Then lastly, we'll end on one of the coolest and most unique features of the selection tool in Moho, and that's the ability to save a particular selection of points. So say we have this head here and we know we're going to want to move the jaw up and down over the course of the animation. I can make a selection of the points for the chin. And then up here, I give it the name chin and click Create. Now, if I ever want to make that selection again, I can just select it from the select group dropdown. And that appears when you're using the other transform tools as well. That can be super useful later when we get into animation and rigging. So that's everything in the vector drawing tools, except for the freehand drawing tool. We're going to look at that on its own in the next video. I'll see you there. 11. 03 02 Freehand Tool: If you're going for a more organic hand drawn look but still want the benefits of vector based artwork, you'll want to learn about the free hand tool. This is a tool that lets you use a tablet or drawing screen to draw more natural pen strokes with pressure sensitivity. But if you turn on viewing vector strokes, you see these lines are still vector based and can be modified by control points just like other vector art. By the way, to really see what your strokes are going to look like, you might want to turn on anti aliasing in your display quality settings. If your computer can handle it, you can leave this on. But if the brush gets sluggish, just turn that off and it will perform better. To make this tool easy to use, you're going to want to understand all its settings and features. First, as always, check under the toolbar here to see how modifier keys affect the tool. In this case, if we hold Alt and drag left or right, that lets us adjust the size of the brush on the fly. That's much easier than changing the width over here in the style palette. And also, if you hold Command or Control on Windows and click, you can delete a segment between two points. Next, let's look at the options on the drop down menu here. First, you can choose whether you want pressure sensitivity on or not. You can set the line variation to none, in which case, the line will be a uniform thickness like using the other vector tools. Or you can also set it to random, which will add random variation to your line width just to make it look a little more organic. Or you can have pressure sensitivity on so the thickness is controlled by how hard you press with your tablet stylus. The width variation setting controls the range of difference that's allowed. So the maximum thickness with maximum pen pressure is whatever the width setting is set to. And the smallest you can go with lightest pressure is controlled by this width variation. 100 would let you get very small with light pressure, but zero would basically be the same as no variation. Taper Start and taper end are only really relevant if you aren't drawing with a tablet or screen with pen pressure. If you draw free hand with a mouse, this will automatically add taper to the start and end of a stroke. I am using a drawing screen, so my pen pressure is going to override this anyway. Next comes smoothing and point reduction. What you set this at is going to be very personal to you. These both control how much moho adjusts the lines you draw to make them smoother. Smoothing is how much moho smooths the line as you draw to account for pen wobble. If I turn this way up, you can see how much it's changing things as I go. I like to keep that fairly low. Then point reduction is how much Moho will try to simplify your lines after you've finished drawing them. This is basically like running the simplify command with the selection tool, but automatic. So if I turn that all the way down and draw a stroke, you can see how many points it's made of. But if I turn that up even to just 20 and draw a similar stroke, you can see there's fewer points. By the way, remember, you may need to do a command or control R to do a render to judge the real smoothness of your lines and decide if extra points makes your lines look better or worse. So I'd recommend you have at least a little of smooth end point reduction turned on. Next, let's take a look at the settings out here on the toolbar. First of all, notice we have autofill and auto stroke like with the other vector tools. Autostroke is what actually draws the strokes we've been looking at. Otherwise, it just makes a raw vector path. Autofill will fill the shape you draw with the fill color if you draw a closed shape. Whether your shape gets treated as open or closed is dependent on some of these other settings. There are two different weld settings here to be aware of auto weld and weld ends. First, let's look at Auto weld. If I draw a stroke and then go to draw another one that intersects with it, you can see my cursor snaps to the line I'm going to intersect with and makes a control point connecting them. Same happens if I draw all the way through. They get welded at the intersection. If Auto weld is off, intersecting lines remain separate. Weld ends is like Auto weld, but it only applies to endpoints of strokes. So now if I draw two lines, notice my cursor doesn't snap to the middle of the first stroke, but it will to the endpoint. Using this, you can build up a bigger shape with many strokes that get combined into one. And if you close the shape, it will get filled in if autofill is on. You can also make closed shapes with a single stroke if the ends get welded. Another way to make a closed shape is to check the auto close option. Then it will automatically draw a closing line between your endpoints, whether they're welded or not. Check Hyde auto close segment, and that final closing line won't have the stroke applied to it. Now, you'll also notice when Auto weld is on that you have these other options trim start and trim end. These are intended to help make your line work easier and cleaner when you have lines intersecting. So let's say I have a shape and I want to add some interior lines that intersect with the outline. Let's turn on trim start. And now the part of my line before the intersection gets trimmed away. With trim end, the opposite happens. The part after the intersection gets trimmed. And if both are enabled and I cross another line, it will trim away whichever is shorter. Also, I can draw all the way through my shape, and both the start and end bit get trimmed, just leaving the portion between the two intersection points. That's a lot easier than trying to start and end line exactly on the outline. The last setting on the tool bar is the merged strokes option. With this enabled, all the strokes you make will be treated as parts of the same shape. So if you select with the select shape tool, it highlights all the strokes and you can change their color or style setting at the same time. If you disable merged strokes, the strokes you draw will be their own shapes. I if you re enable merged strokes, it will start grouping them again, starting with the previous stroke you drew. So before we finish looking at the freehand tool, I want to take a quick look at the styles palette, specifically the different brush settings. Just double click here where it currently says, No brush, and you can choose from one of the preset options here. Some of these are meant to make your strokes look more like natural media and others are used to make patterns that follow your strokes. If you're interested in learning more about these brushes, we're going to cover that and the other features of the style palette in the next video. I'll see you there. 12. 03 03 Style Pallet: So in this video, we're going to dig into the style palette so you're able to use it effectively and save time later on in the animation process. So we already know about setting a fill and stroke color. Let's select a shape with the select Shape tool. By the way, to make it easier to see your styles, make sure checked selection is unchecked. That toggles between the checkered selection and this red outline selection. With the shape selected, we can change our selected stroke and fill colors or uncheck these to get rid of them entirely. Another option for picking colors that we haven't looked at yet is the Swatches palette down here. Using the dropdown, you can set this to display one of these preset examples of a color palette. If you left click within the palette, it will set the fill color, and if you right click, it will set the stroke color. Now, all this color palette really is is an image file. If you look at some of these other options, you can see a variety of ways you might use the color palette to easily get at the colors you want to use for a scene. Some of these are just photos, and some are photos that have been pixelated. While others are background illustrations for a scene, and take a look at face dot png. This is basically the model sheet for a character design with the colors called out to make them easy to select. This is a great way to make use of concept art and character model sheets to make it really easy to use the right color for the right part of the character. To add your own image, just select custom image from the bottom and browse to your image file and open it. If you have images, you know you're going to want to use as palettes frequently, go to File, Open custom content folder. And then in the folder called Swatches, you can drop whatever images you want, and they'll appear by default in the swatches drop down. In addition to colors, we can also apply a brush style to the stroke if we want. These brushes are just a small PNG image file that you can see here. And then the settings down here determine how the brush lays down the image. Down here, you can see a preview of what the brush will look like as you change your settings. If you want additional brushes, you can buy packs from the Smith Micro website, or if you want to make your own custom brush, you just need a starting image as a PNG file with a transparent background. Go to File custom content folder and find the vector brushes folder and add your PNG file there. Then when you start Moho, that image will appear in your brushes palette. Once you've got the brush tip in, you then need to set the settings down here for how it's going to lay down a stroke using that tip. And there are a couple of ways to save these settings. If you look at the other brushes here, there's a naming scheme that will automatically set the settings when it brings in the PNG. You can just rename your file with the settings you want and restart Moho. Or if you want a less technical way, you can just set your settings to what you want and then click Save Bush down here. Give it the name you want, and it'll save it to the same custom content folder. Then also go ahead and reload the brushes. If you look in the custom content folder, you'll see that it saves a new copy of the original PNG and this dot Moho brush file. The next feature of the style palette we haven't looked at yet is this effects drop down. These are special effects you can apply to a shape as part of its style. For example, let's try shaded defect. This gives us a bunch of settings and controls that lets us automatically put a shadow on our shape. If you ever need to change the settings for a style you've applied, press this button. Now, some of these effects won't be visible on the stage. You need to do a render with Command or Control R to see what they will actually end up looking like. For example, the soft edge effect, which feathers the edges of a shape's fill. We'll need to turn off the stroke for this one. You can't see it on the stage, but if we render the image, you can see how soft the edge really is. Next, there's the gradient effect. This is how you would apply a color gradient to a fill. You can select and delete one of the color squares to simplify your gradient or click on the strip to add an additional square, and then you click inside these squares and use the color picker to define the colors that are on your gradient. And choose the type of gradient up here. Then it gives you this tool to position the gradient within the shape. Note that this gradient overrides whatever the color of your fill is. If we go back in the settings and enable allow transparency and bring down the opacity of one of the colors, then it's just going to make the shape transparent. The last one here I think you might find useful is image texture effect. This lets you browse for an image file and use that in place of a fill color. Now this image is tilable so I'll leave the fill mode on tile. You can then use these controls to position and size the image texture. Also, if you use a source image that has transparency like this P&G, by default, it will show it over top of the shape's fill color. But you can also enable through transparency, and then it will hide the fill color of the shape and only show the image texture. Now, you might be wondering if there's a way to apply more than one effect. There is, but we'll look at that in just a second. So let's say you figured out a style for one shape and you want to apply it to others. Well, the first thing to point out is that these buttons down here give you the ability to copy and paste a style from one shape to another. So if we have the style we want in a shape, we just make sure we're using the select Shape tool to select it, then hit Copy. Then if we select a different shape, we can hit Paste and we'll have the same style. We can also hit reset here to go back to the default style settings. So copying and pasting is nice, but there's a much more powerful way to save and apply styles. First, let's enable advanced mode with this checkbox. This gives you some nice extra features right away. For example, you now have the option to apply two effects at the same time to your fills. You can also apply effects to the stroke, too, and you can enable or disable the round caps that automatically get added to strokes that you draw. Real power of advanced mode is being able to save and reuse styles. Let's look at a demo of how and why you'd want to do that. So here we have a basic face that's made up of a bunch of different shapes. The first thing I'm going to do is name these shapes. If you have a shape selected with the select Shape tool, you'll have the option in the styles palette to give it a name. It will then appear on the shapes dropdown. This is just an easy way to select a shape without having to switch to the select Shape tool and click on it. I'm just going to go through and name all the pieces of this face. Now, next to the shaped dropdown is the style dropdown. Here we can save a style. First, let's create a style for the hair. The hair is in separate parts, but we'll just work with one for now. I'm going to set the fill color, stroke color width and give the stroke a brush texture. Then I'll come to the styles dropdown and select new and then give that style a name. So now that style is saved as an option in the styles dropdown. Now the next part can be easy to miss. If I select the shape, if you look down here on the style one dropdown, you see this is where that style is actually applied. So if I select the rest of the hair shapes, I can then set their style one setting to the style for the hair. Now, the nice thing about having the style applied in this way as opposed to copy and pasted, is if I go up to the styles drop down and open the style for the hair, I can change these settings, and they change on every shape the style is applied to. Also note that there are check boxes next to the different settings. These tell the style to override the original shape settings. So say if you wanted the shapes to keep their original stroke width, we could uncheck this box. Then if there's a shape with a different stroke width, it will keep it, but have the other settings from the style applied. Now, the reason shapes have a style one and a style two is because you will frequently want to make your fill settings and stroke settings separately. For example, I'll set up a style for the fill color of the skin here, and I just want it to include the fill, so I'll uncheck everything else. Then I'll make another style for the stroke color. Then for a case like the mouth, I can still give it the skin color for the strokes and make the interior color whatever I want. So that's it for the style palette for now. Next, we're going to look at one final way you can work with color in Moho, and that's making gradients using color points. We'll do that in the next video. I'll see you there. 13. 03 04 Color Points: So we previously looked at the gradient effect that can be applied to a shape to create a color gradient. However, this is somewhat limited if the shape is going to be animated. If you have a shape that's changing shape over the course of its animation, the gradient effect doesn't automatically change with it. You would have to animate the gradient separately. In this lesson, we're going to look at a feature called color points. That lets you achieve a similar gradient effect, but in a way that gives you more control, though it does take more work to set up. If you have a shape, you can select a point or group of points and then switch to the color Point tool over here. Then the tool bar up here associates a color with that point. And then that point will sort of radiate that color according to the strength setting here. You can typically lower the strength setting well below one. Then that can blend with the original color of the shape, or if you want, you can assign other colors to other points of the shape using the color points tool. And now, when the shape changes, those points are still emitting their colors in their new positions. So let's look at how we might use this in a powerful way. So here we have a face, and let's add some color to the edges of the ears. First of all, I'm going to add an additional line to the ear that will give us more control. I'm going to use the Add Point tool to draw an additional line near the edge. But now I need to make sure this line is actually part of the ear shape. So I'm going to use the delete shape tool to delete the existing ear shape and then select all those lines and use the create shape tool to make all those lines a single shape. I want it to have both a stroke and a fill. Now that just gave it the default colors of white and black. But fortunately, in the advanced mode of the style palette, I can set the style back to the skin colors that I have saved. And it also put the stroke color on that new inner line, which I don't want. So I'm just going to use the hide edge tool to hide the stroke on that inner line. Now I'm going to select the outer points of the ear and save that selection as a group with a name just in case. Now with the color points tool, I'll give a warmer color to those points. And I think I'm also going to lower the color strength on those points. Then the advantage of this inner line is that since these points don't have a color point color, we can move them to adjust how far the color extends from the edges. If the color is looking blotchy, you can add additional points with the add points tool. If it's between two color points, it will automatically have the same color point value. Then I'll make a reference layer and flip it to make the other ear. So hopefully, that gives you an idea of how you might use color points. You could use this to add shadows or highlights as well, either along the edge or an invisible inner line. Next, we're going to look at one more important technique we'll be using in making our artwork, and that's masks. We'll look at that in the next video. I'll see you there. 14. 03 05 Masks: One last technique I wanted to make sure you're familiar with is masking. Now, masks and Moho work differently than in other programs you might be familiar with. So it warrants its own video. Let's start with the most basic example. I'm going to add an image layer and import an image. And we're going to make a mask that reveals a portion of this image. So I'll make a vector layer and I'm going to call it mask, and then I'll draw a circle on it. Next, we need to put whatever you want to mask and the mask itself in a group together. So I'll make a group and put our two layers inside it. You want your mask at the bottom. Now, in the layer settings for the group, we go to the masking tab and set it to hide all. So layers that we've set to get masked will get hidden by default, and the mask layer will reveal them. Now, in this case, it correctly understood what I was trying to get it to do. But just in case it doesn't work for you, let's go into the settings for the layers and see what they need to be set to to make this work right. In the settings for the image layer on the masking tab, you want that to mask this layer. And then on the settings for the mask layer on the masking tab, we want this to add to the mask. So now if we reposition or animate the mask, it's going to reveal the image that's set to be masked. You can also have multiple layers adding to the mask. I can make another vector layer with another shape on it, and I can set that to add to the mask, too. So you can have separate elements that you can animate separately, both contributing to the masking effect. You can also make your mask work the opposite way. You would set the mask setting on the group to reveal all, and then the setting on the mask layers to subtract from mask. So now the mask layers hide instead of reveal. Next, let's look at a practical example of how you'll frequently use masks, and that's to do eyes. So here we've got the three layers for the eye, the eye base, which is the whites, the iris, and the highlight over top. So we want to be able to move the iris around without it going outside the eyeball. So let's select all these and make that a group then we'll go into the group and turn on masking. We want it set to hide all. Then we need to make sure the layers have the right settings. We want the highlight and iris to be masked while the eye base adds to the mask. So now we can move the iris around, and it never goes outside the eye base layer. But you'll notice it's going over top of the stroke around the eye base. But there's an easy way to fix that. So let's go to the mask settings and check the exclude strokes option. Then it will only use the visible part of the fill to do the masking. So now when I move the iris around, it looks more like how we want. Also, while we're here, this is a case where we want the artwork for the mask itself to be visible because it's the whites of the eyes. But if you wanted to, you could also set it to add to the mask but make the mask invisible. And that might be what you want for a different situation. So that's the basics of masking. There's a bunch of ways we'll use that later on when we get to rigging a character. To prepare us for that, we need to get familiar with the various features we'll use for rigging and animation. We'll do that in the next set of videos. I'll see you there. 15. 