Another Keymesh thing: 3D patterns on 2D fabric (Patreon)

I did another experiment with Keymesh! (First one here)

One of the possibilities that I was most excited about with this tool, is for patterned clothes! Clothes are floppy and change shape constantly, and in 2D animation that's great, IF there's no details.
But I love textiles! And I want to make characters that wear patterns.

In fact, Double King was actually going to wear a paisley cloak, and I tried several ways of adding the pattern in- but a flattened pattern didn't look all that good masked into his floppy robes, and I couldn't find a way of effectively distorting the pattern to fit his movements.

So! Here is me animating a character, with a suspiciously similar torso to Double King!

Having an image texture added a lot of constraints that I didn't have in the last test, because if I completely re-made the shape I would break the texture. In that sense it couldn't "morph" the way the last thing could, and so this time it was more like manipulating a puppet than a blob of clay.
3D is also very good at cloth simulation already, so you could argue moving it around manually frame-by-frame is redundant.
But! I like deciding how things should move, and even if my hand-made movements are less realistic than a physics simulation, they can be unrealistic in the SAME WAY as any 2D animation I want to pair it with.

One cool thing about this (which I demonstrate in the video) is that for a flat-colour 2D animation, I can export just the fabric pattern without any light and shadow data. But, if I'm shading the 2D animation, I can always export the 3D shadows separately to the pattern, and then composite the 3D shadows over the top in the same style as any 2D shading.

Anyway, there's that! It would still be pretty labor intensive to say, add paisley onto Double King's robe in every shot. But tinkering with the tool, and understanding what it can do, hopefully means I'll recognise when a good opportunity to use it comes up.