How to fix and prevent this flexi-binding issue?

[synthsin75]

Well, that seems pretty unfair to characterize it as only able to make profile pictures. Debut is far more capable than a cheap app.

This was paraphrasing what you wrote yourself.

No, it's really not. There must be some kind of language barrier going on here.

[Greenlaw]

Huh? But isn't it the whole issue that Moho can't bend it without adding unwanted artifacts? That's the whole point. If it would work I wouldn't need to bend it right?

What I meant was that you can use Moho to create a straightened image and rendered that as the new base image for proper rigging and achieving nicer deformations. Chances are, the straightened image won't be pretty but it could be easier to clean in a paint program for a new base image.

I do this often for 3D rigging when I receive geometry that's been pre-posed 'in character'. In these situations, I may use bones or other deforming tools to straighten out limbs, like say curly octopus tentacles (I had to do that only a couple of years ago,) freeze the straightened geo, and then rig it properly for animation. This was 3D but the same principle can apply to images that have been drawn already posed, like your elephant's trunk.

To be honest, it's probably easier to just redraw the trunk (would be for me anyway,) but if the goal is to preserve the original drawing as much as possible and achieve the most flexibility for posing, it's best to straighten it out as much as you can, render it (i.e., 'freeze' it) and then rig the straightened version.

And if everything is so difficult to do in Moho Debut than I could easily switch to Spine and do it there without this issue. Or another tool, like OpenToonz or perhaps even Blender?

As mentioned, what I'm describing would be true in pretty much any program. It's not the software, it's the situation.

I'm sorry to say, but I have to dissagree on this. It's pretty unrealistic to use for real world projects, even for simple cut out rigs or moving and rotating things around IMO. For one because you can't export more than 2 minutes, but mostly because you can't even export to 1920x1080.

Re: shot length: for most TV and film productions I've worked on, the average shot length is about 5 seconds. (I just looked this up and the actual average shot length for a feature made prior to 1960 was about 8-11 seconds, and more recently it's been 4-6 seconds.) It's unlikely that I'll ever work on a single shot running for more than 2 minutes unless it's for a ride film, and it's not likely that will be a 2d cartoon.

Re: output size: yes, 1920 x 1080 is regarded as the minimum industry standard these days. This is especially true for 2D cartoon TV shows, but many 3D animated TV shows are actually still rendered 720p for practical reasons. But, as Wes mentioned earlier, Debut's target audience is beginners and hobbyists producing on a budget, and certain concessions had to be made for Debut's feature set. That said, I still believe Debut is capable of producing professional quality animation but the work does need to be designed around its known limitations.

Trivia time: the longest single-shot scenes I've ever worked on was for three Call Of Duty cgi trailers/commercials I worked on back in the late 2000's, and these ran about 20-30 seconds max. That took a fairly large team of artists/animators to pull off. Might be worth noting that this was also our very first HD (1080p) job. It was a great crew though and we had a lot of fun creating these trailers. (Sigh...memories!)

This post is mostly just my personal opinion but I hope it clarifies a few things.

[mmmaarten]

What I meant was that you can use Moho to create a straightened image and rendered that as the new base image for proper rigging and achieving nicer deformations. Chances are, the straightened image won't be pretty but it could be easier to clean in a paint program for a new base image.

Straighten it in moho, render it out, open it in a paint program to clean it up is actually a great idea. Thanks! I'll keep that one in mind!

As mentioned, what I'm describing would be true in pretty much any program. It's not the software, it's the situation.

Sorry, that's just not true. In Spine the exact same rigging was no problem at all without any need to straighten any image (see the video in my post above where I already done this animation by using Spine). And for what it's worth: that counts for all animations I ever did in Spine; I never had this 'concave'/'pixel-smear'-problem, because you can manually setup every grid you like the way you like it in Spine. Pro for that is that it's completely configurable, con is that it is more work to setup. I understand results will always be better when bending straight images tho, whatever program we use, but when only moving little things like this trunk it shouldn't be a problem bending images and to me that compromise in quality is acceptable for the amount of easier it is to design and rig things and get them the same in animation as on illustration. It makes the workflow easier and faster en gets the same output as the original drawing, painting strokes and imperfections. If we have control over the mesh.