04 01 Keyframe Interpolation: So when we looked at the timeline, I briefly showed you how to make keyframes to create animation and the different interpllations or easing settings you can apply and how that translates to the motion graph view. In this video, we're going to take a closer look at how the different easing settings affect the look and feel of your motion. So I'm just going to quickly set up two keyframes of this circle moving across the screen, and I'll do the same for this bottom one. I'll turn on channel visibility for ball one so I can match the timing. Now, I'm just going to right click on the first keyframe and make sure they're set to linear. And you can see by the spacing of the points on the motion path that it's going to move the same distance between every frame, which looks like this. Then let's set this bottom one to smooth. And now you can see by the motion path that the rate of change over the course of the path starts a little slower, gets faster, and then slows down again. And if we play, you can see that the smooth version looks a little more natural. Now if we switch to the motion graph, we can get a picture of the difference. So this is the graph or the linear version. And this is the smooth version. So the graph starts horizontally, gradually gets steeper indicating faster motion, and levels out again indicating it's slowing down. So let's compare this to the other interpolations. Now, they make it hard to select keyframes from this view, but what we can do is go to Window keyframe and we get this new panel. You might want to have this panel undocked so you don't lose so much width on your timeline. And then as long as I select a keyframe on a channel, I can move between the keyframes on that same channel using these buttons. And I can change their interpolation choice with this dropdown. And down here, I can also give it a hold duration. So it'll hold the keyframe position for this number of frames before starting the transition to the next keyframe. And you can set an interval, which, in a sense is like changing the frame rate, but just for this keyframe. So you can see on the motion path, if I set it to interval two, then we get half as many positions because it's only going to update the position every other frame. In traditional animation, we'd call this animating on twos because we hold each drawing for two frames. And you can see, when it's played, it's slightly less smooth than it was on ones. I'm just going to set the interval back to one. You can also set it to stagger, which basically makes it invert the position of every other keyframe and gives this sort of vibration effect to the animation. There's only very specific cases where you might want to use that. And lastly, you can label a keyframe with a color if you want. Though you can only see that on the channel view. Now let's look at some of the other interpolation types. So right now we're on Smooth, which gives us this gentle S curve. The next one we haven't seen is Ease in out. And by the graph, you can see this is basically a more extreme version of smooth. Then there's Ease in, which has the slower acceleration curve at the start and the faster one at the end. And then Ease out is the other way. Then Bezier lets you control the curves manually using Bezier handles. We'll look at that later in the next video. Whoops got to re select my keyframe. Then there's step, which basically means no interpolation. I we'll just hold the one pose until the next keyframe. You may want to use this as the default when you start animating a character to just time out the key poses. Then there's noisy, which just adds a bunch of randomness to your interpolation. You can change the amount here with these settings if you want. Next, there's cycle. Now, this is a really useful one. This lets you repeat the animation between a series of keyframes indefinitely. We wouldn't actually want to do this on frame one, so let's set this back to smooth and then come out to the end keyframe and set that to cycle. Then if I extend our movie length, we can see that the animation will cycle indefinitely until we add additional keyframes down the line. And in the channel view here, you can see it indicates the cycle with this backward arrow and this orange arrow on top going back to the start of the cycle. Now, to define where it cycles back to, you can either specify an absolute frame number, in this case, one. The disadvantage of this is that if we move the keyframes of the cycle later in the timeline, it's still trying to cycle back to frame one instead of our first keyframe. You could alternatively tell the cycle to move back a certain number of frames relative to this keyframe. Then we can move the frames around, but now the disadvantage is if you try to change the time between the keyframes, it will throw off the cycle. So you just have to go on a case by case basis and decide which is best. Also, if you put a number for the hold duration, it will hold for that many frames before cycling. You can see that on the motion graph here. But notice it only holds once, not every cycle. Then there's a really cool feature we can enable here and make this an additive cycle. This means it will cycle, but add the relative change in distance each cycle. With this on, you can see up here now when the ball cycles, it keeps going from the spot where it ended the previous cycle. Let me shorten the distance so we can see more cycles. So that's a really handy tool for doing things like walk cycles where the character moves across the screen. Our last two interpolation types are bounce and elastic. These will automatically create some common effects you might need. First, there's bounce. You can see this gives us a much more advanced curve where we accelerate to our end position value, then bounce back and do that two more times, which gives us the effect of bouncing. You can specify the number of bounces and the scale or height of each bounce in the keyframe palette. Just make sure you have enough total frames for all the bounces to play out, or the bounces at the end will get really choppy. Elastic is similar except it will overshoot your target end position and spring back and forth before settling into the end keyframe. Or you can make it backwards and it will spring back and forth in anticipation before the final jump to the last keyframe. Now, it's important to keep in mind that you can apply these interpolation types to any property, not just the layer position like we've been doing. Here I've got Elastic applied to a scale change and bounce applied to a rotation change. This is an easy way to add some follow through to animations without having to add a bunch of key frames. So as useful as the preset interpolation types are, you really want to master controlling your easing by hand using the motion graph. Well, look at how we do that in the next lesson. I'll see you there. 16. 04 02 Motion Graph: In this video, we're going to look at how to use the motion graph view on the timeline for maximum control of our keyframe animation. To practice, we're going to do a classic animation exercise the bouncing ball. There's a number of ways we could do this, but in this case, we'll do it just by animating layer position with the layer tools. First off, notice how I have this setup. There's the ground layer, and I have this layer with my main ball artwork on it, and then I have separate layers with the shading and highlight on it, and those shapes have a soft edge effect on them. So if I render with Command R, you can see how the ball is going to end up looking. Now, the baseball layer has its origin point in the center, so eventually we can make it rotate and it will look correct. But then all of the ball layers are in this group, and the origin of the group is set at the base of the ball. This is so we can animate the ball squashing and stretching when it hits the ground. The group is also what we'll be animating the position of. Now, I'm starting in channels view for the first part of this. We want to make sure the default interpolation is set to Bezier. That will let us manipulate things in the motion graph later. I'm going to start by setting my initial keyframe for the start of the drop here on frame one. I'm actually going to do separate dimensions to get separate X Y and Z channels. That's because for now, I'm just going to be animating the ball up and down on the Y axis. I'm actually going to delete the keyframes on the X and Z channels, so we're only working with Y. Then I'll come out and set the keyframe where it touches the ground. If you just grab it and move it, you'll probably end up setting keyframes on the channel as well. But if you hold Shift as you drag, it will only move it along the y axis, and you'll only get a Y keyframe. Then I'm going to copy and paste the keyframes a couple of times and space them out. These are going to be our bounces. And since each bounce gets smaller and smaller, we want them to take slightly less time each bounce. This is the timing I'm using if you want to follow along exactly. You might think we now need to go back and set key frames in between these for the top of each bounce. But technically, this is all the keyframes we actually need. We could do everything else from the motion graph. But for the sake of demonstration, let's set the height of the first bounce with a keyframe. It's easier to define an exact height this way, and it will be good reference when we create the other bounces. Now we're ready to switch over to motion graph view. Now, in Motion graph you, if you don't see keyframes or control handles on your channels, just double click the channel icon, and they should activate. And just in case you didn't set your keyframes to Bezier yet, you can always click the channel icon to select them all and right click and swap to Bezier. Now, these Bezier handles work just like those on the drawing tools. You pull them out and change their angle and length to define the curve of the path. The key for the bounce is at the bottom, we want to hold Alt, which lets us break the different halves of the Bezier handle, which lets us make a sharp corner. And at the top of the bounce, we want a smooth curve, which means the ball is slowing down at the peak as gravity gradually changes its direction and acceleratees it down again. Having this control point at the top of the arc is kind of nice. It gives us more precise control, but we can do a pretty good job of approximating the same thing just with the bottom control points for the other arcs. Want them to gradually get smaller and smaller, and by the end, they're barely there at all. You might need to zoom in to make your arc small enough. So there, we've got a good basic bounds, but we can enhance it with some squash and stretch. We'll do that by animating the scale property. So let's click on the transform handles on the ball to set an initial keyframe. And you can see we get a new channel on the motion graph. You might need to adjust the scale or center point of your graph to be able to see it. Then we want to come down to the point where it touches the ground. Now, this is where the ball is moving fastest, so this is where it should be the most stretched out. So I'll make it longer and thinner, trying to keep the overall volume of the ball the same. So the scale is actually three separate properties, too, but we don't need to fully separate the channels. I'll just double click the channel icon to get the three graphs at once. Now I just want to make this curve like our other ones getting fastest right before the ball makes contact. And actually, we don't really want the stretch to start until the ball starts picking up some speed from its fall. So here's a cool trick. On the first keyframe, we can hold Alt and drag to make a hold that lasts as long as we want. So now the stretch part of the animation doesn't start until this point. Now, that's the stretch, and after contact, we want it to squash. So we're actually going to need some extra frames while the ball is in contact with the ground. So I'm going to out drag the key frame to make a hold for another four frames. Then move the rest of the keyframes, four frames over so our timing doesn't change. Now I've got three extra frames here where I can add some squash and stretch. Then in the middle, first, I'll reset the scaling. Then I'll make a squash state for the ball still trying to maintain its volume. Then we want to go back to its stretched state as it leaves the bounce. So I'll copy and paste those keyframes. But I'll adjust the ball so it's not quite as stretched because the ball will have lost a little speed from hitting the ground. Now with the graph, we need to make it heavily ease into and out of that squash state. There we have a nice transition from stretched to squash and back again. Then before the top of the next bounce, we want to reset the scale back to normal and then extend that keyframe into a hold until we want to start stretching again. And then adjust the curve so there's heavy ease out. Then I just need to repeat that process for the next few contact points. I'm using the onion skinning and setting the markers to look back at the previous stretched and squash dates so that I can make it a little less extreme each time. Because the ball loses energy with each bounce, it's not going to be as fast or hit as hard. For this bounce, I'm just going to have one frame of the squash state. And then for these last few, I don't need the squash and stretch at all. So there we've got a bounce with some squash and stretch. Now, what if we wanted to make this bounce across the screen rather than straight up and down? Well, that's easy since we have our dimensions separated. We can just go back to frame one and move the ball off the edge of the screen, and then at the end, move it where we want the bounce to stop. Now we have the X channel on our graph, and we can make that just gently slow out towards the end where it stops. I'm actually going to make the stopping point past the end of the last bounce because we're going to eventually have the ball roll to a stop at the very end. Now, you might notice right away that we have an issue where the ball is moving even when it's in contact with the ground during the bounce. We'll actually take care of that at the end. The first thing I want to fix is the direction of the stretch isn't right anymore. It's straight up and down still. So let's use the shear tool to tilt the ball at the point it's stretched to be pointed in the direction of the arc. Then we need to adjust the easing graph the same way we've been doing so that it's steepest when it's coming into and out of the contact positions. Oops, I need a keyframe on frame one. And we want to hold on that first keyframe. Then we want to reset the skew at the top of the bounce and have it hold like we've been doing with scale. And Okay, now let's deal with the horizontal movement during the bounce. I'm simply going to go to the contact point of the bounce and add a keyframe on the X channel. Now, that's going to give us another handle and mess up our curve. So I'll just adjust that as I go to get it generally back where it was every time I set a keyframe. Then I'll just hold Alt and drag to make a hold that lasts for the duration of the bounce. And then I'll just do that for the rest of the bounces. So that's how that looks now. What I think we could really use at this point to make it look more natural is some rotation. So let's switch to the ball layer inside the group, and then we're going to want to turn on channel visibility for the group, though we don't need to see all of the properties. Then we'll use the layer transform tool to set an initial keyframe for rotation by clicking within this box around the edge. Then I'm going to go along and add some keyframes so the ball gradually rotates slightly as it bounces. Notice, we're totally free to rotate without messing up any of the other animation because this rotation is all happening inside the group. And as we get towards the smaller bounces, the ball actually rotates more and more as it transitions from bouncing to rolling. Then when it stops bouncing, we'll play with the end rotation so that it rolls to a stop. We need to make sure the easing out on the rotation matches the easing out of the position. Then I think I want to make some adjustments to the bounce curve. The nice thing about the motion graph is you always know exactly what you're controlling, so you can make changes without messing up other properties. So now looking at it, I don't think the ball is rotating enough during this middle bounce here. So I'm going to rotate it a little more on the last keyframe. But then instead of going keyframe by keyframe and further rotating the rest that I've already set, I'll just select them on the motion graph and move them all further down so we get that same gradual increase in rotation. So there we go. Now, I'll export that so we can see it with the effects on it. And then this is the final animation. So hopefully, that gives you an idea of how the motion graph lets you combine simple animations on particular properties to build up to more complex animations. We did all of this with basic tools on properties that every layer has, but to do good character animation, we're going to want to design and rig characters with a mind towards how we want to use the timeline to animate them. So next, we're going to start looking at features that let us do powerful things in a simple way, starting with bones in the next video. I'll see you there. 17. 04 03 Bones: In this video, we're going to start looking at the process of rigging a character for animation. The standout feature of Moho is its powerful and intuitive tools for creating very versatile character rigs that make the animation process much less tedious. The most basic part of rigging is setting up bones. So let's look at the tools we use to set up our characters bones. First of all, we need to create a bone group and put all the artwork layers for the character inside it. There's already a root group for the character here, so I'm going to right click and choose Convert to bone. Then with the bone group layer selected, we get access to this palette of bone tools for building the skeleton for our character. Let's try these out by rigging this character. The exact way you use bones will depend on your character's design. But for this video, we're just focusing on learning how the bone tools themselves work. First, we need the add bone tool. With this, you just click and drag to draw out a bone. For a character, you generally want to make a root bone at the hips of the character. This is the bone that is just used to move the whole character around, not specific body parts. It's a good idea to have it sticking out like this to make it easy to grab. Now, notice that up on the tool bar, you can give your bones a name as you go to help you select them later. Your character will probably end up having a lot of bones, so this is a good idea. Now, let's keep going, making the bones for the legs, putting the joints wherever we want the character to be able to bend. If you have a shape that you want to bend, be aware of where your control points are on the artwork layer. You're going to want a control point directly on either side of the joint. If you draw a bone wrong, you can use this tool here, the transform bone tool to adjust it. Now, here on frame zero, this will define the default position and size of the bone. But later when you're out on the timeline animating, this transform tool will stretch and rotate the bones and the artwork bound to them. Now, before we move on to the other leg, I'm going to make sure each of these bones has a name. I'm going to use the select bone tool to select each of them and then fill in its name. When you want to continue drawing bones, you want to make sure it's connected to the right parent bone, so you want to select its parent first. You can use the Select Bone tool, or if you're already using another tool, you can just hold the Alt key to temporarily get the Select tool. If you ever do accidentally draw a bone that's attached to the wrong parent, you can use this tool, the reparent bone tool to fix it. These arrows show you what bone is parented to what. And if you need to change something, just Alt click to select the bone, and then click the bone you want to be its parent. If you don't want a bone to have a parent, select it and then click an empty part of the scene. So I'm just going to go through and finish out the rest of the bones for this character. Now, after you have bones, the next thing you might want to do is use the bone strength tool. This region around the bone defines the portion of the artwork that the bone has influence over when it flexes the artwork at the joints. Click and drag left or right on a bone to increase or decrease the strength of the bone. In most cases, you want to scale this area to just fit inside the part of the body that it's meant to control. Focus especially on what's overlapping near the joins. There are also cases where you might want to bring this all the way down to zero strength. Like, for example, the root bone doesn't need any strength. Now, you might need to experiment to find the right strength. To actually move the bones, to see how it affects the character, you can use the manipulate bone tool. If we try to use this now, we see we get a lot of distortion. This is because right now the bones on the main bone group are treating everything in the group as one piece of artwork. What we need to do before this will work is bind specific layers to specific bones. The main way you'll generally do this is called flexi binding. This method lets a set of bones distort a layer of artwork to bend at the joints, even if there's only a single layer of artwork. For example, with the leg here, I have a single layer for the leg, and we want it to be affected by these two bones. So to bind that layer to those bones, we keep the layer selected, and we need our bone selection tool. Then shift click to select both bones and move up to the bone menu and choose use selected bones for flexi binding. And that has a keyboard shortcut because you're going to be using this command a lot. Now, if we switch back to the manipulate bone tool and try to move the leg again, there's still some distortion because we need to do that for all the other layers as well. I'm just going to quickly go through and bind all the layers to the right bones. Oops. I made a mistake here binding the neck. I accidentally had the hand bone still selected. To fix that with the neck layer selected, I'm going to go to the bone menu and go to reset all bone rigging. Then I can select just the bones I want to bind. And now, if we try the leg again, just the leg bends along with the bones. But you can see there's some distortion around the bend that might not look how you want. You can try to correct this by adding additional points to the layer at or around the bend or adjusting the bone strength. But in a case like this, where we have two bones in a straight line, we should select the layer that they're bound to and then select the two bones and come up to bone, create smooth joint for bone pair. And then it will try to bend it like there's a proper round joint there. That's a lot closer to what we want. Now, to really get bends like this to work correctly, you'll want to set up a Smart Bone, which we'll look at in one of the next videos. Then the next type of binding is layer binding. This is actually the most simple. Layer binding is good for cases where you don't want or need the artwork to be distorted by the bone and just move and rotate along with the bone. For example, in the case of the head group here, flexi binding doesn't really look right. We've got a bunch of individual pieces of artwork inside this group, all of which, including the head itself, don't need to change shape. They just need to move along with the bone for the head and the neck chain. Any animation we do within the face should be independent of the motion of the headbone. So let's just layer bind the head group by selecting the group. And then over here in the tools palette, this is the bind layer tool. Then we just need to click on the right bone. Now if we move that bone, the head just moves along with it. And actually, let's layer bind the back hair layer too. So now that layer moves along with the head as well. The last way you might bind artwork to your bones is point binding. This lets you bind individual points of a shape to different bones. So you could select exactly the bones you want to be affected by one bone versus another. Let's look at an example where you might do that. So look here at the neck layer. Right now, it's flexi bound to the chest and neck bones. You can see those are highlighted in green. If I move it, it gets out of alignment up at the top. That's because of how the bone strength is working. If I clear it's binding, and then bind it just to the neck bone. Now the bottom of the neck rotates along with the bone. So let's use point binding to attach just the bottom points of the neck to the chest bone. So if the neck layer selected, I use the bind points tool here. Then I hold alt to select the bone I want to bind to, make a selection of points, and then uptop click the bind points button. Then these points get color coded blue to match the bone they're bound to. Now when I bend the neck, those points stay locked in place. We can do some other cool tricks, too. For example, say the character has a skirt, and I haven't bound this to any bones yet. I want to do the hip bone first. Now I can select the points that I want to move along with the character's hips and then click Bind points. Now, you can see by the color coding that these points are bound to this bone. And now for the bottom of the skirt, I want that to move along with the legs. So I'll select the first thigh bone, then select the points and bind points. Then I'll do the same for the other leg. And now when I move the character's legs, the skirt stretches to match, like how a real skirt would. You may always still need to adjust the skirt by hand when actually animating, but this puts you in a really good starting position. So those are the basics of creating bones and the three different binding types, flexi binding, layer binding, and point binding. But there are some more advanced ways you can customize your bones in the bone constraints menu up here. We'll look at these in the next video. I'll see you there. 