I’m curious if the effect known as unmoving plaid can be accomplished in Scratch?

For those who don’t know, unmoving plaid is a shortcut effect on characters clothes that have very complex tile like designs. Instead of animating the design, animators draw the character on top of the plaid tiles with their clothes transparent so the plaid design shows, but doesn’t move with the character.

Also, I wasn’t sure if this should go in help with scripts, or questions about Scratch. Since I’m not asking about a particular script, but perhaps more along the lines of “is this doable”.

Anyone have any ideas on this for Scratch?

You could make everything but the clothes filled in, and let the background behind the “character” have the design. But that would be very complicated.

it is technically doable - though I don't know how much utility it'd have. and I think probably only works if you're animating frame by frame (switching costumes) rather than using code to move sprites around.

you can do it by putting the pattern on a separate (back layer) sprite or as the backdrop,
then, in the animation sprite, filling the screen everywhere except for where you want the pattern to be (so every sprite/layer in the project has a transparent gap where the pattern is meant to show through) which you'd do in the costume editor using the eraser tool or by setting “fill” to transparent.
so basically the character and their surroundings would need to be on the same costume/layer in order for the character to move.
- so it'd work best for simple animations without many layers, but might get complicated if there are lots of sprites/layers involved.

these projects do it here, for example:
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/166600983/
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/827541232/
this project shares a similar concept, it uses code to move the sprite around but this only works because the “darkness” is a solid colour. https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/312932225/
this isn't an animation but you could use the same technique for an animation https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/883810198/

As a sort-of last resort, it would absolutely be possible to do if you draw the whole sprite, or at least the plaid part, with pen (though it would also probably be way too slow to be practical).

CST1229 wrote:

As a sort-of last resort, it would absolutely be possible to do if you draw the whole sprite, or at least the plaid part, with pen (though it would also probably be way too slow to be practical).

If you rasterized it at a resolution of 120x90 (stage width and height both divided by 4, so 1/4th of the resolution of the stage), it might work on most devices.

On higher-end devices you can sometimes rasterize the entire stage at its own resolution, but this usually doesn't leave that much time to spare for computing and does not work on lower-end devices because it takes too long.