When doing more bending, or it would distort unacceptable much, or if software can't handle it, I would make it straight for sure.

That said; By your reactions I'm convinced it wouldn't be an issue in Moho Pro either when using the mesh as you guys suggested. So I'm not worrying about that and I'm positive it will be equally possible in Moho Pro as in Spine. And like it, because Moho has and is so much more than rigging alone!

Thanks for the tips guys and love your enthousiasm about Moho Greenlaw! That's nice to see.

[Daxel]

Yeah the mesh workflow is pretty much the same in both programs. I think you guessed it right, Moho offers flexibinding as a very quick but less adjustable option, that sometimes is all you need but I have never relied on it for an entire character that is not a background character or something like that.

[mmmaarten]

Yeah the mesh workflow is pretty much the same in both programs. I think you guessed it right, Moho offers flexibinding as a very quick but less adjustable option, that sometimes is all you need but I have never relied on it for an entire character that is not a background character or something like that.

Thanks for the confirmation!

[Greenlaw]

A possible cause for the tearing image could be how Debut auto-generates a mesh for an image, and the mesh resolution isn't high enough for what you're trying to do.

Moho Pro does this too but in Pro you have the option to create your own custom mesh for higher quality deformations.

There's no way to create a custom mesh warp in Debut but there may be a workaround: draw your shape around the artwork and then apply the artworks as an Image Texture effect. Note that you will need to knock out the elephant's background if it's not already transparent.

This is essentially how I created the Puss-In-Boots puppet seen here...

Puss In Boots Interactive' Demo Reel (2018)

The character is all vector shapes but I filled them with painted textures using the Image Texture effect. The catch with this method is that moving the points will not deform the image like a mesh warp, the deformation must be done using bones. However, now you have a mesh with editable points that you can bind using Flexi-binding, Selective Flexi-binding or Point Binding. This method should work in Debut just like it does in Pro. Tip: use Select Shape to reveal an animatable widget for the image.

Hope this helps.

Edit: It might not be clear in the video but the book page illustrations were also animate in Moho (well, ASP 11 anyway,) with only a few elements animated in After Effects. These illustrations were painted as stills in Photoshop, and I think I could have rigged and animated these drawings in Debut the same way if I had to. (Might be pushing it for Debut though. Debut is better suited for simpler puppet rigs with minimal bending.)

[Greenlaw]

Experimenting with this right now in Debut and it's not working the way I thought...but I have another idea for this. Will post something later if I have time.

Update: Shoot, almost had something. Managed to suppress the tearing but found Image Texture doesn't respect the PNG's alpha channel. I guess up to now I've always applied images right the edge of vectors. Have some time so still trying.

[synthsin75]

Update: Shoot, almost had something. Managed to suppress the tearing but found Image Texture doesn't respect the PNG's alpha channel. I guess up to now I've always applied images right the edge of vectors. Have some time so still trying.

Image texture does respect transparency. You just need to select "Through transparency" in the image texture settings.

[Greenlaw]

Sorry for the delay in posting this but I wasn't feeling well last night and I went straight to bed after I finished this test.

Image texture does respect transparency. You just need to select "Through transparency" in the image texture settings.

D'oh! It's been a while since I used Image Texture and I totally forgot about that. Thanks for the tip. I may give this technique another go this evening. Update: Ugh...Debut doesn't have the Through Transparency option.

@mmmaarten and other Debut users following this thread....

This was a fun test! I haven't tried anything like this in Debut before because, well, because I use Moho Pro, but it was interesting to see how far I could push things inside Debut.

First--in case anybody is wondering--if you own Moho Pro you can switch to Moho Debut at any time by enabling Run As Moho Debut from Preferences. You will then need to restart Moho to make the switch. Of course you can always switch back to Pro.

Once I was in Debut, I tried various techniques using mmmaarten's elephant artwork and here's the result of the final test...



