http://www.muvizu.com/Forum/topic5850-avi-textures-with-transparency-to-simulate-4-legs.aspx Forum - Tips & Tricks - AVI textures with transparency to simulate 4 legs - Messages en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Jitbit AspNetForum Tue, 09 Aug 2016 20:01:43 GMT Tue, 09 Aug 2016 20:01:43 GMT http://www.muvizu.com/Forum/topic5850-avi-textures-with-transparency-to-simulate-4-legs.aspx Tue, 09 Aug 2016 20:01:43 GMT http://www.muvizu.com/Forum/topic5850-avi-textures-with-transparency-to-simulate-4-legs.aspx
You could create a series of different leg animations.. walking, running, standing still, scratching fleas etc... then swap them in and out as needed with keyframes. Each leg could have its own animation, for maximum flexibility.

I have already tested the ability to apply AVI animated textures to my own models, and I know that part is possible. Whether or not the leg idea looks convincing probably will depend on how the transparent part of the texture affects the color of the ground behind it. If it is truly transparent this would work great. But if the rectangular leg casts shadows... then not so good.


PS.. the same concept could be used to animate eyes, mouth, ears, tails etc on creatures we create as an enclosure for a standard muvizu character. With all these features having positions that don't depend on relative position to the muvizu character, that frees us up to make the core character as small as necessary to keep him out of sight.

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I just tried this, and it works!

disclaimer: a video applied to a plane is still a 2d entity, so this would be most useful in scenes where the camera remained in a fixed position. But because a variety of animations could be keyframed in and out of the rectangle, it would be an enormously flexible tool

In the same sense that cartoons like those in South Park are highly stylized (and a unique look is very desirable when you want to brand your videos) this would have the advantage of looking very stylized and different than anything else. Once you had your set of leg, eye, hand, mouth etc animations created they could be reused over and over again. It would become its own system]]> Tue, 09 Aug 2016 20:01:07 GMT