How to animate a"skirt" between two legs together ?

[omar7120838]

Here is this pant And I am trying to animate it but it have another part in th middle between the left and right leg , I triyed to put each part of pant in a seperate layer but these parts stayed seperated 

I need a way that allow the middle part streching between two legs  while the legs animating to shown as a one piece.

[Derek S.]

Are you saying you want to animate the legs as one group, e.g. both legs performing the same movement simultanelously, and the coattails in the back to animate by iteself, e.g. dangle or similar? If yes, simply place the legs together on a single layer (crown if needed, not sure what type of animation you are tying to perform here), and the coattail on a separate layer,crown and attach to the body group, with a dangle tag on the coattail. I could be completely off on what you are trying to do, but that seems like the answer to me.

[omar7120838]

 Thank you for your reply.

The closest eg. to my question is a "skirt".

I want to animate two legs like a 'cycle walking'

And a skirt connecting the two legs and do a dinamic stretch while legs animation.

[alank99101739]

You cannot stretch a skirt between the two legs, but there are other tricks that often work. If you are using "cycle layers" and drawing all the leg positions during walking, then just draw the skirt as well! That would be the easiest and give you the most control.

You may be able to put a manual dragger on the two bottom corners and manually drag the corners of the "skirt", stretching it. You cannot attached to both legs however and make it stretch. Layers only have on parent / master - never 2.

Hmm. I thought I had a few other ideas, but if a skirt in front of the legs they won't work.

Another idea that might be useful is to draw a wide skirt for the legs the furthest distance apart. You can put all the folds in appropriately. You might then be able to use the stretching appraoches like above, but use a layer that is set up as a mask layer in CH. This can then mask your legs. That is, you animate the mask layer rather than normaly layer. I *think* that would work.

Another idea, draw a few skirts and use a swap set with triggers to pick the approach skirt size for the diagram.

But there is not nice and easy way (that I know of). Layers have one master, their parent controls them. If they need to be conrolled by mlutiple parents.

[Guest]

Try this! Merge the legs (they must be spread apart in an upside down V shape obviously) and rig them like normal legs, put them in a +Legs group, make the skirt independant and place it in the +Legs group above the now merged legs layer. You can then connect the skirt to the legs and it will move accordingly, also u can add dangle behaviours to create a nice flow in the skirt if u want.

NOTE: This is ONLY good for walking cycles though. For still poses u can simply add draggable handles to the skirt part of the shirt.

[Blaine Tanuki]

heh heh heh.  I was reflecting on this the other day too.  Was curious what kinda of solutions you all came up with.  Currently, I just put the skirt in front of the legs.  If it's a longer skirt though- not sure.  Maybe have a front layer with a big flap and then the sides of the legs have "slack" with extra physics so it gets launched outward.