Animating Clothes (not sheets)

[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?

[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.

[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.

[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.)

[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.)