ballerina's tutu (and bodyturn)

[zoesan]

following some of the demo's on body turns early days for me, but beginning getting some results albeit at this early stage with compromises . One thing I had wanted to include on the rigged vector figure was the tutu, using jpeg origination, semi transparent from photoshop and Moho clipping mask as starters, but can only get a sliding look, not a rotating look,changing the reference point, didn't look like it would work, etc, no other techniques come to mind that I know of, any suggestions welcome

[Greenlaw]

A while back I had to rig and animate a character with a frilly skirt. I can't show that rig but here's a quick re-recreation of the concept:



Basically, the skirt is a radial painting that I'm spinning inside a skirt mask.

Here's the texture:



And here's what it looks like masked inside the skirt artwork.



That's probably not exactly what you're looking for but maybe it will give you some ideas.

[Greenlaw]

Note: In the example, you may have noticed that the texture is deforming slightly with the bones but not completely. I added some point animation which does not account for the extra deformation needed to make this 'right'. If I were doing this for an actual production, I'd probably add an extra bone to each skirt bone and/or use a custom mesh and warp it.

You probably also noticed the frilly edge doesn't 'spin'. I think that effect is possible but I didn't want to put too much effort into this demo. FWIW, in the production rig, because of the limited time I had, I didn't even bother to animate the edge 'turning' and I was told it looked fine.

Anyway, to do this you could animate the points of the wave inside the turn action, but a simpler approach might be to add the wavy line in the texture's edge and make the texture transparent outside of the edge. This way, the wavy edge just rotates with the texture.

Hope this info helps.

[zoesan]

thanks Greenlaw, the ballerina was chosen as it can make use of many of the features, like bone rigging, turns, hopefully IK's etc. I will work with what you supplied including the additional direction regarding a mesh ( so happens I was looking at demo's on that subject ). Given its a jpeg not sure what role the bones play, unless the bones are to affect the points of the clipping mask, will proceed and forward another post shortly, have to say this Moho is proving more than meets the eye in what it can achieve by way of animation, in skillful hands. I was also looking at green screen, modeling/making the tutu out of paper as an option. thanks again

[Greenlaw]

Given its a jpeg not sure what role the bones play, unless the bones are to affect the points of the clipping mask...

Not sure what you mean by this because bones can affect bitmap images as well as points, as explained in the example above. As a matter of fact, the image shown is a jpeg.

Technically, you don't even need to create a mesh for imported bitmaps because Moho generates an invisible mesh by default as soon you add a bone. But if you want greater control over how the image is deformed, you'll want to create a custom mesh for the image. Then, in addition to bones, you can use point animation to deform the image (the next level up from the above example.)

Good luck with your rig and have fun!