What method should I use to animate multiple outfits to follow body movement?

[moniee]

Hello!

I am here because i am stuck, i would really need your help...i am a graphic designer at a game developing studio; we are developping a new game. Now we are stuck because of animating method problems.

So the whole situation is:

There will be a lot of characters whose bases will be the same, but there will be a ton of different clothes. Some of them will reach on the characters arm, like a pullover, some will just be sleeveless.

Here is a little illustration but please notice we have many more outfit that are more detailed and complex:

The characters will have one type of movement; (at the beginning - in the future there may be more) and this movement should be animated to every single outfit.

I am using Flash CS5.5. I have tried to animate the base body with the bone tool ; that one was okay, but how could i copy this movement to the clothes too, so they will follow the body's movement?
I have tried to bone the dresses separately (building the skeleton again, one by one on all of the outfits) but as i started to move them, they fell apart. Flash has created outlined all over the outfits and they completely became useless. Maybe it was because they all have gradients, and they are not just a plain shape with fill? I have also tried to import the outfit as a PNG but it neither worked.

So in a shorter version:

1. we have a basic shape with a movement that every character will have
2. we have an enormus amount of outfits that searches for a quick movement solution so you wont need to animate each one framy-by-frame
3. the clothes should follow the body's movement; best way would be to copy the body's skeleton
4. the clothes have gradients and several little details, so the bone tool craps it all up
5. the png method did not work either.

So my question is, with the details known, how would you try to solve this problem?
Does flash have something that can help me or should i not use it and move to another software instead?

Than you very much if anyone helps me!
moniee

[Nig 13]

Hi,

I would not advice you to use the Bone Tool, as it sounds like a cheap way to avoid animating the characters. I recommend turning each body part to a Movieclip and using Motion Tween to animate the looping motion. Then I would simply make a lot of Frames inside each body part movieclip for each clothing, and then go to that Frame when clothes have been changed. To demonstrate, check this out:

DOWNLOAD EXAMPLE FILE

As you can see, a bit complex coding is involved, but it updates the clothes when the animation loop starts on Frame 1 again in the movieclip, to prevent it to go back to the first frames on each body part, and this is done via using variables. The coding on the Main Frame is a function to update the clothes and the parameter tells which frame to go to for each body part. I've made 3 buttons which utilize this function, so feel free to explore

Hope this helps