18. 04 04 Bone Constraints and IK: So we've looked at setting up bones and binding artwork to them. But now let's look at some of the cool features that your bones can have that will make your animation process easier. First I want to explain a couple terms that are important when you're talking about rigs. Those are inverse kinematics or IK and forward kinematics or FK. By default in Moho, when you make a chain of bones like we've been doing with a parent child relationship, it automatically makes it an IK chain. That means by selecting the end bone on the chain, you can drag it where you want it, and it will automatically rotate the parent bones in the chain. This is inverse kinematics. The way, notice that when you have a branch in your skeleton, like the shoulders branching off the spine here, that joint gets treated as the root of the IK chains. Next, when you're on the timeline animating, you could also work the opposite way, either using the bone transform tool or by holding Alt with the manipulate tool and just rotate one bone at a time going down the chain. This is forward kinematics. In general, it's going to be faster and more natural to use IK, but you might find things behave weird like limbs bending the wrong way. So to help with that, we can add some constraints to our bones to make them behave in a more predictable and powerful way. First, use the select bone tool and you can select a bone or select several bones. Then up here on this drop down, you have a bunch of parameters you can set. Let's start with the angle constraints. These define how far you can rotate a bone in either direction. So for the wrist here, we never want the hand to be able to double back onto the arm, so we can set its range of motion with the angle here, you can see the limiter line represented on the bone. Then when we use the IK chain, it's not going to ever go the wrong way. Next, there are cases where you might want to enable an independent angle. So for example, if I enable it on the foot bone, the foot will maintain its angle relative to the stage, even if we move the rest of the leg. You can still animate that bone's rotation directly if you want, but it just won't get rotated by moving its parents. Next, there's a really cool setting called squash and stretch scaling. With this enabled, when you're animating and you use the transform bone tool to shorten or lengthen a bone, the artwork bound to that bone will have a squash and stretch effect. This value here determines the strength of that effect. Now, the next option, maximum K stretching is related, but to see this in action, we need to change how we're controlling the IK chain by adding a target bone. I'm going to use the Add bone tool and just click to create a pin bone. And, oops, we don't want that parented to anything. We want to be able to move that freely. Then I'm going to take the bone strength down too because it doesn't need it. And I'll give it a name. Then on the last bone in the chain, I'm going to set its target bone to that pinbne we just made, and you can see it gets a little target symbol on it. Now, if I move the target bone around, the K chain tries to match its position. Then if we select the bones and increase the maximum K stretching higher than one, and let's also turn on squash and stretch too. Now when we move the target bone, it lets the arm stretch a little farther than normal if we want. Now, in the case of an arm, you might not want the hand targeting the bone. You could instead set the target at the wrist and have the forearm targeted instead. Now you can stretch the arms and still have the hands free to rotate however you want. And if you do intend to control an IK chain in this way, you can select the bones for the chain and set them to shy bones. This just hides them to make your display less cluttered. To show bones, you've set to shy, go to bones, show hide shy bones. Also notice that if you move the root bone of the character, the target bones don't move with it if it's not parented to the root. This makes target bones really useful for legs. Say I set up some target bones for the legs. In this case, I'm drawing regular bones instead of pin bones to make them easier to grab. With those set as targets, I can position the feet And then even when I move the root bone, they stay in place. This is really useful for doing walks or jumps or anything where you want the foot to stay planted on the ground for part of the animation. Next, there's this checkbox here for RC IK solver. This is most relevant for cases like this where you have a chain of three or more bones. So by default, when you have a chain of bones and you adjust it from the end, most of the bend will come from the point at the end you have selected and gradually work its way up the chain. However, if the bones are set to use the RcKsalver, it makes the bones a little more rigid, so the bend gets pushed back to the root and spreads out along the bones more. I'll warn you that the RCIKsalver can be kind of unpredictable. Like here you can see, I can't get this tail to bend the other way. I would recommend avoiding this and try using the other techniques we'll cover to get the results you want. The next constraint you might want to put on a bone is ignored by inverse kinematics. So remember, when you have a branch in a bone chain, that joint where the branch starts will get treated as the root for the K chains that branch off from it. So for this character here, there is a bone chain for the head and neck, but it stops at the shoulders. So basically, you can't move the spine by pulling on the head. However, if we wanted to be able to do that, we could select the two shoulder bones and enable ignored by inverse kinematics. And now the head K chain will run all the way down to the hips. However, now those shoulder bones won't be moved by the IK chains of the arms, either, which is actually probably better for this case anyway. You would just have to rotate them directly when you want them to move. Next, we have drop downs here for control bones. These can be useful when you get into more complicated rigs, but the idea behind them is very simple. It's just a way to make one of these properties of a bone be controlled or influenced by another bone. This is generally either to make controls that are easier to work with in cases when grabbing parts of a character directly would be tricky, or you can use these to make certain animations happen automatically. For example, I have this bone chain set up for this chameleon. And let's say we want to make a separate control for the first tailbone here. I could just draw another bone out here. First, let me go back to frame zero. And I'll give it a name. Then on the tailbone, I can set its angle control bone to point at the one we just made. Now that bone's angle is controlled by this bone. And this value next to the drop down lets you define the ratio of how much change gets imparted from the control bone. So if this is set to 0.5, I would have to move the control bone 30 degrees to make the tail rotate 15 degrees. This would make it easier to make very fine position changes to the tailbone. But the really cool thing you can do is set each bone in the tail chain to have its angle controlled by its parent. And if you adjust all the influence values, right, that makes it so that moving the tailbone makes the whole tail curl and uncurl. You can do similar things with position. Here I've got these telescoping pieces that are layer bound to bones. However, in this case, the bones aren't actually parented in a chain, they're totally separate from each other. But I have each one set to use the previous one as a position controller. And you'll notice I have the influence on the X value set to zero on all these since I only care about making these move vertically. And the influence on Y is different as you go up the pieces. So when the first section moves, they retract or extend. Now, it's hard to control this way because the bones end up overlapping. So I'm going to use the add bone tool and make a separate pin bone next to it, and I'll give that bone a name. Then I'll set the root of the telescope's position to be controlled by the point bone handle, but make the influence really low. And if you get that value right, I can just drag the handle directly to the height I want. The last option for bone constraints is bone dynamics. This is actually a way to make your bones animate automatically in response to how their parent bones move. So here I've got a car, and it already has an animation, but this antenna isn't bending in reaction to the movement. So I can select the bones bound to the antenna and then enable bone dynamics. The settings here let you adjust the level of flexibility and springiness. You'll always want to experiment with this to get the results you want. But once that's enabled, I can play the animation again. And we automatically get the drag and follow through animation on the antenna. So this is a great way to get extra follow through on characters without having to do extra animation. So that's it for the bone constraints. Those are a good, easy way to enhance your rig, but we've yet to look at the most powerful rigging feature in Moho, and that's Smart Bons. We'll start digging into that in the next video. I'll see you there. 19. 04 05 Smart Bones: In this video, we're going to look at a super powerful and versatile technique called Smart bone. This is probably the biggest selling point of Moho. A Smart bone lets you use the rotation of a bone to drive any other bit of animation you want. You'll see how powerful this is in a second. Let's look at a prime example of where you should use Smart Bones. This is a super simple example of an arm. In this case, the arm itself is one layer. And you've seen in previous videos how we add the bones and bind the artwork to the right bone. But there's always the issue of how the artwork gets bent and pinched at the joints. You can try adding points and adjust the bone strength, or in this case, we could make a smooth joint for bone pair, which helps. But to take full control of how the arm bends, let's make this forearm a smart bone and use it to animate how the points around the joint should move. We do this by adding actions to it. So let's go to Window actions, and this is the actions palette. Now, make sure you have the bone selected, and then click this button to add an action. If you did it right, the action should be named the same as the bone you selected, and your timeline will change color. That means this is the timeline just for this action as opposed to the main timeline where all the rest of your animation goes. The timeline for the action is where we'll define what animation happens as the bone rotates. First, we need to set an end keyframe position for the bone itself to define the range of motion that will drive the animation. We'll use the transformed bone tool and start it just in its neutral straight state and then come out a good amount of frames and rotate the bone basically as far as it could naturally go. The more frames you give yourself, the more subtle change you can include in the animation. But you might end up needing to do more work, making sure every frame looks right. 48 frames will be fine for this case. Obviously, that looks terrible now, but that's exactly what we're going to fix. That that's set, let's switch to the arm layer. Notice I have the channel visibility on for the bone layer so we can match up the timing. Now we're going to animate the vector points of this shape. We need to select them and use the transform points tool to click and set a keyframe for the straight state. Then we can go through the animation of the bend and make corrections when it distorts in a way we don't want. Now, you can just fix the area around the joint if you want, or you can basically do whatever else. Let's make the bicep flex as the arm comes up. Next, let's fix the spot where the shape overlaps itself. The goal is to make it look like the forearm is squishing against the upper arm in a way that looks natural. It's important to note that you can't delete or add any new points, move the existing ones. Otherwise, it will mess up its ability to transition. It may take many different keyframes over the course of the animation to make sure it looks right the whole time. There we go. That bend looks fairly natural. Now let's go back to the main timeline using the actions palette. And now that that's done, whenever that elbow joint bends relative to the upper arm, the shape of the arm is going to flex like we defined in the action. So now we don't have to worry about that action anymore. This arm will just work. So anywhere a bend in a joint doesn't look right, you have the option to fix it by hand with a smart bone action. Now, here's another common example of how to use smart bones. A smart bone can be used to animate anything in the bone group, not just the layer it's bound to. In fact, your smart bone doesn't have to be bound to any layers. It can just be a free floating dial. This is a common way to control facial animation in a moho rig. For this example, we're going to create a smart bone dial that controls all the layers of this face and lets us rotate the whole head. First notice how this file is set up. All the pieces are separate layers, and some of the layers like the eyes, mouth, and cheek lines here are in a mass group. So when we move those around, they can never go outside the head. So to get our bone dial, we first need a bone group to draw it on. So let's just right click and convert the head group to a bone layer. Now we can draw a bone that will affect the contents of this group called head turn. And let's set its angle constraints to 90 degrees either way. Oh, and this is important. Turn the bone strength all the way down so it doesn't directly affect any of the artwork when you move it. Now we're going to make it so this dial can be rotated either left or right to turn the head left or right. Now, when you make a bone that works in two directions like this, it's best to have the middle be the neutral starting state and actually have two different actions for each direction. So let's start with the left direction. On the actions palette, we'll make an action. Then we need to come out later on the timeline and set the left position on the bone. In this case, I made it 90 frames. That way, there's a frame that corresponds to each degree of rotation. Now we need to make the animation of the head turning over the course of these 90 frames. I'm going to start with the head masking group and move that whole thing over. That will serve as the guide for where everything else needs to get repositioned. Then let's start with the features on his right. The ear would actually be moving backwards if the head were turning, so that's easy. This hair is a little harder because at some point in the animation, we need it to switch from in front of the head to behind it. To make that possible, we need to go to the group the head parts are in and in the layer settings on the depth tab enable animate layer order. Then at the point we need the hair to move back, we just reorder the layers in the layers palette. That layer switch will be represented with a channel on the timeline of the bone group, not the layer itself. So now I'm going to go through and shift the rest of the features of the face over to make the side position for the head. Once that's done, let's go back to the main timeline and check it. Cool. So that half of the dial is done. Also, you may want to show label on the bone so you can see its name to remember what it does. Now we just need to make another action and repeat the process for the other direction. So there we go. We've got our dial to turn the head left and right. Now let's get even cooler and make a dial for turning the head up and down. First, I'll make sure I don't have any bone selected. Then draw another bone. You want to make sure your bone dials aren't parented to each other. This time, I'll show you a shortcut. With the bone selected, we can come up to bone, make smart bone dial. With this, we can automatically set our name, angle parameters, and the number of frames it should take the bone to rotate on the timeline inside of our actions. This time, I'm not going to make it 90 degrees either direction because the head would have a more limited range of motion going up and down. Really, you can use whatever values you want, but this makes the dials more intuitive to me. Then we do want two separate actions for positive and negative angles, and click Okay. Now, that sets up the bone and creates the smart actions in the actions panel for us. If we go inside, we can see the keyframe for the rotation of the bone is already set up and we just need to animate everything else. I'll make the looking downward animation. And then I'll move over to the other action and rotate the head looking up. Now, back on the main timeline, we can use both dials, and it's smart enough to combine the two actions and to allow us to point the face in any direction we want. So now, to animate the character's head direction changing, you just need to add keyframes to the bones rotation, not all the parts of the face. Hopefully, that gives you an idea of how easy it would be to animate a character that has controls like this. If you look at the Moho demo project Mahoney and find the main bone layer, you'll see a ton of dials have been set up to control both the head overall and the individual features of the face. Having these controls out here is much easier to work with than trying to directly animate each piece of the face by hand. And in the actions panel, you can see how they've organized all the actions that these bones all control. Looking at this can give you some great ideas for clever ways to use smart bones in your rig. We're going to be building our own character in a similar way later. The last way I wanted to show you how to use smart bones is as a way to control switches. Here I have a switch for this hand with a few hand positions inside it. I've created a smart Bone dial, and if we go inside the action, I've set up for it. You can see I've only made this 112 frames long. Then I'm going to go to the switch, and along the timeline, I'll have it swap through each version of the hand in sequence. I'll have each position on here for four frames to make it easier to select with the bone. Now, back on the main timeline, I can use the dial to switch through the hand positions as I animate. You might be wondering why you would want to do it this way instead of just right clicking the switch or using the switch selection panel. Well, if I use a smartphone, I can keep that control on the main bone layer with all of the other controls. I won't have to dig through the layers palette to select the switch every time I want to change the hand position. That's a lot more convenient. Just be aware if you're using this technique, you'll want the keyframe interpolation for the bone channel set to step. Then it won't try to interpolate from one position to another when you set keyframes on the bone. It'll just stay where you set it until you set it to a new position. So hopefully, this gives you an idea of how powerful Smart bones can be. We'll look at play more examples later when we're rigging our main character. So far, all the rigging we've done has been on vector layers, but you can also use bones with bitmap images you've imported or drawn. We're going to look at the best method for doing that in the next video. I'll see you there. 20. 04 06 Smart Warps: So far in the course, we've been using vector layers for all of our rigging, but you can use image layers as well. Here's a character that was drawn in Photoshop. We'll look at the workflow for importing Photoshop files later, but what you end up with is all of the layers from your Photoshop file as separate image layers here in Moho. Now, for the most part, you can rig a character made up of image layers with bones just like we've done with vector layers. You can either use layer binding to bind artwork to a bone like I did with the head here. Or you can flexi bind like I did with the arms. Now, in its natural state, you can't point bind because an image layer doesn't have points. It's made up of pixels. That also means if something looks wonky with your flexi binding, you can't really use smart bone actions to fix it unless you set up a smart warp mesh. That's a way to give your image layers more of the functionality of vector layers. Let's look at how to set that up now. So let's say we want to fix the bending of this foot here with a smart bone. To do that, we'll set up our own transformation mesh so we can control exactly how the image gets distorted by the bone. Let's find this layer in the layers palette, and I put it in a group for just this reason because we need to add a vector layer. And we're going to use this layer as the basis for the distortion mesh. Now, on the vector layer, we can use the Add Points tool to draw a shape around our image. Make sure it's set to sharp corners, and I'm going to turn off autofill too. I'll just hide everything else. We want to put a point in every place that we want to control. That means any spot you might want to move, but also any spots that you want to make sure don't move when something else is distorted. For the outline, it's good to leave some space around the image itself. I'm being pretty generous with the amount of control points. So that's the outline. But we can also add other interior points for anything within the shape we might want to move or keep in place. So I'm going to outline these spots and the shadow line here. Then with the mesh layer selected, go up to draw, triangulate two D mesh. Then this is the result. But we can clean this up a little bit. If there are triangular sections with no artwork underneath them, then they won't affect anything. So you can delete points or use the delete edge tool to get rid of them. Then that looks good. Now the next thing to do is test it out. To make the mesh actually affect our image layer, we need to go to the layer settings for the image layer and on the image tab at the bottom, we can set the Smart warp layer to the mesh layer we just made. Now if you're past frame zero and you're out on the timeline, whenever you move the points in the mesh layer, it will distort the image. So you can test it out and see if you can get the distortion you need. If you find you need more control points, you can go back to frame zero and use the Add Points tool to add them in. You might need more points around parts that need to bend or stretch out. Then whenever you add points, make sure to go back to draw, triangulate to D mesh. Then your new points will actually get incorporated into the new mesh and you can use them. It might take some trial and error to get a mesh with points in the right places. So test as you go to make sure you have the control you need. It's best to get this right before you start setting up your smartbone actions. I'm going to add some additional points along these toe elines so I can control the length of those as the foot stretches. So once you have a mesh you think will work, you can use that either for point binding to bones, or in this case, we're going to set up smart bones. Let's turn this bottom part of the foot into a smart bone by going to the actions panel and adding an action. Then I'll set the end position to down and then switch to the mesh layer and reshape the way it flexes around the ankle and the heel. I'm mostly concerned about keeping the size and shape of the foot consistent as the ankle bends. This technique obviously doesn't give you all the control you get with vector art, and you can only push this so far, but it's pretty impressive how good a result you can get. Then I'd better add another action for the foot bone going the other way, too. This one doesn't need as much work. We just want to make sure the leg doesn't get narrower when the foot pushes up on it, and we want to make sure the foot doesn't flatten out. Now, you'll notice that even if you turn off the Control points checkbox on the stage, you can still see the mesh layer. Since we're done working with that, we can hide it. If we open the layer settings for the mesh, you can see it's already set to not be visible when rendered, but we can also check hide in the editing view too. But if you have vector lines enabled, you can still adjust control points of the mesh. Now I'm going to set up an action for the shin two and adjust how the thigh flexes. This is where it's nice to have control points around distinctive elements like the spots. I really want to get it to look like there's a thigh muscle in there that's flexing to pull the leg straight. So I want that whole region where the dots are to get shifted up. Okay. Then I'm going to do one for the thigh itself to fix this bad cramping up issue and how the leg stretches along the bottom. I'm basically just going to rotate this whole top of the thigh by hand and then reshape this outer edge up top and make sure that the leg sort of flattens out along the bottom. Cool. Now we can come out on the timeline and check how the leg flexes now. So in this case, we have multiple smart bones affecting a lot of the same control points. The effects of the actons are going to get combined, which can sometimes be unpredictable, but in this case, it looks like it worked out fine. This leg looks a lot better in its extended position now. If you download the finished version of this rig, you'll find that in addition to fixing the bends on the other limbs, I've done some other fun stuff with smart warps. Like, make his cheek smush when his head leans, and make it so he can open and close his mouth. If you select a bone, it will highlight the actions associated with it in the actions panel and you can go inside each action to just see what that particular action does. You can look through the layers panel and find the relevant mesh layers to see exactly how the points are set up and what's warping. Check that out for some fun ideas. Next, to finish out our look at the rigging features, we're going to look at one more type of bone that we haven't seen yet and that's sketch bones. We'll look at that in the next video. I'll see you there. 