During the 4-day extended weekend here in Japan I was able to complete an action scene and I’m mostly happy with it. I never thought I’d be able to put it together. Action scenes, especially when the action is kind of a brawl fight are messy, because characters and their body parts overlap and things can get super complicated quickly. I did some cheating, though, to keep the complexity manageable – I hope it hasn’t diminished the illusion of this being a real exchange of blows.

Size Does Matter

Moho by default scales line widths for every layer, it’ll make the lines appear thicker or thinner depending on how large the character is on screen (which can change by resizing the whole character, or simply by moving the camera in the z axis). So far so good. Now I learned something new in a very painful way: when you create characters in Moho (or other animation software), always make sure to create all of them in the same scale.

Because if you resort back to resizing finished characters to make sure they are all the same/correct height, but those characters haven’t all been created in the same scale, your resized characters will appear to have different line widths. The only way to fix this is to resize every single layer of the character, not using the layer resize scaling, but selecting all points in the layer and resizing that. Which would also mean you’d have to fix the position of every single layer as well. Might as well recreate the whole damn character. And this is exactly what I’ll have to do for the Ultraviolet Guard… And I made rigs for 7 different characters. All for nothing.

Maybe I can get away with just 4–5 newly rigged characters (copying a few and just adding a beard or changing hair colour – they all wear uniform anyway). But 3 of these also need to be able to talk (so mouth rigging will be necessary), which will cost me a bucketload of time. I’m planning a one-week vacation in two weeks and was hoping to finish the whole pilot episode during that time, but unless I can get a whole lotta stuff done next weekend and next week nights, this might not happen.

I so want to wrap this all up in 2020. Let me not have to push back to next year!