Need advice to animate woman in a long dress

[gmarcc]

Hi everyone,

We’re beginners in the field of animation and could use some advice as we begin production on our third music video. To give you an idea of what we’ve created so far, please check out our previous work:

viewtopic.php?t=37380
viewtopic.php?t=37381

Our third video will follow the style of ‘Game of Survival’. The main character will be a glamorous lady in a long dress. We’re seeking guidance from experienced animators on how best to approach this. The character will be created using vectors.

• Should we rig the body separately from the dress, or is there a better approach?
• We’d love to give the dress a glitter effect. Any suggestions on how to achieve this? We could add the effect in After Effects, but we’d appreciate any creative ideas.

Thanks for your help!

[slowtiger]

Seen the two videos - nice work so far!

The long dress can be seen as a pendulum starting from the hips down, so that's the way it should be rigged. I would create the storyboard in a way that I don't have any complete body turns, but only a walk seen from the side, and some close-up of a turn/stop where you could nicely fold the dress when it slows down and stops.

I imagine the dress in a style similar to Erté, so it can be made of separate parts overlapping like a fan, but that's up to you.

As for the glitter, it's possible to render out only the dress via layer compositions, to add any FX in another oftware, or to re-import and use as a mask in Moho again. I'd use a video file of something glittering, just some 1 sec loop, but you could use nearly any source. If you want to give the glitter a halo I'd recommend to not do it in Moho but in a video editor.

[Greenlaw]

I imagine the dress in a style similar to Erté, so it can be made of separate parts overlapping like a fan, but that's up to you.

Neat coincidence: I hadn't thought of Erté for probably decades, but yesterday, I was pointing out to my child how the pattern of the tiny water droplets on our car windshield reminded me of Erté's artwork. (My child thought the pattern resembled the delicate veins in a leaf. Man, I wish I had taken a picture, but I was driving.) And here, Erté pops up again in a forum post.

I totally forgot to show my child the books of Erté's work I had. I'll do that when they wake up.

[Greenlaw]

@gmarcc, these videos look very cool! I want to watch (and listen) more closely later, and will comment in the posts. Thanks for sharing your work.

Re: dresses, I typically use a few short bone chains to animate dresses and skirts. Be sure to add enough points to the shape of the dress to allow them to curve like fabric.

Curver might work well for smoother and more detailed animation, but it depends on how the art is constructed.

If the fabric animation requires complicated secondary details like folds and ripples, I might add that detail using the magnet tool. Tip: there is a third-party version of the Magnet tool that has different fall-off modes, and I use it all the time for animating flowing fabric and hair. I'll find where you can get it later and post the link.



(IMO, the fall-off modes really should be in the native version. But even the native version should work well for this case.)

[gmarcc]

Thank you all for your advise! This is very much appreciated. I will share our progress.

[Greenlaw]

Found it:

https://lostmarble.com/forum/viewtopic. ... 76#p208376