21. 04 07 Sketch Bone Tool: There's one last rigging tool we haven't touched on, and that's this tool here, the sketch Bones tool. This is a really nice easy tool to use for cases like the tail on this cat here. I'm just going to select the root bone to make sure the tail is parented to it. And then all I have to do is draw where I want the tail to go, and it automatically creates a chain of bones. Up here, you can specify the length of the bones in the chain that it creates. More smaller bones will let you make finer curves in whatever you're modifying, but make sure the shape itself has enough points to allow it to actually make those kinds of curves and bends. It's a good idea to make sure there's a control point on either side of the joint between any two bones. Then let's bind the tail layer by selecting it and then selecting the sketch bones and going to use selected bones for flexi binding. Now, when we come out on the timeline, we can see the real power of the sketch bone tool. Trying to manipulate a chain of bones like this with the manipulate bone tool and inverse kinematics would be quite a nightmare. But with the sketch bones tool, if we want to put the tail in a new position, we just draw it out. This makes it really easy to put the curve in whatever shape we want. And you can start the redrawing at any point on the curve that you want. So to animate with this, you can just go along your timeline and basically treat it kind of like hand drawn animation and just draw a new pose wherever you need it. Now, you can see by the red guideline that the total length of the tail is going to be the same when I go to redraw it. But if you check scale bones up here, you can make it however long or short you want. Of course, if you're going to do that, you might want to go to your bone constraint settings and enable squash and stretch scaling. O. Except on the base bone, I want that to stay the same width. Then when you draw the tail shorter or longer, it automatically squashes and stretches. So whenever you have a character with a long tail or appendages like this, using the sketch Bones tool is definitely the way to go. So that concludes our look at the rigging and animation features we'll be using over the rest of the course. Next, we're going to be applying everything we've learned so far and step by step, go through the process of rigging a character and animating a scene. We'll start that process in the next video. I'll see you there. 22. 05 01 Importing Artwork: So now that we've seen individual examples of how to use all the tools in Moho, in this section of the course, we're going to bring everything together and go through the full process of rigging a character. But before we can rig a character, we have to have the character drawn for us to rig. I'm going to be drawing our character from scratch here in Moho, but in case you want to work in a different program, I wanted to show you how you can import artwork for a character from other file types. The easiest type of file to bring into Moho is a Photoshop file. Here I've got a character file drawn in Photoshop with all its different body parts on different layers ready to be rigged. Now, back in Moho, if I go to File, Import, image, and select a PSD, it gives us several options. Now, what the message here is saying is that if you select either individually composite or select layers, it will import the image in a way that it references back to the original PSD file. So if you want to edit the artwork after it's been imported, you could do that in Photoshop, and when you save, it would get updated in Moho as well. If you select layers to PNG, it's going to convert the Photoshop layers to individual PNG images as if they were image layers created in Moho, and you would use the Moho Bitmap drawing tools to modify them. If you do that, it's going to ask for a location to keep the PNG files. And then it keeps the PSDs layer structure, but the layers link to the images it created. If you right click and go to Reveal source Image, you can see all the individual PSDs it created. Let's import it again, but look at the other options. If we do select layers, it shows us all the layers inside the PSD, and you can check just the ones you want to bring in. And if you do import and choose composite, it will import the whole file as a single layer. But notice it has a PSD icon, meaning we can right click and choose open source image, and it'll open the PSD in Photoshop. And any changes that get made here will show up in Moho. However, we don't want a single layer. We want all our layers. So let's import it again. And this time, choose individually. Now we have our layer structure, but each layer still references the original PSD. Next, let's look at importing a character made in a vector art program like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape. Now, if you go to File, Import, vector File, there are options for SVG, Adobe Illustrator, and EPS. But the only one you really want to ever use is SVG. If you try to import an Illustrator AI file directly, first of all, it needs to be saved as an Illustrator eight file, and your colors are pretty much guaranteed to get messed up. Same with EPS. So if we need to use SPG, let's look at the right way to save an SVG for import into Moho. So here I have a character in Adobe Illustrator, and right away, I'll tell you there are some things that are going to be small issues if we try to bring this into Moho. These color gradients aren't going to translate to moho, so the umbrella and her cheeks and her irises are just going to end up as flat white. So we may as well change them to flat colors here before we export. Once the basic shapes are into Moho, you can use the moho style tools to recreate those kinds of effects. Then one more thing to warn you about. I'll make an example so I can show you. I'm going to make a line that's just a regular even vector stroke and then another and apply a width profile to make it tapered, and we'll see how Moho handles those. Now, we need to save this as an SVG. So let's go to file, save a copy. And then on this window, we set the format to SVG and click Save. Then on the SVG options window, it's important to have your CSS properties set to style attributes, not presentation attributes. Then just click Okay. Now, in Moho, let's go to import the SVG file. And there we go. Now, if we look at those two lines we made, you'll see the line with the tapered ends got converted to a shape, which might be fine depending what it's for. But if you want it to remain a line that you can easily manipulate with Bezier handles, you're better off making it an even line in your other program and using the line width tool here in Moho to taper it. Now, there's another much bigger issue in that it brings in the whole character as one layer, unlike how we had it in Illustrator. That's a big downside. You would have to select your individual shapes and copy and paste them two separate layers in moho to get your layer structure back. So if you want to use vector art, that's a good reason to just draw it in Moho from the start. We're going to go through the whole process of drawing a character in Moho and organizing its parts into layers in the next video. I'll see you there. 23. 05 02 Drawing Characters in Parts: In this video, we're going to go through the process of drawing the artwork for our character. We need to think about how we want the character broken up into layers to make our rigging work properly later. To start, I have a reference image I want to use, so I'll add an image layer, call it sketch, and browse for this character turnaround. This will be a reference. Now, I'm going to start with the three quarter view, and we'll make smart actions that will let us rotate the character to the other positions or at least get as close as we can. When you're staging a scene in animation, you almost always have the character standing at some kind of three quarter angle. So that's the most important view to get right. I also have a palette of her colors prepared, so I'll add that to the color palette, and that will make picking colors a lot faster. Then I'm going to add the sketch layer to a group and lower the opacity to make it easier to draw over. Now we can't simply trace the reference drawing. We need to think about how the character is going to be rigged and what we want to be able to do. We're going to need to draw the pieces of the character that aren't visible in the three quarter view, but need to be there when the character rotates. Now, building a rig as complex as this one is inevitably going to take some experimentation and revision, but we're going to do our best to think ahead as we draw. I'll start by making a root group for the character and call it Betsy. Then we can start making the layers for our character. I'm going to start with the hips. Right now, I'm just going to do the outlines of the pieces with the add points tool and worry about coloring them later. Let's do another layer for the thigh, adjusting the points to match up with the drawing and look smooth. Now the shin, making sure it extends down to where the ankle would be behind the cuff of the boot. I'm going to make the sock as a separate shape, but on the same layer as the shin itself. Then I'm going to make the knee on a separate layer. This is so when we make the rotation action for the legs later, it will be easy to move the knee over to a front or side position. That's the big challenge of this part of the process, anticipating how you'll want your pieces of artwork to behave when you set up your actions. Next, I'm going to build the boot out of several different sections. Turning the boot to a forward view is going to be particularly hard, but making it in overlapping sections gives me more flexibility to move things around. Now that we have a leg done, let's go the other way and work up the body. Actually, before we get too far, I'm going to make a group for all the parts of the boot. We're going to end up with a ton of different layers, so we want to stay on top of our organization. Then I'm actually going to make another group for all the parts of the leg. Now let's keep going up the body. Notice for the skirt, I'm drawing the seam on the side and the pocket as a separate line from the rest of the skirt. This gives more freedom to shift the seam around when the skirt rotates. For the same reason, I'm going to make the belt and buckle on separate layers. I'm going to make the main torso as one piece with a shape for the body and another for the shirt over top of it. For the part of her but that extends past the jacket, I'm going to need to build that as a separate layer. That's going to change shape the most when we rotate and when we add smart actions to bend the torso. Then we'll work our way up to the head. We need to think about all the layers of the head that we're going to want to move around. There's the main section of the head, but the hair on the back of the head needs to be behind that, and then a layer of hair on the side will need to be in front. And for her bangs, we need to build that out of several overlapping sections, so they have some more freedom of movement and can change how they overlap when the head rotates. Then let's draw an ear. Oh, and I just realized I drew all the parts of the bangs on the same layer. So let's make separate layers and copy and paste the shapes. Then let's make a folder for those to keep it organized. And we should probably have one more section of bangs behind the head. And I'll just finish up this last piece of hair along the temple. Then there's the main layer for the face and jaw line. And now we can start building the features like the nose. I'll start with what I can see in three quarter view, but I know I'm going to need to have the far nostril hidden behind the point of the nose so it can move and become visible in the front view. Now, at this point, things are looking messy, so let's start filling in these shapes with color. I'm going to pick the fill and stroke color for her skin from my palette. Then in advanced mode, I'll define that as a new style. Now, before I can use that style on the nostril here, I want to make sure the line in the middle is included as part of the shape. So I'm going to use the delete shape tool to delete the shapes that currently exist there for the nostril and then use the create shape tool with everything selected and define a new shape that will include the stroke on the outside and the stroke that defines the nostril. And I need to do the same thing for the other nostril. Next, I'll use the hide edge tool to get rid of parts of the stroke I don't want visible and use the linewidth tool to add some taper to the ends of the lines. Then I'll just repeat that process for all the other parts of the head and body. Okay, now that I have the one leg colored, I'll just copy it to make the other leg. Since this copy is now her left leg, I'm going to go through the layers and rename them accordingly. So that works for the most part, but the seam and buttons on her boots should be on the other side on the left leg. So I'm going to move those off to the side and change their direction. Now, these wouldn't be visible at this point, but we want to be able to bring them in when the boot rotates. To hide that, I'm going to set up a mask on the boot group. I want all the sections of the boot to add to the mask and have the seam and buttons be the only layer that gets masked off. Okay. Now when the time is right, I can slide the buttons into view as the foot turns. I need to do the same thing with the skirt. I'm going to duplicate the side seam and pocket and have a masked off version waiting on the other side. Next, while we're on the body, I'm going to finish out the jacket. I'll build the front part of the jacket in sections that we can reshape for the rotation. Then we need to be sure to build the corresponding parts for the other side that can shift and become visible when the character turns. Then we need the sleeves. I'm going to make the arm in two sections with the wrinkling at the elbow as a separate layer. And I'm going to be sure to use the delete and create shapes tools to make sure all those lines are counted together as a single shape. Then for the hand, I'm going to build that out of separate shapes. This will make it easier to move things around to create new hand positions later. Then like we did with the leg, I'm going to copy the arm group and then go through and rename all the layers. Then I just need to make some slight adjustments except for the hand, which I pretty much need to redraw since it's from the opposite direction. Now back up at the head, I remembered we're going to need sections of the hair and her left ear to be hidden behind the head. So I'll just copy the layers from her right side, flip them, and put them behind everything. Then the last part of the hair is the braid. I'm building it on one layer but as separate shapes. That will let the segments move past each other when they get warped by bones. Now we need to add the facial features. I'm going to do this slightly differently. The eyes and mouth need to be very precise in how they look as they change shape during rotation. To make sure I have all the control points I need to rotate convincingly, I'm actually going to start in the front view over here using my other view as reference. For the eyes, I'm building them in the standard way. The parts of the eye are all in a group and the whites are acting as a mask for the pupil so it can't go outside the eye. Then the lids and the lashes are set not to be masked so they can sit on top of everything. Then I'll just duplicate that group to make the other eye. Now, the mouth is going to get more complicated, but for now, we'll just have a top and bottom lip. Then I'll add the eyebrows. Now that the front view is ready, I'm going to slide over all the shapes so that I can change them to their three quarter view form. This way, I know it's possible to get these shapes back to the front view when the head turns. And I just realized I forgot her freckles, so let's make those and move them over. Then as a final touch, I'll add a stroke to the upper lids and use the stroke exposure tool to reduce the line on the top eyelid to just the front of the lid. That way, that stroke can be animated as the eye rotates. So there we go. That's our main character pieces. However, there is additional art we need. To really be able to give a performance with this character, we're going to need different hand positions and different mouth positions for lip sync. We'll set those up as switch groups in the next video. I'll see you there. 24. 05 03 Mouth Positions and Switches: In this video, we're going to set up alternate hand and mouth positions for our character using switches. We're actually going to learn about a new really powerful feature of switches that we haven't covered yet. Let's start with the right hand. I'm just going to duplicate the existing hand layer, and because it's built out of shapes, I can just reposition the fingers how I want, adding in the thumb since that should be visible now. Right now, I'm mostly concerned with having views of the hand from different angles. When we're actually animating the scene, we can always make whatever specific positions and gestures we might need. That's easier if you already have a view of the hand from the right angle. Once I have a bunch of those, I can right click the hand group and convert it to a switch, and that lets me easily switch the visibility of the different layers. And then after some fine tuning, this hand is good to go. Then I just need to repeat the process for the other hand. I want to make sure each position we have for the right hand has a corresponding position on the left hand. Then the next place I've decided I want to use a switch is actually on the braid, but for a different reason. I want to be able to rig the braid in two different ways. I'm going to right click the braid and make a reference because I want my two versions of the braid to be identical. Then I'm going to create a group for the first braid and call it braid dynamic. On this version of the braid, I'll eventually set up bones with bone dynamics that let the braid bounce and swing automatically. Then I'll make a group for the second braid called braid sketch. This one, I'll rig with the sketch bone tool so I can easily animate the curve changing by hand when I want to do that. Then I need to put both of those groups into a switch group, and that will let me swap between them on the fly when I need to change my technique. Next, let's do the mouth positions. This is the fun part. So when speaking, the individual speech sounds we make are called phonemes, and there are a lot of them. However, there's a much more limited set of recognizable mouth positions or Vizms that are actually used to make those sounds. So we can actually get by with a fairly limited set of mouth positions and just switch between them in time with the dialogue track. However, there's a feature of switches in Moho that will help make our mouth animation much smoother. To use it, we need to set up the mouth in a specific way. I'll show you using a bigger front view of the mouth before doing it on our rig. Right now, there's a layer for each lip, but we're going to build the inside of the mouth out of separate layers as well. There's the maze shape for the inside of the mouth. Then I'll add the top and bottom teeth and a tongue. Then position those so they're hidden behind the lips. Next, I'll set this mouth group up so that the mouth inside shape is masking everything except the two lips on top. Now, this mouth group is actually just one of our positions, so I'm going to rename it to rest and put that inside of another mouth group that will eventually be our switch. Then I'll duplicate the resting mouth group, and we'll use this to make our mouth position. Inside the mouth group, I'll just shift the shapes around to make the position. Being careful not to delete or add any control points. Then let's make the mouth group a switch and try it out on the timeline. I'll set the switch in a starting position. And then come out later and switch it to the other position. And you can see it switches on the timeline. But now the cool part. I'm going to go to the layer settings for the switch. On the switch tab, we can enable interpolate sub layers. And now you can see the timeline is now showing keyframes because it's actually animating between the states instead of switching instantly. Now the reason it can do that is because we have layers with the same names inside the groups we're switching between. So it knows to treat the shapes on those layers as the same and interpolate the points. Now in the corner of the mouth, you can see the inside mouth shape isn't in the right position, so we're seeing gaps during the animation. On the resting post, let's change it so the inside shape starts off with points in the corners of the mouth. Now, when it interpolates, it looks perfect. So this is the technique we'll use to do the mouth on our betsy rig. I made a version of the mouth with the interior shapes, and I just copy it and it's just the shapes to make the next mouth position. In addition to your mouth positions for speech, you can add in whatever other expressions you think might be useful. So there we go. We've got all our mouth positions set up for three quarter view. Next, we need to start the actual rigging process and give our character some bones. We'll do that in the next video. I'll see you there. 25. 