Having a character take off a piece of clothing?

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I looked on google and on these forums but didn’t see any prior posts. I have a turtle/human (CG Cookie tutorial) and i’m trying to have him “take off” his shell (literally just rip it off and find a camera angle that doesn’t look horrible).

The turtle and shell are separate objects. The shell is has a MeshDeform modifier on it which is referencing a cage that deforms the shell. So the 3 objects all have the armature modifier on it going to the same armature.

I’m assuming i would use a child of constraint to have him take his shell off? any suggestions? I’m kind of worried about the contact point (where the hands grab the shell). I’m going to give a hack at this right now, but any pointers would be greatly appreciated. It’s my first time doing this type of thing.

edit: the mesh deformer seems to be making this impossible…

2

You could just do a swap, right? Doesn’t need to be the same shell (with meshdeform and whatnot), just use a copy of the frame and switch visibility.

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3

Well, when he takes the shell off he’s like bending over trying to rip it off, so the shell is in a deformed position at that point, so i think it might be noticeable if i swapped the shell out i think. But I’m not sure, I never really thought about that. It might work like your saying if i made a copy and just applied the modifier?

4

Yep, just do a duplicate of the deformed shell at the point you want the takeover to happen. Just apply the modifiers or export/re-import.

You can use the undeformed one as a shape key to pop it back to it’s original form, use dynamics, sim or just hand animate.

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5

In general, I’d say, use two different bones for any two bits of mesh that won’t always move together.

For example, consider if you duplicated the armature, gave it copy transform constraints targeting the original armature, then parented the mesh deformer to the duplicate. You could animate the influence of the constraints to leave the shell behind. (If there are a lot of bones involved in the deformation of the shell, a driver would make this easier.)

This can be done with a single armature as well, just by duplicating the bones and renaming vertex groups appropriately in the mesh deformer.

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