Damn, if I'd have know that was what you were looking for I'd have saved the file. If you really need it, I think I can do it up again though.
I just drew the dress on a separate layer, over a walk cycle I already had. I didn't use separate pant legs. I added four chains of dynamic bones, two attached to each leg (one on either side). And a third parented to the hip bone.
Then I just did some angle constraints to keep these from swinging into the legs.
Give me some time and I'll at least post some screen shots.
OOoooooooooooh. So you just molded the dress' movement to fit what the character was already doing? I thought maybe you had a secret that allowed the dress to move with the legs.
I thought about that. . .doing all the leg animation and then simply manipulating the points on the dress afterward, but that seems like it would take forever.
No. There is no point motion, all bones. I just meant that I modified an existing file. The dress works along with the motion of the leg bones. Moving the leg bone moves the dress.
Got it. Thank you. I seem to missing something, some kind of script. . .I get a little error window when I open it. It still works, but it doesn't like something I do or don't have.
It's cool. I had almost arrived at your method, but couldn't quite get my head around. Looks like you have two separate dress pieces, one controlled by each leg, both joined to a third piece controlled by its own set of bones that can be manipulated independently of the legs to cover where it's needed based on their movement. Genius! I'm still trying figure out exactly how everything is related, but once I get it, I"ll implement your design. Though, as I said, it'll look less awesome when I do it.
Ok. I think I have finally wrapped my head around how this mesh is arranged. Took me a while, though. Again, it's simply brilliant! That is to say, simple but brilliant.
No, it works well. I added another bone so that the part of the dress between the two legs is controlled separately from the part of the dress that's to the right of left leg (from the point of view of the animation). It allows more stretchiness, and more variety in the movement. Have not added bone dynamics. Not sure if I will. . .it would almost to be too "nice" for the style I'm doing, and would put everything else to shame. I'd have to add bouncing boobs and genitals and stuff.
'His' would be the appropriate pronoun.