AnjaFrey wrote: ↑Tue Mar 15, 2022 11:06 am
This is clearly a beginner's question: I look forward to your experiences and advice! Which is better - to use an image (PNG, PSD etc.) or to draw/import vectors directly into MOHO?
It depends partly on the style you're going for but also for the technical capabilities you wish to use.
Bitmap art is preferred when you want a very textured look to the characters. In this case, the art has to be created in a third party program like Photoshop, Krita, or Procreate. You can deform bitmap art using bones and custom meshes, and you can use Smart Bone Actions with the meshes.
The upside with bitmap art is that the art can be quickly painted directly in your program of choice, and Moho will automatically update the changes when the bitmap is saved.
The downside is that there is limit to how much you can deform and alter the artwork from within Moho, so you will probably need to create a lot more variations and layers.
The biggest downside is that a bitmap image is resolution dependent. For example, if you use too low a resolution, the art will look chunky and pixelated when you zoom into it. If you use too high a resolution, you might unnecessarily degrade performance, making it harder to animate the character.
Vector art is preferred when you want a clean line look, and you want maximum flexibility in how you edit and change the artwork over time. In short, you can directly change and animate almost any attribute in a vector graphic from inside Moho. The vector art deforms with bones or custom meshes, and you can use Smart Bone Actions directly on the artwork itself or on a Smart Mesh deforming the vector art. And of course vector art is completely animatable in ways that are impossible with bitmap layers.
There aren't many downsides to using vector art but it can be harder to create than bitmaps. With practice, it's not so bad though. Another big plus is resolution independence. You can zoom into vector art as closely as you like, and it will always render sharply and smoothly.
The one downside with Moho vector art for me is that the Freehand and Blob Brush tools don't work very well in Moho, but the other tools are just fine...I would even say they're
excellent for created shapes you intend to deform using bones.
Regarding created vector art in Moho vs a third party program: If you intend to deform the art using bones, it's way better to do this inside Moho because you can optimize and control the placement of your points as you create them for the best looking deformations. If you create your vector art in a third party program, chances are you're going to spend so much time altering the artwork to make it work with your rig, you may as well have just drawn it in Moho to begin with.
You might have noticed that I didn't say you can't have a textured look with vector art. This is because you absolutely can in Moho. Moho has textured vector brushes and you can file shapes and strokes using bitmap art using the Texture Effect and/or masking. A lot of my work for television was created this way.
I noticed that the new Moho examples are almost all based on PSD files and almost never created directly in Moho.
That's interesting because much of the
recent animation I've created for TV shows uses only Moho vector art for characters (like in
Boss Baby: Back in Business,)
More typically, though, my Moho animations are a hybrid use of vector and bitmap art combined. All of the earlier stuff, like
Puss In Boots, The Croods, and
All Hail King Julien for example. To see how this works, check out my demo for the rig used in the interactive episode of Netflix Puss-In-Boots:
My 'Puss In Boots Interactive' Demo Reel (2018)
All of the art using in this rig is Moho vector art with texture fills using the Texture Effect. This allowed me to get the best of both worlds...nice shape deformations but detailed painted textures. A few features are completely moho vector, like Puss' eyes, the feather in his hat, and the shadow under the brim. His body is a vector shape but the texture is just one big tiling texture that I'm sliding right/left with a body turn Smart Bone Dial.
In short, there's no 'better' way to do these things in Moho, just different ways to do them. You're decision for which approach to take should be based on how you want the final animation to look and how you want to animate them.
Here is my animation that might give you some inspiration 