This week our Moho Featured Artist is Nahuel Poggi 🔥 Nahuel was the director of "Yo Pipoo" a preschool children animated series. The animation was fully made with Moho. ✨ 

Tell us about yourself

My name is Nahuel Poggi, visual artist born in Argentina and professor of Visual arts specialized in illustration. I studied a baccalaureate in Fine Arts and later in the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Buenos Aires.

My first experience in animated series was “Plim Plim, a heart hero”, as a Storyboarder and Background artist. Later I worked on animated videoclips and short TV spots, book illustrations and board games. I became an Art Director for a startup videogame company and on 2014 I moved to Chile. In 2016, and thanks to winning CORFO & CNTV national funds, at Reina Mono (Director and co-founder) we were able to develop a children animated series for preschoolers called “Yo Pipoo” made with Moho. After this project, I worked as General Director and Animation Director in several animation productions for Reina Mono and Amblagar Studio.

Where do you get inspiration?

I think YouTube, Pinterest and Instagram are some great places to find inspiration, watch tutorials and follow the work of many artists. Personally, I consider that Ghibli Studios, Pixar and Cartoon Saloon (where they use Moho in most of their productions) have been a huge source of inspiration and motivation for me and the productions where I work.

What’s your hardware setup?

Intel i7 processor, a 16 GB RAM, Nvidia 1050, 1TB HD,
Wacom Cintiq 24 Pro.

What do you like best about Moho?

There are a lot of things I like about Moho, there are so many tools and possibilities to do stuff, which makes it a very versatile animation software for work. Smart bones, the Actions library, being able to animate the layer settings, vectors and bones, grids, Vitruvian bones, and even the latest features of version 14 like deformers, Liquid shapes and many more, make of Moho a very complete software that optimizes the workflow of any project I’ve been working on the last years. With Moho you can reach ridiculous numbers of production at a high level in a very short amount of time. The possibility of recording actions on any bone of the rig or generating commands through Smart bones and being able to edit them and add more movements, makes rigging an extremely fun and almost addictive process, making animation a very fast and efficient operation.

How has Moho helped you in your creative process?

As I said earlier, Moho is a very versatile animation software that adapts easily to any production. This always requires new challenges and ways to shape the project with attractive artistic proposals, so then it’s simpler to jump into the program and find out what’s the best way to achieve a specific look. When I start a production, time is always a thing to consider so this is where Moho stands out the most. Its tools and features allow you to reuse your animations in a faster way, making the workflow very efficient. With the new updates on Moho 14, the possibilities were expanded to achieve similar results to a traditional animation look, which opens my mind and creativity for more challenging projects.

Can you talk about the “Yo Pipoo" series and how it was made using Moho?

Can you talk about the “Yo Pipoo" series and how it was made using Moho?
“Yo Pipoo” is a children animated series with a preschooler orientation, with a story full of complicity between a 5-year old and his grandpa Roque (an old man with a children spirit). Motivated by an unlimited curiosity, they travel through a magical book to their friends’ worlds: Greta the minotaur, Oliver the hipster tree, Eddie the snowman and Serena the mermaid.



The series’ goal demanded a hard pre-production work. The biggest challenge was in the artistic point o view. We wanted that everything looked like a hand painted children book. We focused on the character design and background without even knowing how the animation was going to be or which software we would use. At the time we used a FX’s program to animate. The picture wasn’t encouraging because it used to take us a lot of time for each shot. It was at that time when I had the privilege of participating of a Masterclass dictated by Víctor Paredes where I saw all the potential of Moho for our project. I discovered a world of possibilities which allowed us to speed all the production steps. From then on, we just enjoyed all the rigging process. We started drawing all the characters in Moho, using its textured brushes (at the time on version 12) and we also created some new and specific brushes for filling the drawings, getting some identical results comparing the original bitmaps artworks. After making the first actions and head rotations, we were marveled with the outcomes. Many thought we were using a 3D software.

At the animation stage, we discovered we could use PSD sceneries inside Moho. That helped us to have full control over the camera movement and the program even allowed us to create frame by frame animation for VFX and smears. Finally, we discovered that with the Moho Exporter, we could export each sequence independently and without any kind of troubles. Since then, I never question myself which animation software I’ll use in my next project. The answer will always be Moho!

How has Moho improved your pipeline workflow?

Moho allowed me to create some very ambitious production, with a limited team and budget, but without even thinking on compromising the quality.
This granted us enough time to dedicate ourselves to each stage of the series, specially the character development in the pre-production, having a great model sheet with consistent rotations. Thanks to Moho’s rigging and vector drawing tools, it gave us the possibility to create characters able to make any kind of acting throughout the whole series depending on each scene. While the production was progressing, our action’s library kept growing and helped us to speed and improve our animation process.

Where can we find you?

You can check my work and Yo Pipoo here:

nahuelpoggi.blogspot.com
Instagram: @pogginahuel
                  @yopipooficial

Youtube: @YoPipoo