This is what the project looks like inside Moho Debut...



Before breaking down the above setup, allow me describe the techniques that didn't work.

First, I tried using Selective Flexi-binding like in the original example by mmmaarten and the result was predictable. Where the trunk was close to the itself, the image would tear. This commonly occurs because Moho's auto-generated mesh is fairly low-res and un-editable, and there isn't a way to isolate the influences of the bones, not directly anyway. Note that in Moho Pro this is less problematic because you can create your own custom mesh for mesh warping, and there are more options for binding. Ideally, however, it's better to simply straighten out the trunk and rig it as normal, which we'll go into later in this post.

The second technique I tried was to create a shape around the trunk and use Image Texture to fill the shape with the same trunk image. This produced the same tearing result, which I guess should have been expected. So then I tried splitting the shape into two shapes and filling each with the trunk image using the same transform settings. The ideas here is that I can use Selective Flexi-binding to limit which bones affect different sections of the trunk. When I animated this setup, the geometry split where the two shapes were aligned, so next I used Bind Points to bind the edges to a common bone. This approach technically worked but the deformation did not interpolate smoothly between the two bones...this was totally expected but at this stage I just wanted to see if I could keep the edges together. Next I added another bone in-between the two bones so it branched off, and I used Point Bind to bind the edge to this bone instead. This technique worked fine so long as I animated this bone to follow 50% of the rotation value of the next bone. (Note: In Pro, you can automate this animation by using a Rotation Constraint set to 50% of the second bone's rotation...this method in Pro is much MUCH easier to animate with!)

I also had trouble with transparency in the Image Texture effect but, as synthsin75 pointed out, I needed enable this option in the settings. I may revisit this technique later. Update: As mentioned above, Debut doesn't have the Through Transparency option.

Finally, I decided the best approach was to straighten out the trunk artwork as recommended earlier. This was easy to do in Photoshop. First I chopped up the trunk into three layers like this...



Then I used Liquify to straighten out the parts like this...



Next I merged the layers and cleaned up the imperfections. This whole process took less than 5 minutes so definitely worth the effort.


The image was then imported to Moho Debut and rigged like this...



Nothing fancy. I just used Selective Flexi-binding for each layer to control the deformations.

Some more info about this animation:

1. I used Layer Shadow to give the individual parts a little extra depth. I felt this made the final render look a little more like a hand crafted greeting card.

2. The elephant art was downloaded from mmmaarten's link and adapted for this test, the backdrop was a free image I found at a stock image site, and the rose was snipped from IKEA's website. I didn't want to spend any time creating new artwork since this was just a test.

3. The background art uses the Hide In Editing option. This hides the layer in the workspace but still allows Moho to render it. This option simplifies the display to make it easier to animate in.

4. When working with bitmap images in Moho Debut or Pro, you might see faceting along the edges of the artwork in the display. You might not have to worry about this because Moho will generate a higher-resolution mesh for final rendering. For example, in the above example, compare the curve of trunk in the animation to the curve seen in the GUI image...it's much smoother in the animation. When you're not sure, use Ctrl-R to check the quality.

5. Yes, I know the elephant's head is chopped off and that he doesn't have eyes. If anybody wants to fix that, here are the files: DebutElephant_02.zip Have fun!

Animating this clip reminded me of the differences between Debut and Pro. Here are my observations:

1. There is no way to turn off the Checkerboard Preview for Styles in Debut. I really hate this option because it makes it difficult to tell what color I'm working with on the shape. Personally, I feel Checkerboard needs to go aways or at very least Debut users should be given the option to disable this feature. It's an unnecessarily annoying and frustrating feature.

2. Animating the trunk in Debut was easier than expected but, FYI, it's even easier in Pro because I can use Sketch Bones there. Sketch bones lets you draw the shape you want over the bone chain and it sets the keyframes for each bone automatically. This is a very nice feature for animating tails, rope, or anything that needs to be wiggly. Sketch Bones is only one of many reasons to upgrade to Pro.