05 04 Adding Bones: In this video, we're going to go through the process of giving our character all of the bones she'll need and binding the artwork to the bones. I'm going to start by right clicking our main character layer and converting it to a bone group. Then I can just start drawing the bones with the add bone tool. I'm going to start from the hips and go up the spine. I forgot to add a root bone for moving the whole character around, but I can add that later. Then I'll just add the chain of bones for the legs. The feet are going to have three segments to go with the three main parts we built for the boots. Then I'll add in the arms, Now, let's start binding layers to these bones so we can actually test out how they move. Let's start with the easy stuff. We know the head group, the braid group, and the back hair all need to be layer bound to the headbone. Now, for the rest of the character, we'll need to do a little more guess and check to find the best way to bind things. For the arm, I'm pretty sure we just want the three layers of the sleeve to be flexi bound to the two main bones of the arm. Then the hand switch, we can just layer bind to the hand bone. The wrist is hidden by the sleeve, so we wouldn't see that bend anyway. And I'll just do the other arm the same way. And then for the legs for the time being, I'm just going to flexi bind all the parts to all the leg bones. Right now, I just want to get every layer bound to something. Then let's get the bone strength under control for all these bones. I'm going to shrink them all down so they're within their corresponding artwork. Now, for the body, specifically the jacket, I want to make sure all the pieces, including the collar and the hidden parts of the jacket on the other side, get flexi bound to all three of the main spinal bones. They'll make sure the pieces get distorted in the same way and stay lined up. Oh, and it looks like we need to layer bind the hips to the hip bone. Okay, it looks like all the parts of the torso are staying together pretty well. Now, I think her neck is long enough that I want to have two bones instead of one, so it can actually bend. I'm going to use the transform bone tool to shorten the existing neck bone and add another one in then I need to use the reparent bone tool to make sure the segments are parented in a chain. Then I'm going to try flexi binding the neck to the two bones. First, I need to reset the binding on the neck, and then I can flexi bind it to the neck bones. But I'm getting some distortion at the top and bottom. So let's use point binding to bind the base of the neck to the chest bone and the top of the neck to the headbon. Now, that's pretty close. We can always fix the details with smart actions later. Now let's revisit the legs. I'm going to flexibnd the thigh, shin and knee layers to the thigh and shin bones. And then for the boot, I'm going to treat it kind of like how we did with the jacket and flexibnd each piece to all four of the lower leg bones in the chain. And then let's make sure the belt is layer bound to the hip bone. And let's test out the arm. Okay, so when I move the arm, I can see the belt buckle and the front of the T shirt must not have gotten bound. So I'll flexi bind the bust layer to the two main bones of the spine. Then for the belt buckle, I'm just going to layer bind it to the hip bone. Okay, now we can move the arms without distorting anything. And we can move the spine, but I'm going to use point binding to make the bottom of the shirt stay attached to the hip behind the belt. Kind of like the shirt is tucked in. There. Now that looks good. So for the elbows and knees, I'm going to want to set up smooth joints to get a better bend. But on this front arm, I think the upper arm bone and forearm bone aren't in line enough to do that. So I'm adjusting the bone and the artwork to make it start straighter. Now I'm going to need to rebind the sleeve. And with those two bones selected, I'm going to go to bone, create smooth joint for bone pair. Now, this is important. You have to do that again for each layer that's bound to those two bones or it won't look right. There. Now that elbow bends pretty good. Then I just need to repeat that process to set up a smooth joint for the other elbow and the two knees. Now for the skirt, I'm going to attempt to point bind the different parts to different bones to try to make them move along with the legs. This might not end up working out once we try to apply our smart actions, but I'll give it a try for now. Now, there's bones for every part of the body, except remember we want to rig the ponytail too. We aren't going to do it on the main character bone layer. We'll do it on the two groups we set up inside the braid switch. So I'll convert the braid dynamic group to a bone group and then draw in some bones with the add bone tool. Then I'll switch to the braid sketch group and make that a bone group as well. Then with the sketch bones tool, I'll try to draw a chain of bones approximately the same size as the other ones I made. Okay, now back on the dynamic bone braid. I want to set up bone dynamics so that the pony tail will automatically animate as the character moves. But I need the character to be moving in order to test that. So now I do need to add in that main root bone to the character, and I just need to make sure the hip bone is parented to it. Now I can just make a quick animation of the character bouncing up and down. Now, back on the braid, I'll make sure those bones have names. And we better adjust their bone strength, too. Then I'm going to enable bone dynamics on each of them. Now, if we play the timeline to test it out, we can see the default settings for the bone dynamics just don't work. The braid is way too stiff. After experimenting for a while, I found that the torque, spring, and damping settings all need to be brought down much lower, like in the 0.2 to 0.4 range. You can look at the project file to see the exact settings for each bone. But now we've got the braid bouncing pretty nicely. So now that the character has all her bones, we can move on to adding smart actions to those bones to make the bends look better. We'll do that in the next video. I'll see you there. 26. 05 05 Adding Smart Actions to Bones: So now that we've added all our bones and done our basic rigging for the character, we're going to add smart actions to those bones to enhance our rig further. Let's start with this front arm and see what we can do with that. With the upper arm bone selected, I'll just use the actions palette to create a new smart action. The action on the shoulder is pretty simple. We just need to change the shape of the top sleeve, so it looks like there's a consistent seam where the shoulder joins the jacket. Then we'll set up a second action for the arm moving forward. And here we can even have the body of the jacket get pulled forward along with the shoulder. The action on the elbow is much trickier. We need the crease to look natural over the whole course of the bend. It can be tricky when the arm bends this far. It's best to start at the beginning and gradually work the points into their end position. Good. Now, one last thing on this arm. On the handbon, I'm going to add actions that move the cuff of the sleeve out of the way when the hand bends. Next, we'll do the actions for the chest bone bending. We want to control how the jacket and the shirt flex. The bottom of the jacket should retain more of its original shape, but the front of the shirt should bunch up more. And don't forget about the hidden parts of the jacket, too. Then let's do the knees. These are pretty easy. Not a lot of lines to manage here. O. The boots, however, are much trickier. We need to make sure that the big heel retains its shape as it gets pushed by the bone. Other than that, it's mostly a matter of making sure the lines for the other parts of the boot stay lined up. And I'm actually going to have the perspective on the sole shift a little too. Okay, now for the skirt, I'm going to attempt to make actions that will account for the leg's position. It's pretty easy if only one leg is moving at a time, but we'll need to test to see how it looks when we move both of them. At this point, we've got a ton of actions in the actions pallet. So let's organize those into folders to keep track of them. So to test out our rig, I'm going to add target bones to the arms and legs. I'm going to put them at the wrists and ankles so that the hands and feet are free for us to rotate how we want. I'm also going to add some limits to the bone rotations, so it'll behave more predictably. Once we get into situations where the character is rotated, these kinds of limits might actually get in the way. But for testing purposes, they're going to be very helpful. Here's a tip. If you're using a target bone and the limb doesn't seem to want to bend the right way, use the transform bone tool and hold Alt to try to move the bone to bend the other direction. Once you do that, it should work. Now that we've got the legs bending, we can see the skirt is, in fact, messed up. The actions from both thigh bones are combining to push the skirt too far. So we'll need to handle that in a different way. First of all, I'm going to clear the point binding on the skirt and just make all the parts of it layer bound to the hip. Then instead of using the thigh bones to drive the smart actions that distort the skirt, I'm going to set up two control bones so we can just adjust the shape of the skirt directly by hand. Starting with the skirt front control, I'll set up an action to try to define the max range of how far forward one of the legs might come. Fortunately, the range is limited by how far she could realistically stretch while wearing a skirt anyway. Then for the other direction, we'll try to define how far back the skirt might go if both legs were back. Then for the skirt back control, we'll do the same for the back edge of the skirt. We want it to curve underneath when it comes forward. And then flare out when it goes back. Okay, now back on the main timeline, I've temporarily dstabled the target bones, so we can just put the legs in a position and then use the skirt controls to match up the skirt accordingly. I think that's going to work pretty good. So that's it for the basic rig. We can try moving her around, and the action seem to be working pretty well. It's a little bit of a bummer that the skirt has to be controlled by hand, but it's still pretty easy and will give good results in the end. So that's it for the main bones and actions for the body. Next, we're going to use more bones and smart actions to set up rotation controls that will let us turn different parts of the body toward and away from the camera. We'll do that in the next video. I'll see you there. 27. 05 06 Rotation Controls: In this video, we're going to set up controls that will let us rotate our character toward and away from the camera. We're actually going to make it so that the legs, chest and head can be rotated independently. Let's start by setting up two bones for the leg rotation and the chest rotation. We'll do something special for the head later. Now, let's start with the legs. I'll create an action. I'm going to want to put angle limits on these controls. Okay, so those have limiters now. And back in the leg rotation action, I can set my bones left position. And now I can start shifting all the artwork to a front view. It's typically really hard to make a rig that can actually rotate this far and still work right. But we're going to shoot for it and see what range of motion is viable when we start animating. The trick here is I want the waist to stay lined up to the top of the body throughout the rotation. Then I can have the hips and chest pointed in different directions. Now we need to use the transform bone tool to reposition the hips and leg bones. Once those are in place, we can keep going with the skirt. This is where having that hidden skirt seam comes into play. Now we need to rotate the leg artwork to a front view. And now the boots are going to be the hardest part. I'm going to start by using the transform bone tool to shorten the foot bones so that they will be closer to where we would want the artwork to be. Now I'm going to shift the different segments of the boot to something closer to a front view. Okay, I'm going to call that close enough to a front view for the boots. Now let's go back to the main timeline. Now I realize I made a mistake. I shouldn't have moved the target bones inside the smart Bone action. That causes a conflict with the target bones position here on the main timeline. So I'm going to disable the target bones for now and then go inside the rotation action and use the transform bone tool to position the legs correctly. And now we can see that the leg rotation control works right. Now we can make the next action for turning the other direction and go through the process of shifting the artwork to make the profile view. Okay, so that's the rotation control for the lower body. Now we need to do the same for the chest rotation control. We set the action up and then move around all the parts. This is where those hidden jacket parts come into play. Though I'm realizing I totally forgot to give her a lapel on her left side, so I'll copy and paste the one from the right and flip it. Now I just need to make sure that it's hidden in the three artivi and only comes out when the chest rotates. Okay, that's the chest itself, but I still need to make the arms come along with it. So I'm going to be sure to disable the target bones on the wrists first. Then inside the rotation actions, I just need to use the transform bone tool to shift the shoulders over and then adjust the shoulder seam to match up. And there, now the chest is done. Next, we're going to make the control for the head. We're going to use some clever tricks to make a control that can set the rotation and tilt of the head at the same time. First, I need to make a layer to draw a visual guide on. And I'm going to check this box so this layer won't be rendered when the scene is exported. Then I'm going to draw a circle. Then I'm going to use the Add bone tool to add a pinbne to the center of the circle and call it head control. Then I'm going to add pinbons at the exact bottom and right edge of the circle. And I'll call the right one vert control and the bottom one horror control. Then we're going to set some constraints. On the vert control, we're going to set its position control bone to be the head control, but set the X influence to zero, so it'll only follow the head control vertically. Then I'll do the same to the horizontal control bone, but set the Y influence to zero, so it will track the head control horizontally. So now when I move the head control bone, the bones on the sides slide along with it. Now I'm going to draw out a bone horizontally, pointing at the vert control. This bone will actually drive the head tilt action, so I'll call it head tilt. Then I'll draw another bone for the bottom and call it head turn. Then I'll turn down the strength on those bones, and then set the two long bones to target their corresponding pin bones. And then let's make sure none of the bones are parented to each other. So now, when we move the head control, you can see how that will drive the rotation on the head turn and head tilt bones. Next, before we can set up our actions, we want to set the angle constraints. I'm going to guess 45. And if we check, it looks like the rotation stops just a little too soon. So let's change that to 50 degrees. And now that looks just right. So then we should be able to use the same thing for the other bone. There, now we can just create smart bone actions on those, starting with the head turn bone. Once that's set up, we need to shift all the artwork around to create our front view. The head is made up of a lot of different pieces that all need to be accounted for. A I decided I need an extra line on the nose to define the tip when it's in the front view. In the three quarter view, I'm going to use the stroke exposure tool to reduce it down so it's invisible. Now, to get the front view right, I'm going to move our sketch above our artwork with the opacity lowered. So now I can use that as a guide to get the shape of these features, right? Now, the biggest pain is going to be the mouth. Because we don't know what mouth position will be visible, we need to make a front view for every one of them. Okay, the mouth is finally done. So let's test out the rotation. And oops, I definitely did something wrong. It looks like in my action, I must have used the layer transform tool to move the nose and eye groups, which isn't going to work. I need to move over the actual shapes on the layers for the actions to move them. The mouth worked because it's a switch, so I could move that with the layer transform tool. So now that that's fixed, the front view rotation works. Now we need to do the next action for the turn to profile view. Oh, and I just realized I need this group of freckles masked off so I can slide them off the edge of the face. So I'm going to put those in a group with the main jaw layer and then turn that into a mask group. So now these freckles are masked by the jaw art. And again, I need to make a rotation to profile view for every one of the mouth positions. Okay, that's everything done. Now let's go back to our main bone layer and test out our rotation. So that's the head turn finished. Now let's do the tilt. I'll make another action and start making the head tilt up. Now, we aren't going to be able to tilt that far. But remember, we always have the headbne itself we can move to tilt the head. What we're doing with this action is letting us change the perspective on the face a little bit. I'm trying really hard to only move points vertically as much as I can and avoid moving anything horizontally. That will help the tilt and the turn actions look better when they get combined. So now I'll make the tilt down the same way. Now, in all these actions, we want to make sure to account for the pieces of artwork that are hidden behind the character. It might not be visible from this angle now, but if the head returned towards us, it would be visible, and we need to make sure it's in the right place vertically. And once that's done, we can try the head control, and you can see how easy that makes it to point the head in any particular direction. Now that that's working, we can select the side portions of the head control bones and set them to be shy bones, leaving us with just the single central control handle visible. So that's all our rotation control is done. The last set of controls we need are the controls for the facial expression. We'll set those up in the next video. I'll see you there. 28. 05 07 Facial Controls: In this video, we're going to set up the facial controls for our character rig. All of these are just going to be basic bone dials, like we've seen before, but we'll lay them out in different ways, customized to the features they're controlling. The real challenge here is going to be making the facial animations in our actions work in combination with the rotation controls. So the face looks right no matter which way the head is turned. Let's start with the eyebrows. There's going to be two dials for each eyebrow. I'll make a vertical one to control the height of the eyebrow called right eyebrow height. Then I'll make a horizontal one to control the angle or pitch of the eyebrow called right eyebrow pitch. Then I'll make the two controls for the other eyebrow. And let's make sure these aren't parented to anything. And bring the bone strength down to zero. Then I'm going to want to have the labels on for all of these controls. And then let's arrange them so that they aren't overlapping. Now we can start creating our smart bone actions. Oops, I'd better put angle constraints on these. The eyebrows don't have to move far, so we don't need a very big range of motion, and we also don't want the controls to be able to overlap at any point. Now we can set up that action. This is going to be a really simple one. We just need the whole eyebrow to move upward. Then we just need the action for turning the dial the other way to make the eyebrow move downward. Next, we need to make the same actions on the height dial for the left eyebrow. Okay. Now let's set up the actions on the pitch control. When it goes down, we want the eyebrow to arc down to match. And when it goes up, the eyebrow arcs up. Then we need to do the same for the other eyebrow. So with that done, now comes the real test. Let's rotate the head to the front view and see if it still looks right. Not quite. Our eyebrows aren't symmetrical. Her right brow looks good, but the left one is a little off. I need to go back to the actions on that eyebrow and see if I can do something different with how the control points move to make it look different in the front view. A lot of this is just guess and check. I'm going to set up keyframes on the main timeline with the head turned forward and the eyebrows up to make it easier to go back and forth to check how it looks. One thing that's useful to know is that if you have a control point selected while working inside in action, it will stay highlighted when you come out to the main timeline. That can help you identify what about the point is behaving differently than you expected. Okay, I've found an arrangement of points that looks right in both views. I think the key was that curve on the top point needed to extend over the course of the animation. So that's the eyebrows complete. Oop, though it looks like one of the eyebrows is behind the eye, so I'll just move that layer up top. And now they're good to go. Next, we're going to do the controls for her pupil positions so we can make her look in different directions. The three quarter view makes this tricky because the perspective is a little different on each eye. But I've got a solution that will work pretty universally for any head angle. I'm going to make three dials. The first one is going to move the vertical position of the pupils. The second is going to move the horizontal position, and the third is going to be the pupil focus, which means how far apart the pupils are. And I better make sure those aren't parented to each other and show labels and angle constraints. Now I'm just going to set up the actions for each of those dials. The key is I'm moving both pupils by the same amount for each action that isn't going to look right now in three quarter view, but we'll be able to use the focus control to compensate for that. The focus control will bring the pupils farther apart or closer together. Again, always moving both pupils by the same amount. So once that's done, we use the controls in combination to point the eyes in any direction we want. Now for the eyelids, this is going to be pretty tricky because there are so many moving parts to account for. I'm going to start by setting up four bone dials. One for the top and bottom eyelid on each eye. Now, I just need to add actions to all these dials that move the lid up and down. So there we go. With these four controls, we can create a bunch of different expressions. However, when we want to just do a simple blink, it would be a pain to have to move four controls. So I'm going to make a single separate control that can open and close both eyes at once. When I set up the actions for this bone, I can just use the other controls to put the eyelids in the position I want for a blink. Then I'll make an action for the other direction that opens the eyes wider. So that's a lot easier to use in most situations. Just know moving this control will override whatever the individual lid controls are set to because the actions on this control directly animate those bones. So now the moment of truth, let's rotate the head and see if it still works. Oh, boy, that's pretty bad. Most of it's alright, except the eyelash layer itself is super messed up. I had a feeling this might happen because the eyelashes are such a complicated shape made up of so many control points. But I think I know a better way to handle this. Instead of making the eyelashes a complex shape like this, I'm going to replace this with a single stroke and use the linewidth tool to give it that tapered look. Then for the eyelashes that stick out, I'll make them out of simple separate shapes with just three points each. That looks pretty much the same, and it's going to be a lot easier to transform in a way that will behave predictably. However, I do now need to go through all the actions and re animate the eyelash layer. Now, on the other eye, I'm going to need to go even a step further. On this eye, it's a little trickier because the part of the lashes that stick out shifts from the inside to the outside during the turn. What I'm going to do is put the inside and outside lashes on separate layers from the line part of the lash. I'll make animations on each of those layers so that the outer lash grows out as the inner lash shrinks down during the turn. And the reason I want them on separate layers is so that I can go into sequencer view and then use the layer visibility settings on each layer, so it's only visible during the time when it should be seen. That way, we don't need to account for how the head turn action affects those shapes when they're not supposed to be visible at all anyway. It's just a little less to worry about. Now I need to re animate this lash layer on all my actions. And then just like we always do with hidden shapes, even for those lash shapes that have their visibility turned off, I still want to animate them so they're in the right position when they become visible. Okay. Now when I use the head control, the eyelashes look a lot better. And they even work in the middle of a blink, as well. So that means all our facial controls are working now. We can easily use these to put the head in any position we want and give her any expression. So the controls are all working now, but there's a little more we can do to keep these organized and usable. We'll put the final touches on our rig in the next video. I'll see you there. 