Animate and Make Cartoon Videos Using Moho. Then Distribute Your Cartoons on DVD

Jan

2006

As part of my exploration of visual thinking and visual communication, I've been looking at animation (OK, I also just like watching cartoons).

I was looking for information on using Blender to do cartooning, where I could design a character and then just reposition and render the model. This would allow me to quickly make a variety of drawings, comic strips, etc., all of which could be used as illustrations in articles, tutorials, etc. In the process, I ran across a posting about Moho. I promptly visited the Moho site at Lost Marble at which point, I had the same reaction that the author of the post, that of nervous excitement.

So, there I am, all excited about the fact that this is only $100 when I notice that they've got a lip sync tool. Great! That was one question I had about it. But, it's not just a lip sync tool. It's bloody GPL'ed!!!

Moho is sort of a 2D or 2.5D animation tool that essentially gives you little digital puppets to manipulate on the scene. This is great because once your characters are set up, you can easily make multiple cartoons without having to repeat the work. As you can pretty much start out with stick figures, this is a much lower barrier of entry to animation than the 3D methods.

I bought myself a copy of Moho as my Christmas present to myself. I buy something like this every year: the kind of thing no one else will buy for me, but that I'm not likely to be able to rationalize the other 11 months of the year.

So, in the grand tradition of a member of a generation who spent every Saturday morning watching cartoons until the toy companies destroyed the magic with such gems as Rubik's Cube, I spent this morning making my own demo cartoon. For the couple of years between ages 3 and 5, I "helped" my mom clean cabins at the resort my family ran by enthusiastically cheering on Scooby and the gang as they solved mysteries on a little black and white TV. This morning, I made a snowman move around a bit, blink and dash off the screen. In short, I rediscovered some of the same kind of magic I found when I started drawing again.

Anyway, the screenshot in this article is the first frame in my sample animation. You can download a ZIP file with several sample .moho files, an XVid .avi and a Quicktime movie all using the snowman model. The model and the rest of the zip file contents are public domain so do what you want with them. I'll probably also put up a section on this site for open source .moho models for sharing.

If you want to try this out, but don't want to cough up the $100, you're in luck because Moho comes as a fully functional trial version that just watermarks videos and grayscales Flash (SWF) movies as output. Otherwise, it's fully functional. That means you can make your whole project before paying a dime. To me, that's a great compromise on the software.

After downloading and installing Moho, the first thing you should do is hit the Help menu and go through the supplied tutorials, at least reading them if not doing them. Do that before messing with my samples. This is the kind of software that isn't intuitive at first glance and takes a bit of orientation. After that, it becomes truly powerful. There are also more tutorials at http://www.steveryan.net/Moho.htm that are worth looking at.

Other than your own drawings, there are some bits to use as the basis for your own cartoons. I bought a couple of characters and a background from Cartoon Solutions. I now have a copy of Herbert and Carl. I can then put them into the Front Room and do the rigging, etc. If free is more your style, you can take a look at the stuff from Cartoon Smart.

While I'm also messing with my own drawings (including the snowman), using those premade items lets you focus on just doing the animation part without being frustrated by trying to get the shape of the hands right. While both of these character sources come as Flash files, you can convert them to images or trace them in Moho to get your objects for animation.

Once you have your AVI files, you can use any one of the tutorials from VideoHelp.com to get them onto CD-R or DVD-R discs as VCD's or DVD's. Combine that with a service like Mixonic to make up the packaging and do the distribution and sales of your DVD and you can make your own full-featured cartoon on DVD for next to nothing but your time.

Posted in General |

Tim Says:
January 11th, 2006 at 10:49 am

I have been looking for just such a tool. I thought I was going to have to buy Flash studio or something. Look out, South Park.

david anderson Says:
January 13th, 2006 at 5:52 pm

help i cant do this.

J Wynia Says:
January 16th, 2006 at 7:49 pm

Tim, Cool. Let me know when you've got something to look at.

David, this isn't exactly simple, but you're going to have to be much more specific for anyone to be able to help you.

tony g Says:
January 18th, 2006 at 6:37 pm

Yea I came across this program when I was looking for cool vector tools that can be animated. This is a good one for creating pop art type of animations as well as far as I can tell.

I'm disapointed that you can't export an EPS or Illustrator sequence though.

Aquilino Says:
February 8th, 2006 at 6:54 am

since i new what Moho can do, i started to like it!!! now i have the last version 5.3 and i am folowing the tutorials that comes with moho, and i have a big problem about how to animate a mouth or (lipsyncing), i dont know from where to start.
help me J Wynia, i would like to have a tutorial about that….
thanks a lot J.

dominic earley Says:
March 31st, 2006 at 7:37 am

simply wanted to make a cartoon to have some fun with and even send to friends. do not intend to spend any money

J Wynia Says:
March 31st, 2006 at 10:54 am

The trial version of Moho does watermarked AVI export and black and white SWF. I don't know of any free equivalent, but don't really care all that much. The price is about what buying dinner for 3 of my friends would cost me. I know that the number of hours it would take to put a free equiv together would make it not worth it for me.

Hunter Says:
April 30th, 2006 at 3:11 pm

Hey i make cartoon

Allie Says:
May 3rd, 2006 at 9:07 am

i want to start making cartoons and animation and adverts can you help me out

Ton Says:
May 8th, 2006 at 3:14 pm

It's funny. I started using Blender because I wanted to make cartoons. Basically I wanted a program like Moho. Couldn't find it. And now, here it is…

Well, thanks. Goodbye Blender (for now) and hello Moho!

Roger L. Waggener Says:
May 11th, 2006 at 1:18 pm

Synfig is a free 2D vector animation program released under the GNU GPL.

It seems to include some very powerful tools, however unlike Moho it does not have bones and even more unfortunately is sadly lacking in the tutorial department.

One of Moho's greatest strengths is the excellent and very complete browser-based tutorial that comes right along with it.

AMBER Says:
July 5th, 2006 at 1:18 pm

THIS IS AWESOME

KK Rawal Says:
July 14th, 2006 at 7:59 am

Sir
I have done 17 clips in Blender. It takes lot of
rendering time. Sound is mixed using Sony Vega.
Just Now Blender is not mixing the sound. I have downloaded synfig today. I will try. If the render time will be less then I will learn synfig. See my 4 Frogs taking in Blender. .
Yours KK Rawal

Farzan Says:
July 20th, 2006 at 10:29 am

Sir, May you please mail me a very small cartoon creation which animates for 2 minutes? Voice is not needed. please be kind enough to mail me to the mentioned mail ID.

Norman Says:
July 28th, 2006 at 2:28 am

You are right! Moho is the tools we were looking for a long time, or else it was me. A friend brought me the demo version of Moho last year and I went 'wow'! Very exciting features and I really love the 3D camera moves on 2D-objects. I'm still working with FlashMX too. But it is really cool to combine both tools.
I'm looking forward for further features.

Jody Says:
August 11th, 2006 at 7:46 am

Hi Creative people of the world.

i'm looking for animations to re sell will pay!
mail me jody.pitts@xegis.net

thanks for your time.

Jody

ahmed Says:
September 30th, 2006 at 12:04 am

hi i want 2 make cartoon but for free plz cuz i dunn have credit cards sooo plz sappourt me!!!!!!!!!!!! thnkz

Lucio Says:
November 4th, 2006 at 9:14 pm

What Moho version have you used? I cant open the files with Moho 5.2.1

Roger L. Waggener Says:
November 5th, 2006 at 11:37 am

Moho as such is no longer available.

The program that was Moho is now called "Anime Studio" and can be found at: