3D Buildings

[starstriker32]

Hello, I was wondering if anybody here has tried using Moho Pro in scenes to give buildings a 3D Look? Especially in scenes where the camera might be slightly panning or orbiting?
I assume you might treat it like a head turn? Was just wondering if anyone has tried it or knows of any examples or resources and techniques?

I assume most people would go to a 3d program for things like this but I've never been that great with 3D, and it can be a struggle to texture these things and get them to match your artistic style from more traditional progams like Clip Studio Paint and Photoshop.

Thanks.

[synthsin75]

Someone that used to be a regular here years ago made an entire city block using 3D rotated layers. Looked like a ton of work, but it was impressive.

[slowtiger]

I did some sketchy 3D setups of a house or a piano to get a rotation right, but only used that as reference to trace over in TVPaint.

There was a very nice example in a short online which had the common parallax tracking, but added side walls to buildings which followed perspective. Worked very nicely. Of course I can't find that anymore now ...

[Greenlaw]

There are many ways to achieve this effect. Here are some suggestions based on my experience...

I use both 2D and 3D in my work, but I'll sometimes cheat 3D in Moho when I feel it will be easier and just as effective as using real 3D art/animation.

It requires understanding how perspective and parallax work, and how the effects can be simulated using 2D techniques...which, of course, any good traditional artist should be familiar with. After that, it's knowing how to apply Moho's tools to get those effects in animation.

For buildings, lay out some perspective guidelines in a separate vector layer. Now you can draw elements in another vector layer, just like you would traditionally. From here, you could draw everything in perspective, but that wouldn't necessarily lend itself to animation. Fortunately, Moho has tools and techniques that make it easier to animate 2D to appear 3D.

For the art, you can use quad shapes in Perspective Mode to warp images to have true perspective. To get Perspective Mode, the curves need to have only four points and not be attached to other curves. If you don't follow the rules, then the shape will work as a regular quad deformer without the perspective effect.

Ideally, the element that will be warped should not have perspective itself, but should be drawn flat like decals. This will give you more flexibility for warping. (Note: Creating everything as a flat decal could be overkill when the animation is going to be minimal, but that's up to you and the requirements of the scene.)

The images for warping can be vector art, photos, paintings, or pre-rendered Moho vector drawings. When using vector art, you will need to draw it in a way that makes deforming it optimal. Personally, I often find it easier to pre-render it to a bitmap. There are pros and cons to this, but bitmaps typically give me better results for warping. Again, this depends on the degree of warping you intend to apply. For simple perspective shifts, it probably doesn't matter.

After you have the images for warping prepared, use the quads to fit the images to the perspective grid. To animate them, grab the corner points for the quads and animate them appropriately. If it helps, you can animate the perspective grid first, and then match the quads to follow it.

For added realism, you can add elements in separate layers, adjust their z-positions, and create true perspective by moving the camera. Hmm...actually, that could get messy because you're trying to sync fake 3D with real 3D effects. It should work, but within reasonable limits. Again, it depends on the scene.

If animating this art is something you expect to do frequently, and at varying degrees and speeds, I suggest using Smart Bones for this animation. (Tip: If you're new to Smart Bones, our next tutorial video, Endless Nachos, Part 3, will be all about different ways to use them.)

I haven't looked lately, but there are probably other tips and rules in the manual, so I recommend reviewing that. (I should review the manual myself because it's been a while since I looked through it, and I'm sure there's newer stuff I'm missing out on.)

Anyway, applying 'real' perspective animation effects in 2D is fairly easy to do in Moho. It just requires planning ahead to do it well.

The other option is to use actual 3D in Moho. But, to be honest, if you're going that route, it's easier to do this using a dedicated 3D program (like Blender), and it will look better, too. Then, you can composite the Moho elements with the 3D elements in a compositing program (which could be a program like Moho or Blender, but I prefer using After Effects or Fusion).

Hope this helps. If you need more info, let me know, and I'll think about making a tutorial on the subject with visual examples.

[hayasidist]

Here are some examples of using moho's 2d vectors in 3d.

https://youtu.be/KFcyaKehHxc -- external view of a building in a landscape
https://youtu.be/JwzmQMD5Q2I -- internal view of a room
https://youtu.be/PjFulEo2auw -- trees / mountains / terrain

The common lesson I took from all of these is one of consistency of scale and an understanding of how rotating a vector layer can place objects "unreasonably close" to the camera (leading to major distortion with the default settings).

Back in the earlier days, the camera in Moho was set up much more as a rostrum camera - wide angle, close to the default z depth. This (IMO) was useless for using layer rotation and z-placement to achieve 3d. So I moved the camera "way back" and changed its field of view (increased its effective focal length) to allow a typical vector layer to be rotated around x/y without the sort of distortion that comes from having (say) one edge 0.5 moho units from the camera and the other 2.5 moho units away. IOW - reduce the proportionate difference between "front" and back" to give a realistic perspective effect. Today's camera is slightly more akin to a cine camera but nonetheless needs to treated carefully when rotating layers to ensure that the near and far edges are proportionately not greatly separated.

The other important consideration (IMO) is scale - and this remains true today. For example if you draw a whole scene on one vector layer with each major item occupying half the screen height - e.g. a person (full length) foreground, with a tree in the mid ground and a mountain in the distance, there are three extremes of scale: (loosely) the person has 1 moho unit = 2 metres; the tree is 1 moho unit is 10 metres; and the mountain is 1 moho unit = 3000 metres. The terrain on which these items sit has a scale that varies "smoothly" between the extremes. Add the sky and the sun and you have a scale that can make 1 Moho unit perhaps 300 M Km. IMO to get a realistic 3d effect, it's important to pick a scale and stick to it. In Little Boy Blew I had the teardrop at (something like) 0.001 moho units and the mountains at (dunno exactly) - say a few hundred moho units with their layers at a z depth of maybe a thousand (IOW 1 moho unit = about 10 m). Then the intervening terrain needed to cover 10Km or so - i.e. 1000 moho units ...

I cut that vast range down dramatically in the PTZ test, but the principle remained the same. And the internal room (mixed live and animated) was (comparatively) trivial in terms of diversity of scale in any one shot.

In all these cases, to make life easy for me, I typically put the point of rotation at an item edge (not its centre) so (e.g.) If I had a wall that was 10 m long that had to stretch from z = -5 to z = -6 I'd draw it as 1 moho unit wide with its point of rotation at the near edge, place the layer at z = -5 and then rotate by 90 degrees about y.

[Panha]

I sometimes like working with 3D scene in Moho. It is much easier than 3D software to create a simple 3D scene. Since Moho is a 2D software, there is much limitation to 3D building, however, I found myself very comfortable building some 3D in Moho better than in 3D software. Easy to build, and right for the task I work with Moho.
I used to try import 3D object to Moho, but the more complex the object is, the more it is weird Moho can handle. So I decide to build my own 3D scene using 3D axes in Moho. However, it would be helpful if in the future Moho could update feature like:
- precise texture fill for vector to 3D in Moho
- Points can be dragged to Z axes
- precise measurement where the 3D object should placed. Recently, we have to be very caution when placing 3D objects. For example, a 3D building (built with vector in Moho) on the ground (flat image that rotate on 3D axes, to make ground) would look like it moving when we move camera.