29. 05 08 Finishing the Rig: In this video, we're going to finish up our character rig by adding some features to our controls that will make it more convenient to use. I want to be able to move the controls around so that they can be out of the way of the character when I'm actually animating. So I'm going to make a small bone here, and I don't want it to be able to move, so I'll set its constraints to zero and set it to independent angle. And I'm just going to name it eye control and bring the strength down. Now, I'm going to parent all the face control bones to this bone. While I'm at it, I'm also going to use the color drop down to color code my different sets of bones. So now if I'd rather have the face controls on the other side, for example, I can just use the bone transform tool to move them all at once. Now the next thing I can do is take that little handle bone and set its position control to our rigs root bone. But I'm going to set the Y influence to zero. Now when we use the root to move the character around, the controls come with it. But they don't bounce up and down with every step the character makes. Now, right now, the head control circle is moving, but we'll fix that by setting up a handle for the rotation controls as well. I'm going to make the handle bone and then make sure that its angle is set to zero. Call it rotation controls, and then set the constraint so it can't move. Then parent all the bones to And like with the other handle, I'm going to set its parent control bone to our character's root with the Y influence set to zero. So now it tracks with the character like the other controls, except that the circle is still going up and down, so we need to use layer binding to bind the circle layer to the handle bone. Now that's tracking properly. Great. So now that our rig is complete, let's save it to the library so we can easily use it in other scenes. Just click this button to open the library. Then within our content folder, let's create a new folder called Characters. And then if our main betsy layer with the whole rig in it is selected, we can just click the Plus button here on the library, and we'll add a copy to the character's folder. So then if we're in a new project, we can go to the library and find Betsy in the character's folder, drag her out. Hit Okay. So that's it. The rig is ready to go. Next, we're going to try out doing some animation with this rig by making a walk cycle. And I'll show you how to save animations as actions along with the rig so that you can reuse those later in your scenes. We'll cover all that in the next video. I'll see you there. 30. 05 09 Making a Walk Cycle: Now that we've got our rig built, we're going to try animating with it by doing a walk cycle. Before we get started, there's one feature of the timeline we glossed over before that we can illustrate now. And that's the auto freeze keys option. So let's come out a little ways on the timeline and put the character in a new pose by moving this left arm bone. Now, something to understand about the timeline, on the top here, there's the gray channel that represents the rotation key frames that are set on any bone in the rig, and below that are these red channels that will show you just the keyframes for the bone you have selected. So let's come out later on the timeline and make the next pose by putting both arms over the head. However, now we have an issue. On this right arm, the last keyframe was all the way back at the start. So it starts animating all the way from the start instead of from the last pose. So this is where freezing keys can be useful. Let's delete all the keys and try this again with auto freeze keys on. With that on, whenever we position a bone in the rig to make a new pose, it automatically adds keys for every bone in the ring. Now, when we come and make our next pose, we know it's going to animate exactly from the pose where we last left off. Now, you might not want to have that on all the time, because you'll probably end up with a lot of keyframes you don't need, and that can cause issues later. So instead of having auto freeze keys on, you can use the shortcut Command or Control F to freeze keys at a particular frame just when you want to. Now, since we're going to end up with a lot of keyframes, if we want to make sure to get rid of them, the easiest way is to go up to animation, clear animation, and use one of the options here. This will clear keyframes from the main group layer that you have selected and any sub layers within it. Now, one more thing to think about when we animate a character walking, we know how to move the body parts around, but how do we handle moving the character itself across the stage? There are a couple ways to handle that. The first way is to use the layer transform tool to set keyframes that move the character. This is really simple to do. However, that gives you the extra challenge of matching the speed the character walks to the speed they move across the screen. The other option is to just move the root bone of the character. We even built our rig to be able to do this and have the controls move with it. You build the horizontal movement into your animation this way, it makes it easier to match the horizontal speed to exactly how the character is walking. But there's another disadvantage. Even though we moved the character, the anchor point of the character layer stays in the same place. That means if you wanted to scale the character while they move, the layer is going to scale from the anchor point, not the center of the character. If we don't move the root bone and just leave it over the anchor point and animate the layer instead, it makes it easy to use scale to make the character come closer or move farther away. Both are useful ways to work. But for this example, we'll animate the character walking in place and rely on animating the layer for the horizontal movement. So let's set up the character for the walk we'll be animating. I'm going to rotate the character so she's facing more horizontally. And then, now that I know the neutral position for the ankles, I can position my target bones and set the legs to target them. I've also set the first bone of the foot here to independent angle. Now, for the arms, I'm actually not going to set up the target bones. I just want the arms to swing in a natural arc, and that's actually going to be easier without using target bones. So now I'm going to make the starting position for the character. I want the front foot just at the point where it's making contact with the ground, and then set the arms outward opposite to the legs, and we can rotate the shoulders and hips a little, and the body should be pitched forward a little. Then I'll set the switches for the hands to a position that looks better for this pose. Then I'll select all the keys and copy and paste them out here at frame 17. That will give us a 16 frame walk. That's the end of the cycle. Now, halfway between those at frame nine, I'll paste again. But this time, we're going to reverse everything to make this the touchdown pose of the other foot. I'm using onion skinning so I can generally match the position of the feet and arms so the walk looks symmetrical. I'm going to take advantage of my rotation controls so the character's chest and hips can rotate slightly in opposite directions as she walks. Now I'm going to use Command F to freeze keys on those poses to make sure they stay as I set them. Now we need the in between positions to actually move through each step. I'm going to hide the arms so I can focus on the legs and body. The first thing is to move the root bone up so she gets higher when her leg is directly beneath her. I'm also going to use the transform bone tool to lengthen the bones of her trunk and neck, so she'll have a little more stretch as she bounces with each step. Then I'll copy that, so she's at the same height on the other step. Then I'll just adjust the skirt. Then we've had the default easing on linear. Let's set the easing on all these keyframes to ease in, ease out to make the bounce look a little more natural. Once there's some rhythm to the bounce of the body, we'll actually position the leg target bones so she lifts her feet during the step. This is called the passing pose where the back foot becomes the front foot. I'm going to set the easing so it eases in on the first half of the step and eases out for the second. We want the foot moving fastest during the passing pose. Then let's set the timeline to just our 16 frames to see how the cycle works. First, that's a little faster than I want. So I'll extend this out. So the walk is 24 frames instead of 16. That rhythm looks good, but there's definitely more work we can do on the easing, especially on the feet. So I'm going to change the easing on the target bone keyframes to Bezier and switch to the motion graph. Now, the red graph for the X dimension and the green for the Y dimension look very different. We want to make the X graph or forward motion steepest or fastest during the passing pose keyframe. But on the Y graph for the height of the foot, we want the foot to slow and then reverse. So let's make the graph get flatter at the passing pose. Then to get the skirt right, I pretty much need to go frame by frame and match it up since the width of the legs changes so much. And let's see how that looks. Now, let's turn the arms back on. And just to establish a baseline, I'll set the easing on the keyframes on all these bones to ease in, ease out. And let's see how that looks. That kind of works, but it's pretty stiff and robotic. So let's look at how we can enhance this and make it more natural. First, let's go into the motion graph for the arm and switch these keyframes to Bezier to give us more control. Then to make the arms more natural, we want to offset the rotation of the three arm bones so it curves and whips a little as it swings. With the motion graph, we can do that easily without having to add a bunch of extra key frames. I'm going to bend the curve here so it actually overshoots this key, and the curve peaks a little later. Then I'll do the same for the opposite hump of the curve. Remember, this is going to loop so we can imagine that the two handles on the first and last keyframes are connected. To really get the effect, we need to do the same on the other arm bones. We want the offset and strength of the curve to get more extreme the further down the arm we go. Then I'll just do the same thing on the other arm. So that offsetting makes the arms look a little more natural. Now, let's apply the same principle to the bounce of the body. For the bones of the spine that we made stretch, I'm going to reshape the curve so the bones extend a little farther and a little later, getting more extreme as we go up the spine. And then since we justed the swing of the arms, we should adjust the curves for the rotation bones to make sure the shoulders match up. Then finally, let's smooth out the way the head tilts back. Next, let's work on the way the feet behave. I'm going to adjust the foot bone so the foot drags a little more during the passing pose. Then if we go into the motion graph, all of these are still linear. So let's set those to smooth. And then from there, we're going to set everything to bezier and apply the same principles that we've been doing on the arms and spine. We want to generally smooth out the curve, and we want to offset the curve in a few places so that we get some more flick and flexibility in the movement of the toe. Oh, and it looks like we still need to adjust the target bones curve on the other leg. So now that foot has some flexibility that sells the motion more. Okay, that's our basic walk. Now let's look at how to move it across the screen. First, we need to get the cycle working. Let's select the last keyframe of the walk and set the interpolation to cycle and extend the playback range so we have plenty of time, and we'll test it. So now that's looping how we want, and we can use the layer transform tool to set the starting position and then come out and set the ending position. Now we need to match the timing so she walks at the right speed. We look at the foot that's supposed to be planted during each step and adjust the timing of this last keyframe so the foot stays in place. Looks like there's some spots where the foot is moving unevenly. At the end of the step here, I'm going to adjust the target bone so the ball of the foot moves at the same speed as the ground. That's the part that's actually meant to be in contact. Then I'm realizing we don't actually want the cycle to go all the way back to frame one. Since our last frame is already the same as the first frame, it's holding a frame too long on that pose. We actually just want it to loop back to frame two. So I'll select those last keyframes and go to Window keyframe. And here we can set it to go to frame two instead of frame one. So let's check the wa. The movement looks good, but now we just need to set the skirt to the right position on each frame. And the dynamic bones we put in the pony tail aren't moving how we want. I'm going to go in and adjust the settings on all those. I'll take the torque down and the spring up. There. Now that looks more like what we want. So now that we've made an example animation, I want to show you how we can save this as an action along with the rig. We'll do that in the next video. I'll see you there. 31. 05 10 Saving Animations as Actions: So we finished making a walk cycle animation for the character. Now in this video, I'm going to show you how to save that animation as an action that comes along as part of the character rig. First, I'm going to clear the animation on the layer so that we're just dealing with the walking in place animation. This will be the animation that we save. First, we'll select all the keyframes of our animation and copy them. Then we open the actions panel and click the new Action button to create a new empty action and call it walk. Then we just paste our keyframes in here. Now I'm going to delete the animation from the main timeline, and we'll save this as a new rig. I'll delete the Betsy rig we already had in the library. And then with the main Betsy group selected, click Add to add our rig to the library. So now in a new document, if we add the Betsy rig from the library and look at the actions panel, the walk action has come along with it. Now, to use this action, we need to select it, and then down here, we can either add a copy, which basically just means it will copy the keyframes from inside the action to the timeline where your playhead is, or we can insert a reference. This will add the keyframes, but the layers will refer back to the action itself. If you were to change the animation in the action, it would change it anywhere you've inserted a reference. Now, there's a weird problem here where the root bone isn't going up and down. If I select that, I can see on the timeline that my X and Y channels are separated and don't have any keyframes. If I just rejoin the dimensions, then it's able to apply the animation from the walk action. Now, if you don't want the walk to be exactly the same, you still have the option to move the bones around. If you do that, it will break the link to the walk action, but only for the layers that you've actually changed. And lastly, we saved the cycle effect as part of the action, but we can break the cycle at any time. So, for example, let's come out here and say, starting at this point, we want her to stop walking. So I'll command F to freeze keys. And now we can just add whatever custom animation we want after that point to make her slow down and stop. So that's it for rigging. We'll come back and animate a scene using this rig in the last part of the course. But before that, I want to show you another way to animate in Moho, and that's traditional frame by frame animation. We'll look at that process in the next set of videos. I'll see you there. 32. 06 01 Bitmap Drawing Tools: So far, we've been working exclusively with Mohos vector tools. But in this video, we're going to look at Moho's Bitmap drawing tools, which let you make drawings and paintings that look closer to natural media. Now, to get access to the Bitmap drawing tools, we need to be working on an image layer. So let's create one. I'll give it a name, and we want to make sure it's at least as big as our document resolution, and we want the background transparent for our purposes. And I'll just make that the default. Now, in our tools palette, we have a very limited set of tools. We just have a brush, a paint bucket, fill tool, and eraser, and a crop tool. However, with the brush tool selected, we get a bunch of functionality up here in the toolbar. Here you select the type of brush you want to use. More on that in this second. Then you control the size of the brush here and you can pick the color here. Note that you can't use the style palette to set the color of a bitmap brush. To get a Bitmap color picker, you need to go to Window Bitmap color, and then we can make sure it's docked, as well. With this, we can easily pick the color and set the opacity of the color. Now, what this doesn't give us is the ability to create a nice palette of colors to easily pick. So what you might want to do is make another image layer and import a separate image you prepared with your palette of colors on it. Then when using the brush tool, even on another layer, you can hold Shift and get a color picker and select any color on the stage. And to change how your colors interact, you can use the blend modes drop down here. Most of these are standard blend modes that you would find in Photoshop or other digital painting programs. However, there's a pretty key feature that's hidden in here as well, and that's the draw behind option. This lets you paint your color behind the existing color. So this would be useful for coloring in a shape that you've outlined, say. You could try doing the same thing with the paint bucket tool, but depending on how textured your brush is, that might not end up looking great. If you want to do sort of the opposite, you can turn on lock transparency. Then the brush will only paint where there's already color with the same amount of transparency. And of course, if you want to erase something, you can use the eraser tool. And the eraser tool also gives us access to a handy clear all button if you want to erase the whole layer. So those are the options for controlling color. Now let's look at the brush itself. You have a drop down with a couple options here. The spacing is how far apart your brush tip gets stamped. For most brushes, you want this very low to be able to make an actual brush stroke. Smoothing is how much the software will try to correct for your pen wobble to make your strokes smooth. Then down here, you can turn on pressure sensitivity, velocity sensitivity, or directional sensitivity, assuming the brush you're using is set to use those in the first place. Now, this drop down here is where the real possibilities of the Bitmap brush become apparent. By default, we have a bunch of different preset brushes with a variety of different textures and nuances organized into categories. Brushes like these let you create more natural looking painterly effects than you can get with vector tools. To dig into the settings for a brush, click this gear icon up here. This shows you the stamp, which is the head of the brush and the texture which creates the paper like texture within the brush stroke. And down here, we have settings for how the brush should react to your tablet stylus. It can react to the pressure, the velocity, the direction, and our general settings, we have the spacing and the default blend mode. Of course, on this preset brush, we can't actually change that. So let's set up a custom brush. The easiest way to do that is to just duplicate an existing brush with the duplicate button. Then I can change the name here and choose a category to put it in. If I want, I can create a custom category over here and then put the brush in there. Now I can change whatever I want. Say I want to use a different image for the stamp. I can click Change and then browse for a new image to use as the stamp. Then we can change the texture too or just get rid of the texture altogether. Then for all these settings, you can set them to either linear, exponential or logarithmic. The preview will show you the effect that that will have. The left end is lowest pen pressure and the right is highest pen pressure. Then when you click Save, that brush will show up in your custom content folder in Bitmap brushes as a dot Moho brush file. Now, just to finish out our look at the Bitmap tools, we have the Crop tool. This is good for cases where a particular layer only contains one element of a scene. You can crop down the image to just the size of the content instead of having it take up the whole stage. Okay, so that's it for the Bitmap tools. Now let's try these out and do some frame by frame animation. We'll do that in the next video. I'll see you there. 33. 06 02 Frame by Frame Animation: In this video, we're going to use the Bitmap drawing tools to do some traditional frame by frame animation. Let's do the same bouncing ball exercise we did before, but this time, do it hand drawn. First, I'm going to make a layer and establish the ground plane. Then for the ball itself, we need to set up a frame by frame group. We'll go to the add layer button and then pick frame by frame. Now, we need to choose whether to use vector or image layers for this animation. I'm going to use image layers for this demo. Now I need to pick a naming scheme and size for the images that we'll use for our frames. I'm actually going to make the image a little wider than ten ADP, so I have room to draw outside the edge of the camera frame. And now we need to choose a folder where we want to keep the image files for this frame by frame group. Remember, image layers in Moho will link to a separate image file. They aren't saved as part of the dot Moho file. So we'll make a folder in the directory next to our project file. And now image layers we create in this frame by frame group will automatically get put there. Then if we open that, we can see that it's made an image layer to serve as our first frame of animation. I'll start by drawing a ball at the top of the starting drop just out of frame. Then to make the next frame, I'll come out later on the timeline where I want the ball to hit the ground and press this button, which makes a new layer and switches to it at this point on the timeline. These other buttons are for if you want to delete a frame or duplicate the current frame, in case you just want to modify the last drawing instead of redrawing it. Then the key to making this process work is to use onion skinning. This lets us see previous and upcoming frames. We just need to click just above the timeline to set the frames where we want to be able to see. You can set up to eight total frames, either backwards or forwards. And those markers track with wherever you have your playhead unless you go in the settings drop down here and uncheck relative frames. Then they stay wherever you set them. Now, I'm going to go through and make drawings for all of the key frames of the bounce. If you ever decide you want to retime something, you can just click and drag to move the switch points around. Now I'm going to set the onion skinning back to relative and go through and fill in the in between frames. Okay, now let's try playing it back. So there we go. Now, if you want it, you can make another frame by frame layer over this to do cleanup drawings over these roughs, either with one of the inking brushes or even the vector drawing tools. That's really all there is to it. Technically, this process is very straightforward. It all comes down to drawing and animation skill. Now, I'm not going to be doing a full hand drawn animation as part of our final project, but I will show you how to use these tools to plan out your animations timing and poses. We'll do that in the next video. I'll see you there. 