How to animate partly a mesh with MD

[telamon]

http://telamon.nerim.net/Scratch/george.jpg

I would like to animate the small cloth of this character with MD (I am fed up with keyframing and I hope MP will help to get this natural motion that I want.

The body of the character will walk, run, jump, fight and much more.

What is the tip for this.

Regards

[Extent]

cut the cloth to a seperate layer, set the subdivision order to last. Set as much of the cloth as a fixed texture in MD and then use your MD to get the rest of the motion. only other thing you got to do is set the layer to use the bones from your object.

[txbob]

MD is as much an art as a science...

what I usually do is set up the scene.. forgetting the md targets... save the scene and all of the objects... then we go into hack up everythin mode...

I hack up the colision objects and save only the parts that will effect the target.( in your case cut the body into just the lower torso and upperlegs.

I save these objects, and replace then into the original scene then I run the MD stuff... it goes way faster this way... once the MD file is created, and I'm happy with it, I go back to the original scene and ad the MD Plug disp plug in on the loin cloth.. and it should work.

Using this method has several advantages, and a few dowm sides...

Advantages: Fast (not considering a bunch of polys) Semi real time calculation makes it easier to set the various MD properties...

Downsides:
you can't move the object.. it has to be set up so that the new MD happens in the exact same sopt... (you cantweak the opject a bit by moving it's pivot point but then every thing can explode... so don't .....)

Anyway.. I hopr this helps a bit... I know MD can be a real pain.. I think there should be a new 12 step program called MDA.. Motion Designer annonomous,,,,,,,, Hi my name is bob and I last motion designed last night..... HI BOB!

[telamon]

I have found another clue that fits well with my model and animation. I applied the "parenter" motion modifier and I parented the cloth to the root bone of my main object. This works very very fine and is quite quick.

For the rest, I obviously work with parts of the body to quicken the calculation process.

Thanks for the clue.

Regards