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u/jeinvielleicht

r/MotionDesign r/AfterEffects r/MohoAnimation
Could this style be recreated in Moho?
▲ 20 r/MohoAnimation

Could this style be recreated in Moho?

I'm doing research for a commissioned project. The client wants me to animate a painting in a style similar to the example above.

I thought about repainting the characters in Moho in order to have full control and better motion than classic digital cutout, but it would most certainly be loots of effort. Do you think this would even work, achieving a painterly style like this?

Note that the characters should be able to fully walk, maybe even including some body turns. How would you approach a scene like this without spending a ton of hours (and therefore budget for the client)?

u/jeinvielleicht — 11 days ago
▲ 0 r/AfterEffects

Why is AE that unintuitive with its different coordinate systems?

Let's get this out of the way - I'm a heavy expression user and the "invest in setup, orchestrate complex motion with a few keyframes" type of guy. But even after years of working in the motion design field, I still stumble upon really weird behavior in After Effects.

Why do position coordinates on (some?) effects work at comp level, while others work at layer level? Why is the 0 point of a footage layer at the top-left corner, but a shape rectangle has it in the center? Why do I even have to use toComp or toWorld just to make conversions between coordinates? Why can't AE just be more streamlined here?

And, based on these core "problems" of how AE handles things, there's even more nerve-wracking stuff happening when we go a step further. For example, why do people constantly have to precompose just to get an effect to work? I've had scenarios where I needed to precompose a single layer and awkwardly expose its transform properties through Essential Graphics, just to make the FX stack applied to it work. It can get especially painful when working with Displacement Map or Set Matte effects, where more than one layer (and therefore possibly different coordinate systems for each) are involved. Let's not even get into 3D at this point.

Pretty sure this is part of the classic experience people have when working in this tool. But I'm curious, how are your experiences here? Did you have any "eureka" moments that made coordinates and their conversions (across comps, layer properties, effects, layer styles) much easier to grasp? Any resources you can recommend?

In an ideal future, I wish I could just imagine what I want to do with my layers and know exactly what to do to get there, without having to scratch my head for hours wondering why something doesn't work as it should. And precomps could be used again where they're meant to be.

TLDR - Please explain AE's coordinate system to me. I'd love to fundamentally understand why it's built how it is.

(or maybe I just need to hear from you that I'm not alone, and that After Effects can be a horrible teammate, offering plenty of frustration for years to come)

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u/jeinvielleicht — 2 months ago