We’re about to launch into space. After all. And although I’ve been able to work from home during the COVID-19 outbreak and thus save 2 hours of commute every day, my production hasn’t really picked up speed much. The boys are home, too, and they want to spend some more time with dad.

I spent quite some time to figure out how to create, layer and organise the backgrounds for the interior of Phungus’ spaceship, the Pon Kho. Since it needs alpha channels for windows, doors, has moving doors, and a few layers of cockpit armatures, seats and walls, things can get messy, especially if you want to put an animated character in the middle of it. Originally I wanted to create everything using vectors, because that allows me to scale backgrounds to my heart’s content, however it turns out using bitmaps for backgrounds is more efficient for production, because those images are just linked externally.

I still produce the actual background using vector based software (Affinity Designer), but I’ll then setup slices for separate objects and layers. This way I can easily make tweaks to the background design, simply export those in one go, replacing the previous files, and the Moho document that has links to those files will be updated in an instant. If I create vectors directly in Moho they’re embedded and I’d have to do everything in Moho – not ideal. I also think creating these assets in another piece of software makes it easier for me to jump ship, if/when I have to move to a different animation software suite…

Software Woes

I continue my love/hate relationship with Moho – it’s an awesome piece of software for producing animations as a one-man operation, if it weren’t for the instability, bugs, crappy performance (on macOS) and the rather lethargic stance of their tech support. Their official stance is the older version 12 (the one I’m using for performance reasons) isn’t really supported at all anymore, and their latest version 13 (which I own, but don’t use, because performance is crap on macOS) isn’t really supported yet on the latest macOS 10.15 (Catalina), which was released half a frigging year ago. Great. So I’m basically all alone, and they don’t get the thumbs out of their a**es.

Still there are no true alternatives to Moho for me. I’ve tried out Cartoon Animator 4, which is probably the closest contender, but the workflow seems ultra cumbersome if you want to do all custom characters and animation. It is more geared towards quick production of corporate animations. As for Adobe Animate/Character Animator – I don’t rent software. If you don’t own a copy of your software, you also don’t own everything you have created with it, because as soon as you stop using the rented software all your files become 100% inaccessible to you. Then there is Blender / Grease Pencil, super powerful, but as mostly everything open source the UI/UX is an abomination (2.8 makes little difference, it’s just window dressing), and I just can’t wrap my head around it. And finally there’s ToonBoom Harmony. I used ToonBoomStudio years ago, they really left me a burnt child that is twice bitten thrice shy. I would’ve loved ToonBoom Studio, it if it weren’t for the bugs, the instability… wait do you see the pattern? And back then ToonBoom’s stance was after years of not fixing bugs: hey, we’ve abandoned ToonBoom Studio, here’s our new even more expensive software ToonBoom Animate – buy now. Being young and naive, I was of course stupid enough to buy it, just to have them abandon Animate as well after a few years. Now “Harmony” it is… and it has become software to rent. Oh well, yes, you can get a permanent license, but if you want half decent functionality you’ll have to pay over 1000 bucks for the not totally crappy edition. What is this? 1999? Jeez. And honestly I think the IK chain and many features in Moho are far superior to Harmony, but that’s just me.

For the trailer episode I’ll stick with Moho, but after that I really don’t know. It’s just so exhausting to have this uncertainty and doubt about the roadmap and future of a piece of software you’ve come to rely on so entirely… Over and out.