Post 46 –Full head turn.

Still in week THREE of Adam’s Animation Academy, Moho Magic Rigging Course, with Dani Abrams, Moho Ambassador.

As I mentioned last week, the learning is absolutely EPIC. Dani is so thorough. Even though the videos are asynchronous, they feel a lot like guided practice, because she doesn’t execute everything perfectly. She makes mistakes, catches them, and corrects them along the way.

You are very much treated like a new learner, rather than an expert just ripping through it. And I really appreciate that. The Discord channel acts as formative feedback, so you can adjust, improve, and keep going independently.

There is so much to learn in Moho. Every little hill climbed feels like a victory. Here’s a quick-and-dirty tutorial from Victor Paredes on a head turn. Another little hill. Another little victory.

Things to Know:

✔ Head Turn

Action Bones

An action bone in Moho works a little like a lever or controller.

You remove all influence from the bone, and it becomes a controller for an action that you animate inside its own timeline, e.g., a head turn, a blink, or another repeated movement.

The amazing part is that you only have to animate that action once. The animation stays connected to that bone/controller, so later, you can simply move the bone to recreate the action. So instead of animating a head turn from scratch every time you need one, you do the work once and let the controller do the work for you.

Do the work once. Move one bone. Get the animation again.

That feels a little like magic. haha. Moho Magic.

Key points to remember:
1. remove strength on the action bone
2. new action and bone, MUST be named the same to work
3. Make sure you are in the actions panel, and when done click back to the mainline

“Sometimes when you experiment you will fail. Some way-out ideas may not work the way you thought they would. But that’s okay! ”

— Noble

Cow Birdy in the Wild

So I keep pushing to animate a story.

The idea was to animate a little story with the two characters I’ve been working on in the course. As a reward for working on the head turn, last week I derailed a bit with Cow Birdy, which was inspired by Adam’s black-and-white eyebrows in the Moho Magic Rigging course.

Here is my very rough draft (?)… I’m not even sure it qualifies as a storyboard. I just kept asking what happened next ?

You can see how the story changed, as I realized I couldn’t animate certain aspects that I originally thought may work, e.g., little cow birdy walking away lol . However, I also realized how fun it is to have a rig that you have several actions attached to and then you can quickly add in a head turn somewhere unexpected. I also love how you can change things on the rig when you use styles in Moho, it’s literally a click of the button. Sometimes the grass wasn’t working, but I didn’t have to redraw the grass, I could just change the style. boom.

So magic hiding in this software.

As dawn breaks, a young cowboy birdy begins his perilous journey
along the pebbled path.
With each deliberate step, he disappears into the treacherous tall grass.
If you remain still, you may witness the rare ritual of play.
After a grueling day, he settles down to rest.
Until tomorrow.
narration: Adobe
(because, sadly, I am not an older British male, and the story demanded it ;))

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Post 46 — Afterthoughts

I am super stoked that I pushed myself to tell a story, no matter how terrible it may be. 😂 It is hard, and honestly, I consider it a huge accomplishment just to have made myself do it.

I watched this for the front walk cycle, and also this interview, holy moly was so inspired by Denver Jackson, what he has done is over-the-top AMAZING and MINDBLOWING.

I had so much fun with this little detour. But now, back to work! I have wonky shirt and shoulders that are giving me grief and that I need to fix. I also need to finish watching the rest of Week Three and then dive into the bonus section before Moho Magic Animation course begins. 🙈

One little story at a time.✍️Nik