34. 06 03 Sketching Out an Animation: In this video, we're going to use the frame by frame animation tools to plan and sketch out a rough version of the scene we'll later animate using the rig we built. To give you a little sneak peek, this is the three D background I'll be using for the final scene. It's just a section of hallway leading to a library. I don't need to bring this into Moho quite yet. I exported some images and made them into a simple two D background that we'll use for the sketching out phase. This keeps our file simpler and better performing during the planning phase of the scene. So I'll just make a new image layer and browse for the background. Now that's in. Let's set up the frame by frame group. I want to use image layers, and I want their size to be the same as the background image, so I can draw anywhere I want over top of the background. I can see the dimensions of the background image here in the file browser, and I'm actually going to make the width and height of my images a little bigger. Then I'll make a folder to store the image layers in and there we go. Now I have the first big wide image layer here to draw on with the Bitmap tools. Now, I want to fade out the background image to make it easier to draw over. However, there's a problem if I just go to the layer settings and lower the opacity. It looks like it will work, but when I actually draw, the stage doesn't render the opacity effect while I'm making the strokes. It updates once I'm done. I'll set the opacity back to normal and instead put it in a group and then make a vector layer over top of the background layer. Then I'll draw a white vector rectangle over top of everything and lower the opacity of that vector layer. Now when I draw on my frame by frame layers, the background stays faded. Next thing I'm going to do to set up is import the model sheet for the character. Then scale it down to the appropriate size. This will help me keep the character's size consistent as we make different drawings in different parts of the scene. Then we're all set up and we can start drawing out the poses for our animation. I'm using a rough sketching brush to roughen the character. The idea of this scene is that Betsy is a bit of a teen detective and she's sneaking into the library to look for clues. So she's going to quietly sneak down the hallway, and then when she gets to the library, she'll spot a clue. I'm not worried about drawing her super accurate to the model, since these are going to get replaced by the rig in the final anyway. I just want them to be clear enough to indicate the pose that's necessary at this frame on the timeline, so I can match it when I pose the rig. I'm just trying to put in enough keyframes and in between poses to make it clear how she's supposed to be moving when she sneaks. Some of these poses are pretty extreme and might push the limits of our rigs range of motion, but we can modify the rig or adjust things by hand if necessary. We don't want to let the fact that we're using a rigged character limit us too much. So at this point, she pauses cautiously before going into the library. I'm consulting the model sheet here to make sure she's sized correctly. So now the clue she notices is going to be on a globe, so I'm going to draw that on a separate layer in the foreground here. She's going to walk in, look around the space a little bit. And do a take where she steps back on her tracks. And then she's going to walk forward to the globe in the foreground. Great. So that's the end of the shot. Now, to make it easier to see, I'm going to go back and with my brush set to draw behind mode, I'm going to paint in the character with white. Now we can just press play to see the scene play out. Cool. Now, if we wanted, we could just keep going and draw in even more in between poses. And if you wanted to do this as an entirely hand drawn scene, it would just be a matter of doing clean up color drawings over top. And, of course, we still need to pan the camera with the character so she's actually in frame for the whole animation. We'll be working with the camera more in the next video. So with this two D animation as our guide, we're ready to start building the final scene that we'll be animating using the character rig in a three D environment. We'll do that in the next set of videos. I'll see you there. 35. 07 01 Setting Up a 3D Scene: So now that we've planned out a rough version of the scene, in this video, we're going to build out the environment for the final version of the scene. Now, for most shots, you could probably get by with just a two D background image like we have currently. But we're going to do something more elaborate for the sake of demonstration. We're going to build the scene in three D. So when you're working with three D, down here, you're going to want to set your stage to at least two views. We'll use the right one to view what the camera is actually seeing. And on the left, we can use the orbit tool to rotate the workspace and get a three D view of the scene, and see how our scene elements are positioned relative to the camera, which is this purple thing over here. Now, when we're in an orbited view like this, we can use the regular layer transform tool to move our layers along the Z axis if we want. For example, with the globe selected, I can bring that forward so it's closer to the camera. Let's adjust our other view so we can actually see what's happening. Just hold Shift to restrict the thing you're moving to whichever direction you're moving. Or you can take elements like our background and push them farther away. Just remember to also scale things so they appear the right size in the camera frame. But this isn't the background we're actually going to use, so I'll hide that for now. I showed you before that I have a three D model of the library scene. And to bring that in, I just need to go to File, Import, and I'll do general Import. Originally, I set up this library model in a program called SketchUp that lets you import free three D models from the sketch up warehouse. I downloaded a full model of a library and then just cut off the walls to see inside it and added the hallway section. Then I exported it as a dot OBJ file, which is the three D format that Moho can use. Then it's going to prompt us to create a three D object layer, and we do want to check scale to Moho. And now it's in the scene, but it's a little small. You can use the layer Transform tools on the three D object layer, like any other to scale it up. Then we want to position the environment so that our rough animation is positioned correctly. Something important to understand is that when you have separate layers, even if they're positioned in three D, Moho doesn't treat them as truly part of the same three D space. It's always going to render one layer on top of another. So, for example, here, even though it seems like Betsy should be in the hallway, she's getting blocked by the library model. To fix that, we need to drag the library model to the bottom of the layer stack. So now she'll always appear in front of it. If you want Moho to do this automatically, you can go in your project settings and check sort by layer depth, and I'll also check sort by true distance. So now that we can see her in the hall, we need to move the hall so she starts in the right place, and our rough animation will hopefully line up. I can see on the temp background that she should start out three windows down the hall. And most importantly, she needs to end up pressed against the wall just before the library entrance. So now that the model is positioned, right? Let's talk about how it's being rendered. We don't really need to mess with this until we're done animating, but just to introduce these settings, with the model layer selected, if we go to window and choose light, we get this control that lets us position the direction the light is coming from that lights this model, as well as the intensity and distance. You'll notice Moho does a sort of tun shading effect, which is why the light appears in these bands. To change that, we actually need to go into the material settings. On the layer settings for the model, on the material tab, we have settings for each material in the model. This is a particularly complex model, so there's quite a few. But let's look at the settings for the wallpaper here. I happen to know from making the hallway that this material is formica laminate dark. Now, if I change the drop downs on here to eight bands instead of three, there's a slightly smoother look to the tune shading. And you can also change how the material reflects different types of light. Now, I'm not going to adjust all of these until later after we have our effects in and do the final color adjustments. Right now, we have some more elements to get into the scene. We need to put some scenery outside the windows here. So I'm going to go to File Import. And this time, I'm going to import a moho object. I have a skyline set up in a different Moho file. And when I do that, it gives me the option to pick the layers to use. I want all of them. And what's nice is when I import them, they come as separate layers. I'm going to put them in a group and then move them back and scale them up. Now, I want to spread out the depth of some of these layers a little bit. And I can get rid of the outline on these ground levels. Then I'll just the size of each layer so they look good outside the window. Next, I want there to be a little courtyard outside, so I'm going to bring in a garden wall. This time, I want to import a vector file, and it's an SVG. Then I'm going to try to position and scale it so it lines up with the actual front side of the library. Now, something you might find when you scale up a vector object is that your strokes get super thick. To fix that, we just need to go to edit, normalize layer scale. Now that looks right, and I can finish positioning that. Now, one last thing, I want a ground plane outside, so I'll make a vector layer called ground and draw a big rectangle on it. And then in the style palette, I'll set the effect to image texture and use this grass tile image. Then I'm going to use the rotate XY tool to turn the ground so it's flat. Actually, up here, I can just type in 90 degrees for the rotation. Then I just need to position the ground plane. And actually, it looks like maybe I want sort by true distance off. Now that shows up where I want. And I'll scale the grass texture down to a better size. And then I'm going to put all the contents into a group to make it easy to move the scene around relative to the camera if I need to. Okay, so that's as much positioning as I can do without knowing the final camera angles. So let's put in our camera animation now. These are camera controls here. So to start, I'm going to use the track camera tool to shift the camera over to where the character starts. Then later, when she's at the library entrance, I'll track the camera over, which makes a keyframe for the camera. I want that keyframe on this frame, actually. And we can see how well that keeps the camera on her. I think I actually want the camera move to start a little later so she has a chance to walk in frame before we start following her. So I'm going to move that starting keyframe a little later. And I think I'm going to change the default interpolation to ease in out. So any camera keyframes I create now will have that easing. Then I'll keep adding tracking key frames as she enters the library and comes to a stop. Then the plan is to do a zoom in to a close up as she approaches the globe. So I need to position the globe layer to make that work. Then I can use the Zoom Camera tool to get tighter on her and the globe. I also think I might want to try using the pan tilt tool here to give us more of an upshot. That gives us a better look at the library, and we may as well take advantage of the fact that we have a three D set and can move the camera like this. Okay, so that walk up looks good, and she's at the right place in the frame for all these parts of the stopping animation. Now I'm realizing there's an issue with the library model. It has this post in the foreground here at the entrance, and there's no way to make Betsy go behind it without going behind the whole library. I could edit the model to cut that out, but I think we can solve that with some creative camera work in a minute. For now, I think I want to go back to the beginning and zoom in there as well and also make it a bit of an upshot. I think I want to start out focused on the window and then let Betsy walk into frame. We want to make sure the camera gets wide by this point so we can see all the nice full body poses. And then when she stops at the entrance, I want to zoom in closer. I'm going to go in far enough that we don't cross the foreground post. Then I'm going to go into the motion graph for the camera and smooth out the curve so the speed changes are more subtle. And then just a little adjustment to the Zoom curve. And now we're ready to do our camera trick. We're actually going to turn this into two separate shots. On the very next frame after the point we stopped here, I'm going to swing the camera all the way to the other side of the door post, and then zoom in on the face to make the shot different enough that it doesn't feel like a jump cut. There, now it just looks like it's cutting between two separate shots. Then we'll slowly pull out as she enters and looks around and then hook back up with the animation we did for the zoom in on the walk up. So now that we have our camera positioned, I'm going to adjust the background so we can actually see some of that cityscape. Now, let's hit Command R to do a render. And this is what the scene is going to look like. I think we can enhance this by enabling depth of field to push the background out of focus. That will keep the viewers focus on the character. Let's go to the project settings and turn on Depth of Field. If we check how that looks, it looks like the character is actually out of focus. If we look at the three D view, we can see now that we have this box to indicate the depth of field effect. The line in the center is the distance from the camera that is in focus and the square is the range that stays in focus. Beyond that, things will start to get blurred based on their distance from the camera. So let's go back to the project settings and adjust the focus distance until it's on the character. I think I also want the blur radius lower so the blur isn't as extreme. I think six will actually be best. Now when I render, it looks like this. I think that will look good. So now we can see how the shot looks with the camera move. Great. I think that's going to work. Now the next step is to replace the rough animation with our actual character rig. We'll start doing our final character animation in the next video. I'll see you there. 36. 07 02 Body Animation: In this video, we're going to bring in our character rig and start the process of doing our final character animation. So let's bring in the rig from the library and scale it down. We need to think about how tall she should be when she's standing up. Now, an issue I can see right away is because we have the lower camera angle, we can see by the bounding box of our character that it's slightly tilted in perspective, and that actually ends up making the character look more flat. Fortunately, there's an easy way to fix that. In the layer settings for the character, there's a setting called face camera. If I set this to face image plane, free rotate, the layer will always rotate however it needs to, to appear parallel to the screen. Now, I want to see the timing of my rough animation, so I'll turn on the channel visibility for my frame by frame layer. Now I want to retime this a little so there's time for a pose before this where Betsy is off screen and takes a step into this first position. A handy trick for doing that is to right, click on a keyframe, and then you have the option to select keys to write. Then I can just drag everything over. And I'll do the same for the keys on the camera channels. Then I'm actually going to mute the channels for the camera move because I want to be able to focus on the full character as I'm animating her. Now, let's get the character in position and hook up the target bones for the ankles. Now, the first phase of the animation process is called blocking out. This is where I just pose out the rig to create all the key poses for the shot. In this case, by matching up to my rough drawings. Notice I have the default interpolation set to step for this phase, meaning it's not going to add in betweens yet. These poses are just going to hold in place just like the rough drawings. I'm also doing freeze keys on all these key poses. Also, I'm not worrying about the hands or face at this point. I'm going to need to go back and make some new hand positions to match the gestures in the drawings. We'll do all that in separate passes. I'm noticing that the foot is flattening out too much on some of these poses. I'm going to have to modify the rig to get the range of motion in the ankle that we need. Now for this pose, we want the head to face the other way. To do that, we need to flip the bone. Up here are buttons to flip the bone, and we want this one that flips it sideways. Normally, that would be enough. However, in our case, we have an issue. If I lift up the head, you can see the neck is getting twisted. This is because we used point binding to attach the top of the neck to the headbon. This is a big downside of using point rigging, but to fix this, we can just go to the neck layer and select the top three points and then flip those horizontally with the controls in the top bar. Now it looks right, and we can finish the rest of the pose. At this pose, we're at the first place where we want to use the other version of our braid. So I'll switch the switch to braid sketch. And I think I want to turn on squash and stretch for the braid bones. Then I can draw with the sketch bone tool so the braid is going the opposite direction. Then on the next pose, I need to flip the head back and flip the neck points back. We still want the sketch bone braid, so I won't change that back, but I'll make sure it's on the other side of the head. Then I can just continue blocking things out. Here on this standing pose, I need the foot pointed the other way, so I'll flip the leg bone like we did with the head, and the foot flips with it. Thankfully, this doesn't wreck any of our actual art layers. From here, I can continue working. Notice I've been using onion skinning to make sure the feet line up as she goes through all these poses. As she puts her hands on her hips, I'm realizing her left elbow doesn't look great, bent this direction, but we'll fix that later. Now we're to the point where she turns and walks forward. It's a little harder to make the walking convincing the more forward facing she is. We need to rely more on shortening the leg bones because of the perspective, which doesn't read as clearly. Fortunately, since we're zooming in anyway, the feet and legs will go out of frame pretty fast. I'm also moving the character forward in three D space instead of just scaling her up. Because of the camera move, it's going to look better if there's an actual perspective change on the character relative to the background. Okay, I've got all the poses blocked in now, but I want to modify some of our smart bone actions to accommodate these poses. First, for the boots, I'm going to go into all the smart bone actions to increase the range of motion for the first foot bone and make sure the foot maintains its volume even at this new angle. Then on that left elbow, we need to be able to bend it left as well as right, but we never set that up. So I'll make an action that shapes the elbow fold properly when it bends in this direction. Okay, so those poses will look better now. Now, there's one last pose we need. At the very start, we want a pose of her that starts off screen. That's why we gave ourselves those extra frames. Okay, now that we've got all our key poses blacked out, we need to make it transition properly from one pose to the next. I start by setting a set of keyframes to linear interpolation. You could also use smooth or one of the E's in ease out interpolations, if that makes sense for the particular spot you're at. Then I check how that default motion looks and add additional in between keyframes that make the motion more correct. Especially focusing on the feet and using onion skinning to make sure they're staying in place as the layer for the character moves. For the head turn, I need to find the exact right frame in the middle of the turn where the headbone needs to flip and the right place to transition from the dynamic braid to the sketch bone braid. For the point where she stops at the entryway, I'm going to enable squash and stretch scaling and K stretching on the leg bones so she can stretch a little further when she pops up and then settles into the resting pose. Here where she stops in her tracks, the IK for the legs is getting a little haywire because I had the knee break and bend the other direction for that one pose. So I need to track down frame by frame exactly the frame where it should change from one direction to the other. And also, it looks like we're pushing the limits of the skirt here on a few frames because the thigh needs to come up pretty high. We may need to extend the range of the skirt actions, too. But for now, let's just finish our rough in between. I meaning. Okay, that's all the in between frames we want to put in. Now, let's switch to the motion graph and work on smoothing out our curves. I'm starting with the main root bone, specifically the Y dimension, because that's going to define the overall motion of the body. I'm just converting my key frames to Bezier and using the handles to smooth out the curve so she's transitioning smoothly when she changes the direction she's moving. On the curve for the foot target bones, things are a little more jagged. So I'm going to shift points around in addition to using the Bezier handles to create smoother arcs. It's really important for the whole path and speed of the step to be in nice fluid arcs. Otherwise, the walk won't look natural. In fact, whenever possible, I'm going to delete key frames entirely and just rely on the curve handles to get things in the right position. When I get to this stopping animation, I'm finding that it could use some more time to play out and let the leg hang longer. I'm going to select my keys and move them to the right to put some more frames in between each of the keyframes. Got to make sure to move all the camera frames over to match. When I get into smoothing the bones for the spine up through the head, I'm being very aggressive about deleting extraneous points and making bigger smoother curves. That makes it easier to control the overall arc and bend of the body over the course of longer sections of the animation. And it makes it easier to use the curve handles to overshoot and offset the peaks and valleys of the curve so the bones in the chain can offset a little like we did with the arms on our walk cycle. And of course, the same idea applies to the arms here as well. It always adds some nice overlapping action when you can get different parts of the body moving on different timing. On this stop animation, especially, there should be a lot of overlapping action as the leg, spine, head, arms all slow and change direction at different rates. Now, for this spot here where she puts her hands on her hips, I'm actually going to switch to using the target bones for the arms. Thankfully, bone targeting is something you can switch on and off in the middle of an animation. Then once the hands are in contact with the hips, I'm going to parent the target bones to the hips so I know they won't shift around. Then when she goes to touch her chin, I'll break the target bone link on that hand. And then the other one a few frames later. I now the motion of the body is good, so we're ready to start doing our finishing touches, like going through and matching up the skirt. I know there's some spots where the skirt doesn't quite stretch far enough. I could try changing the angle of the hip bone, but I don't want to compromise the animation we just did. So I'm going to extend the range of motion on the skirt bone actions. This time, I'm actually going to extend the angle constraints of the bone dials. And inside the actions for the skirt, I'm actually going to make an additional key frame at 60 pass the one here that we already set for the farthest stretch position at 48. This way, anywhere in the animation where I've already set the skirt position, it should remain pretty close. Then I can just finish positioning the skirt on all of the poses. I'll try to keep the number of keys I use to a minimum and rely on the motion curve to make sure the skirt is changing shape right. Now I'm going to do a pass where I focus on the pony tail. For the section here, where it's in sketch boot mode, I want to make sure it's following nicely along the path the head is traveling. And I want it to swing, overshoot and settle when she comes to a rest by the entrance. In the sections where it's in dynamic mode, I'm going to go in one more time and play around with the bone dynamics so it bounces right in these particular shots. Now I need those new hand poses, so I'm going to duplicate some of the positions already in the switches and then modify the fingers. Then I just make sure it switches to those hand poses at the right point in the animation. And now, just to make that transition to shot two smoother at the entryway, I'm going to shift all the keyframes over to create a slight pause before she starts moving after the camera angle cuts. I'm going to copy and paste that first set of keyframes and set them to step to make sure there's no accidental animation during the pause. Cool. Now let's play the scene and see how it looks. Awesome. Now, the next big thing holding back the scene from being great is that we haven't done much with the facial animation. And also, she is going to have a line of dialogue when she notices the globe. So I'll do the facial animation and lip sync in the next video. I'll see you there. 