IDS - Animated Short Film - Production Diary - 003
This is part two of my production diary for my short animated film “ I Dont Steal “. Where I go over the beginning stages of how I will animate and composite my shots.
Project Update
I’ve gotten the son character artwork back from an artist and I have started working on prepping the artwork for animation.
From the last update I was going to be using after effects for the character animation using Joy sticks and sliders, and Limber 2. I’ve decided to change up the plan and move forward with Moho 14 to animate my characters.
It is so much more intuitive and fast.
One of the best parts is that while you’re working with vectors there is no limit to the resolution you can work in or export. Even with joy sticks and slider you’d have to deal with constant precomps linked by expressions that break and all those comps have their own pixel resolution.
I have started to work on rebuilding the artwork in Moho to make the animation process smoother. I found that just importing the SVG from affinity or illustrator made it really messy with all the chunks and parts used to make it.
So I am importing the illustration in as a tracing layer and rebuilding the artwork in a more efficient manner that will help with animation later on.
Once I got the head built I wanted to start messing with rigging right away to understand it. I built a simple head turn and blink action to see how they look when blended together.
watch the test below.
Moho 14 Character Animation Test
I’m very happy with how this looks with only using two seperate controllers. I know it will only look better with additinal rigging.
Here is what the viewport looks like with the smart bones animating.
Moho 14 Character Animation Test Smart Bones
Current Progress
I believe I have locked down the animation software I will be using with Moho 14 Pro.
Next steps
Next steps are to finish working out how I will need to rig characters in Moho, Im thinking every shot might just be its own rig instead of trying to waste time and build 1 rig that could do everything. I think Im going to do more tests and experiments with rigging to make sure I get the process down before doing it wrong on a bunch of shots for my film.
Want to help out?
This is a passion project that I am ultimately doing both in my own time and my own money as well as calling in favors when I can. If you’d like to help me out in any way I’ve added a donation option below if you feel the want/need to help contribute to this project. Anyone who donates will have a credit added in the film.
If you can’t donate please consider signing up to the email list to get updates on the project as it progresses along.
