Animating Clothes (not sheets)

Wondering how to accomplish a certain animation task? Ask here.

Moderators: Víctor Paredes, Belgarath, slowtiger

Post Reply
Leon13DM
Posts: 20
Joined: Wed Jun 07, 2017 8:28 pm

Animating Clothes (not sheets)

Post by Leon13DM »

Forgive me for asking, but I was curious on this topic.

I wanted to know how to animate something such as a character taking off their shirt or something similar. I'm guessing the only way to accomplish this is to animate the clothing frame by frame in a switch group. Any other tips?
User avatar
slowtiger
Posts: 6067
Joined: Thu Feb 16, 2006 6:53 pm
Location: Berlin, Germany
Contact:

Re: Animating Clothes (not sheets)

Post by slowtiger »

That's what I think as well. In fact this is one of the complex motions most animators will avoid, and directors choose a different solution, like doing it off-screen: character puts hands to T-shirt, cut to other person, cut back to character with T-shirt in hands.
AS 9.5 MacPro Quadcore 3GHz 16GB OS 10.6.8 Quicktime 7.6.6
AS 11 MacPro 12core 3GHz 32GB OS 10.11 Quicktime 10.7.3
Moho 13.5 iMac Quadcore 2,9GHz 16GB OS 10.15

Moho 14.1 Mac Mini Plus OS 13.5
User avatar
Maestral
Posts: 531
Joined: Tue Jan 27, 2009 5:44 pm
Location: Belgrade, Serbia

Re: Animating Clothes (not sheets)

Post by Maestral »

Another possibility, if the established shot could be interrupted, could be a series of close-ups depicting the brief bits of the process and then back to the primary shot.
User avatar
Greenlaw
Posts: 9192
Joined: Mon Jun 19, 2006 5:45 pm
Location: Los Angeles
Contact:

Re: Animating Clothes (not sheets)

Post by Greenlaw »

I've done something like this before and, since it was a special case, I just used a Switch layer and point animation. In this case, Switch and point animation makes sense...it's pointless to build something like this into the rig if it's never going to be used again.

You might also consider using Moho's FBF layer...I occasionally use FBF combined with point animation to add 'non-rigged' animation to a character rig. Just hide the layers in the rig (keyframe visibility) that you're replacing with the FBF animation, and then show them again when the FBF part is done.

(I just wished the Freehand and Blob Brush tools worked better. It's the one thing that makes FBF less fun to use in Moho.)
User avatar
Greenlaw
Posts: 9192
Joined: Mon Jun 19, 2006 5:45 pm
Location: Los Angeles
Contact:

Re: Animating Clothes (not sheets)

Post by Greenlaw »

I've also done the FBF part in another program and imported it as an image sequence to Moho. To do this, animate as much as you can in Moho, render out the frames, and then import that as reference to the other program to add the 'missing' animation. Then, render out the FBF part from the other program and import it into Moho to add the animation over the rig.

At work I use Toon Boom Harmony for FBF and at home I use TVPaint. Adobe Animate, Krita, OpenToonz...any of these will work fine too, and the last two mentioned are free to use. (If you use them, remember to donate.)

(P.S., the reason I do the above is to avoid using the Freehand and Blob Brush for FBF. If these tools were fixed in Moho, I wouldn't have to resort to other programs just to add some FBF.)
Post Reply