3. By default, Debut uses Consolidated keyframes in the Timeline. This is good for beginners who may get confused by the density of keyframes that can appear when Consolidated is turned off, but it does make it harder to add secondary animation and subtleties. In this case, I needed to disable Consolidated to be able to add a small bounce to the flower animation. On the plus side, Consolidated does make it easier to retime the overall animation, which was helpful for getting the speed of the trunk animation smoothed out.

4. That said, taking Debut out of Consolidated mode can be a nightmare to work with because there is no way to hide unnecessary channels. In Pro, I prefer to keep the color bone channels hidden because they can quickly clutter the timeline and overwhelm the user with redundant visual data. To see this in practice, watch this video from the 8:54 mark: Better Default Settings For Moho Pro. Unfortunately, Moho Debut doesn't offer the option to simplify the timeline. This is probably another option that should be in Debut if it's going to be aimed at beginner users.

5. Debut does not have Group layers like Pro does, however you can use Debut's Bone layers just like Group layers. For example, notice that I have a Bone layer called Flower that's used only for masking and not for bones at all. There's also a hidden Bone layer called NotUsed, which is where I stored layers used in earlier tests but not needed for the final test.

6. Debut does not support keyframeable parenting so to get the elephant to pick up the rose, I used visibility instead. BTW, this is a pretty good technique even when you do have keyframeable parenting.

7. Re: the auto-generated mesh: notice how the trunk is able to roll in front of itself. This is because the polygons in the auto-generated mesh happen to be stacked in order from top to bottom. However, if I wanted to tuck the trunk behind itself, I'm out of luck because I can't change the stacking order of the polygons in Debut. In Pro this isn't a problem because I'm likely to create my own mesh for this and I can sort the polygons anyway I like there.

To sum things up: I still think Debut is a fine choice so long as you're not trying to create animation that's too advanced or ambitious for its toolset. You can do a lot with what Debut offers but you need to design sensibly for its feature set. To me this means approaching Debut projects as traditional paper cutout style with some simple bones deformations, and relying on Switch layers to change drawings. But that's just my personal opinion and what I think shouldn't discourage anyone from thinking bigger about their Debut projects. How Debut is used by other artists is entirely up to them and their own vision.

Hope this helps.

Revisions: Added item 7. Re: the auto-generated mesh, and updated note about the Transparency option in Image Texture.

[synthsin75]

1. There is no way to turn off the Checkerboard Preview for Styles in Debut. I really hate this option because it makes it difficult to tell what color I'm working with on the shape. Personally, I feel Checkerboard needs to go aways or at very least Debut users should be given the option to disable this feature. It's an unnecessarily annoying and frustrating feature.

Hehe, I actually prefer the checkerboard.

[Greenlaw]

I just knew somebody was going to say that.

Anyway, it should be optional like in Pro.

[Greenlaw]

Ah! This is why I couldn't enable transparency for Image Texture in Debut...



Another mystery solved. Except...why was it removed?

One more reason to upgrade I guess.

[Greenlaw]

Oh, one more difference between Debut and Pro that I forgot to mention: Debut doesn't support exporting to GIF so I used Debut to render out an image sequence of the animation, and then had to switch to Moho Pro to import that Image Sequence to re-render it as the GIF you see posted above.

So, that's another reason to upgrade. Of course, there are other ways to convert an image sequence to a GIF but it's convenient to be able to do this directly from Moho.

[mmmaarten]

posts

Wow! This is amazing @Greenlaw! Sorry for my late response, I didn't know about your posts until now. Pretty cool to see how you got it working! Thanks a lot for all the efforts!
Will definitely take a closer look on everything you did and your tips tomorrow! Thanks again! Very helpful!

[synthsin75]

2. Animating the trunk in Debut was easier than expected but, FYI, it's even easier in Pro because I can use Sketch Bones there. Sketch bones lets you draw the shape you want over the bone chain and it sets the keyframes for each bone automatically. This is a very nice feature for animating tails, rope, or anything that needs to be wiggly. Sketch Bones is only one of many reasons to upgrade to Pro.

Umm...sketch bones are available in Debut.