37. 07 03 Lipsync and Facial Animation: So we've got the body animation done, and in this video, we're going to focus on the face. This phase of the animation will go a lot quicker because the face doesn't need to move nearly as much as the body does. We're going to be dealing with these controls over here. Now, remember that we assigned to these control bones a color when we set them up. So each set of those controls gets a colored channel down here on the timeline to show their keyframes. That's going to be quite handy. Now, all these channels have keyframes from where I did freeze keys on the body. I did already set eye positions as I did the body, so those should remain. But all these other channels should have their keyframes cleared before I get started. I'll delete all the keys, except the rotation property on the orange eye position bones. Now I can start working on the face. On the first frame, I'll establish a baseline expression that looks a little more sneaky and devious to go along with her sneaking animation. One thing I'm looking out for is anywhere where the head is tilting, I want to move the pupils and the eyelids so that it looks like she's keeping her eyelines steady. Anytime I want to set keys to freeze the current position of a bone, I just click on the bone, and then I can come out later and set a new position. Then a big part of making this convincing is putting blinks in the right spot. In general, whenever the head moves suddenly or turns, a person will instinctively blink, like on the swings forward with these big steps here. And then for the next step, I'll just copy and paste the keys from the last blink. H. Then I'll put a quick blink in the middle of the head turn. And when she's looking back, I'll raise the back eyebrow in that direction. So, of course, because the head flips here, I need to reverse which eyebrow gets raised at the point the head switches. Then another blink on the turn back. Then when she pops up to lean against the wall, I'll close her eyes as she goes into the dip. I'll just copy and paste the keys from one of the old blinks. And then make them go extra wide when she's at the top of the bounds and then relax back when she settles. And I'll tilt the eyebrows again on this pose. Y. Now, it looks like there's something weird going on with the eye here. Since I haven't seen it before, it must be on the top lid opening action. Here I can see somehow the linewidth setting on this one point got set super huge. So I'm just going to delete the linewidth keyframe from the timeline here. That must have got set by accident. Now it looks normal and our expression should look right. During the pause here, I'm going to make the eye squint and focus a little. Since this is a close up on the face, we don't want it to be completely still. Then once she steps in, she's going to look around the room. So I'm getting the eyes and eyebrows to match the tilt of the head and the direction of the pupils. Then when she notices the globe, I'll switch the mouth to help give her a surprised expression. Then she's going to transition from the surprised expression to a sort of suspicious expression. Then I'll switch the mouth to the thinking pose I made. Now we're to the part where she has a line of dialog, so I'll need to import the audio for that. I'll go to File, Import, audio file and find the file. And you can see the waveform is represented behind the keyframes here. But to position that sound, we'll switch to the sequencer view. I can see the line is going to go past the current end of the shot, so I'll extend the length of the shot a little. Now, I just need to match up the start of the line with where I want it to start in the animation. Hmm. Well, well, well. What do we have here? Actually, I think that should start a little sooner, so I'll just shift the layer back. Hmm. Well, well, well. Okay, that's a good place to start. Now I just need to go through the line listening and switching the mouth to the right position. I'm going to open the switch selection window to help with that. In general, it's a good idea to have the mouth position precede the sound that it makes by a couple frames. Now, when I'm checking something really precise, like lip sync, I'm going to turn off all the background elements to save on my CPU. I want to make sure we don't get any dropped frames when it tries to play back the timeline. We need to see every mouth position. Hmm. Well, well, well. What do we have here? I think the mouth positions on Well Well Well are coming just a hair too soon. So I'm going to select all those and then shift them just a couple frames. Well, well, well. What do we have here? Okay, that's matching up pretty well. Now we can go into our switches layer settings and on the switch tab, enable interpolate sub layers. Remember, we specifically set up the mouth so that it's able to do this. And now it's transitioning from each pose to the next instead of switching. That's going to make it look a lot smoother. Then since we extended the end of the scene, I'm going to do some additional animation just so she continues to shift and settle a little. We don't want her to be suddenly totally still except for the mouth. Also, I can go through and put in appropriate facial expressions to go along with the line now. There's one last thing I missed. It's interpolating all the mouth positions, including the ones we set for the expression earlier. So to make sure she holds on the thinking position for the h sound, I'm going to copy that keyframe and paste it just before the rest of the actual words start. Okay, the dialogue should be good. Now let's check the whole scene. Hmm. Well, well, well. What do we have here? Cool. So that's the actual animation finished. Next, we're going to enhance our scene by adding some cool lighting and particle effects. We'll do that in the next video. I'll see you there. 38. 07 04 Effects: In this video, we're going to enhance the animation we've done by adding some lighting effects to our character as she moves through the scene. And we're also going to make a particle effect that will make it rain outside our windows. Let's start with the lighting. If we go to the layer settings for the character, you can see there's a layer shading option. By enabling this and setting the settings right, Moho will try to automatically add shadows to your character. You can't see it on the stage, but if we come out a little ways and Command R to render a preview, you can see Betsy gets these shadows added along her edge that give her a little more volume. However, that's not what we're going to be using this effect for. We actually want to do the opposite. So in the layer settings, I'm going to reverse the direction of the shadow, and I'm going to make the shadow inverted. And I'll also just lower the blur a little. Now when I do a render, we get light uptop instead of dark underneath. In fact, I'm going to change the shading color to be a little darker and make the offset bigger so there's more light uptop. Cool. That looks good, but we're going to try to do something more advanced and have the lighting change as she goes past each window. I'll warn you that the way I came up to do this is a bit of a hack, but the results will be really cool. First, what I'm going to do is right click the character layer and pick reference layer. Now, this is a perfect replica of the character and all her animation, except I'm going to change the layer shading to come from the front and set the offset to one, so it will hardly be noticeable and she'll almost be entirely in shadow. This is for when she's between windows and not getting any light from outside. You might notice on the stage, my reference version of Betsy looks super messed up and distorted. That's just some fluke of the stage preview. If I do a render, you can see she looks totally fine. She's going to end up looking really bizarre on the stage, but the rendered version is what we care about. Now, I'm going to make another reference of Betsy giving us three copies in total, and I'll change the shadow settings on this one, so the light will be coming from top right and have a really big offset. This is for when she's standing at the entryway, and the light is coming from the library. Now we're going to use masks to control what version of Betsy is visible in what part of the scene. So on a new vector layer, I'm going to draw three big rectangles. Now I'm going to turn my camera animation channels back on so that I can make sure these rectangles line up correctly with the windows from the perspective of the camera as we move through the shot. Then I'll make the rectangles filled and take off the strokes. And there's our first mask. And I'll put that layer in a group with Betsy, too. Now to set the mask settings. We want the mask setting on the group to reveal all, and we want the window mask layer at the bottom and set to subtract from mask. And, of course, we want Betsy herself set to mask this layer. Then if I render, you can see part of her is getting the light from the window, and the rest of her is all dark. As a finishing touch, we'll go to the layer settings for the mask layer and give it some blur. Now there's not a harsh edge where she crosses the matline. Next, we need a mask to reveal the Betsy lit from the library. So I'll make a new layer and set up that mask. I want it sloped, and there's going to be a fairly big blur on it, so I need it to cover her quite a bit to create the right transition as she approaches. And I'll put it in a group with Betsy three called library Light region, and the mask should go at the bottom. Now, this time, we want the mask set to hide all and the mask layer set to add to mask, but keep invisible, and betsy set to mask this layer. And then when we render, we can see on this particular frame, her back half is lit by the window and her front is getting lit from the library. Now, on the other side of the cut, we need one more Betsy reference. Then in sequence review, I'm going to set the visibility of the first three betsys to end at the cut and this fourth copy to only become visible after the cut, just for simplicity. And on this betsy, I'm just going to turn the shadow effect off. But we still need her back half in shadow to match up with the end of the last hot. So this time, I'll make a new layer and draw a shape on it that will serve as our shadow. Then I'll position it and make it vaguely follow the contours of her head and body. And I'm going to look at the shadow settings for one of our other Betsy's so I can find the shadow color and copy it. Then I can make the shot two entry shadow match. And I'll add a blur to that layer as well. Now, this time, we're actually going to use Betsy as the mask. So I'll put her and the entryway shadow in a group together and set the group masking to hide all and set the entryway shadow to mask this layer and Betsy to add to mask. And if we do a render, there we go. That looks good. Then I'll set the entryway shadow layer to only become visible after the cut. For the rest of this shot, she'll step out of the shadow and just be in the light, and that's it for the shadows. Next, we're going to make it rain outside with some particle effects. First, we need a particle, so I'm just going to make a new layer and draw a long raindrop. Then we'll make a new particle group called rainfall. Then in the layer settings, open up the particle tab. Oops, I need to put our raindrop inside the particle group. Now out on the timeline, it's using the raindrop as a particle, but it's not behaving like rain. Let's adjust the settings. First of all, let's set the direction to down, and we don't want any acceleration. They should already be going at full speed. Then if I find where they actually are, I can see they're offset from the center of the particle layer a lot. So in the raindrop layer, I'll make sure to set the anchor point centered on the raindrop. And now they're coming from the center of the particle system. Now, let's make the source width super wide. This is the region that's going to be generating raindrops. We want it to cover the whole range outside the window. We can also make it a little taller, too. Now, it looks like I've got the raindrop upside down for the direction we want it to move. So I'll just go into that layer and flip it around. Okay, now the rain is pointed down. Then let's get our particle system outside the windows. I'll orbit the camera and then shift the particle group back so it's behind the windows. I'm also going to increase the source depth of the particle group so that our particles will spawn in the three D space with some closer or farther away from the camera. Of course, I need to put the actual rainfall layer behind the library model layer. And, of course, we want to put the source of the rain up higher than the windows. And now I think I need to scale the raindrop down a bunch. Looks like I definitely want to increase the velocity, and I'm also going to increase the source depth even more. And I want to set the spread for the direction to zero, so the drops are all falling in the same direction. And let's do a render to check. It looks like the raindrops are still too big, so I'll scale the drop down again. Then I'm going to up the velocity and lower the lifespan. The lifespan is how many frames a given particle exists for. Each drop only needs to exist long enough to move past the window where we can see it. So the faster it's going, the less its lifespan needs to be. This will let us get by having to generate fewer total particles in the system. Okay, now that's looking more like how we want, but the range should be a little denser, so let's up the particle count. And let's check that. Yeah, that looks like enough to me. And looking at it in motion, I think we could stand to up the velocity some more. And there we go. That rain looks good to me. Now, since I decided to use this three D model as my background, I need to go in and deal with the color and lighting on all of the surfaces. On the materials tab for that layer, I need to go through each of the materials for the different surfaces in the model and adjust the lighting. I want to reduce the banding effect of the tune shading. In general, a good way to do that is to decrease the intensity of the diffuse and specular lights and increase the ambient intensity. Okay. Then the last thing is to replace the sketch of our Globe. So I'm going to bring in another three D model. Now I need to use the lighting tool to set the direction for the light. And it's banding really bad. So if I go into the material for the globe itself, I'm going to make sure to up the bands to eight. Then I'm going to up the ambience and lower the diffuse and specular. But we don't want to lose the shadows entirely, so I need to play around and find the right diffuse and specular settings. Okay, I think that's going to work fine for this shot. Okay, now that we've done all these effects, we want to see what they look like in motion. Since we can't see them on our timelines playback, we're going to need to export our animation. We'll look at how to export and animation in the next video. I'll see you there. 39. 07 05 Exporting: So we've got the animation all finished, but with all these effects we're using, we can't really tell how it looks until we do a full export of the animation. We've been able to render a single frame, but now we want to see the full thing with all the effects in motion. To do that, we go to the file menu. And first of all, I want to point out this option preview animation. This will render things out basically the same way you see them on the stage, but it will process every frame ahead of time and then show them as a movie. So if your machine is sluggish and you're having problems with the frame rate of your playback on the stage, this is a fast way to see what your animation looks like at full speed. However, it still won't process all the styles and effects, which is what we want to see. For that, we want to choose export animation. Then we have options for how to configure the export. We can specify the frame range we want to export. Then we can choose the output format. There are a couple video formats or you can export a flash Swift or a gift or an SVG, or you can do an image sequence. Now, if you need a very high quality export of a shot to composite or edit in another program, you might want to export an image sequence or use one of the QuickTime formats if you need sound. But if you're exporting your final video out of Moho, we'll be fine just using the MP four setting. Then down here, you have render options. Most of these have to do with ways to make your render go faster, which you might want to do if you're in the middle of the animation process and just want to check on how the scene is shaping up. You definitely want multi threading enabled to make things faster if your CPU supports it. You can render at half dimensions or half the frame rate. Those will both make the render twice as fast. You can disable effects on shapes like the grass image texture on our ground or layer effects like the shadows on the character, and you can reduce particles so there's less calculations to be done with that. And you can turn off anti aliasing or extra smoothing on images. All of those will reduce some aspect of your quality but make the rendering process a lot faster. The other thing you might want to do is just render a particular part of your scene. You could enable rendering muted channels or not. So if this was off, any animation channel you disable on the timeline will stay disabled in your export. For example, if we were to mute the Zoom channel on our camera, it would give us a wideshot version of the whole animation. And on this drop down here, if you have any layer comps set up in your scene, you can specify one, and it will only render layers that are part of that layer comp. Like here, I have layer comps for each level of the set. This can be handy if you just want to get your elements out of Moho and composite them in after effects or another editing program. Then you can specify where you want to save your file and the file name. And finally, down here with this dropdown, you can save your configuration of settings with a name so it will appear on this menu and you can reuse. Now there is a slightly more advanced option for exporting, and that is under File Moho Exporter. Now, what this is is basically a queue for different rendering jobs. You'll notice it automatically added a render job for both of the Moho projects I currently have open. You can also click Add and find another Moho project to add an export job for that file. This way, if you have a lot of content to export, you can set up all your scenes to render, press Play to start the Queue, and leave and come back later. If you double click on a job, you can get the same settings we were just looking at. Now, even if you don't have multiple project files, there are other reasons you might want to set up multiple export jobs. For example, I could just duplicate this for our main scene and configure the two exports differently. Like, for example, since we actually have two shots in this project, I could change the frame range on one job to just the first shot and the other job to the rest of the timeline. Then that would give me two separate files for the two shots if I wanted to edit them in a separate editor as part of a larger video. Or if I wanted my layer comps separate, I could make a job to render each one. In fact, this button here will automatically separate the current job into separate ones for each layer comp. There's even a column to show which layer comp each job is rendering. But in this case, I'm just going to export the whole scene as a single MP four video with all the effects on. I'm going to make sure the layer comp is set to the one I made for all. Then we just press play and let that run, which because of the complexity of our scene and all the effects, it's going to take a long time. You can see the status for each job in the column over here. Okay, that took a long time to render, but we're finally ready to check out our final scene. Hmm. Well, well, well. What do we have here? Awesome. So that's it. That concludes our animation process and the course. I hope you're feeling inspired to dig into Moho and do some animation of your own. You can try using the Betsy rig that comes with the course or use the features we've covered to rig a character of your own. Now that you're familiar with the software, you might want to check out one of Boop Animation's skills courses. Animation foundations is your best option for learning or improving your animation skills. You'll learn all the principles and skills that go into great character animation. If you want to go back a step and learn how to visualize a story for animation, check out storyboarding foundations. You'll learn all the filmmaking terminology and storyboarding techniques for planning out shots that you can then animate in software like Moho. If you want to go even higher level, you can learn the entire animation pipeline in making an animated movie. All 30 of these lessons come free with every course, so you should already have access. Check it out if you haven't already. I think you're going to love working in Moho and we can't wait to see what you create. Share your creations on social media with the hashtag made with Moho. Have fun and get animating.