How to have part of an earring behind the ear, using a mask or dynamic hair layers (1 Viewer)

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Hello

I noticed that U UndertowTruck asked this question in August 2024, but since it might be of interest to others, and I am currently experimenting with masks on Animate, I thought it would be best to create a short tutorial.

So, you want to make an earring with a ring, but the Ear Piercing Template only allows drawing in front of the ear, resulting in this when Her movements are too wide:

(basic game 'Ring')​

There are two ways to do it: using a mask on the EAR_PIERCING layer, or using both DYNAMIC_HAIR_OVER and DYNAMIC_HAIR_BETWEEN layers, either method having little problems.

1. Use the Ear Piercing Template and a mask.
   1. Draw your earring and cut it in two:
      1. put the right part on a layer (that will be the front part).
      2. put the left part on another layer below (that will be the back part).
   2. Copy the ear from the Reference layer.
   3. Add a layer above the back part, and draw a large rectangle around the ear in it. This will be your mask (check this YouTube tutorial for more info about masks).
   4. Paste the ear in that rectangle, then remove it, leaving a hole. This will be the masked part.
   5. Right-click on this layer and change it into a mask.
   6. That's all, the only concern is that the mask will dangle with the earring. But as the bottom of the ear is kinda circular with its centre close to the earring rotation point, it should be OK if Her movements are not too wide.
2. Use both Dynamic Hair Over and Dynamic Hair Between templates.
   1. Draw the front part of the earring on the Dynamic Hair Over template.
   2. Draw the back part on the Dynamic Hair Between template.
   3. That's all, but this method has some issues:
      1. It may interfere with other dynamic hair mods, depending on which is loaded first and the layers used in the hair mod, the upper part of the earring may appear above some hair strands, or the bottom part being hidden under other strands, cutting the earring in two.
      2. The earring will be affected by Her Hair Tint, i.e. the HSL sliders in the Custom tab (though they're not used often by users as far as I know).
      3. If you want to make an RGB adjustable mod, you'll need to transfer the rgbFills to the Earring slider, using the method presented in the 3rd example of this tutorial (you can remove the function tick2 and the part after //preset colours:).
   4. There are some advantages over the Ear Piercing Template:
      1. No need for a mask, the back part will be perfectly hidden by the ear.
      2. You can make several segments for your earring, avoiding it to dangle like one rigid rod.
      3. You can control the dangling, that is quite extreme with the EAR_PIERCING layer. Reduce the var topDamping:Number in the Action tab for both dynamic hair templates, and the var damping:Number if you are adding additional segments.

I attached an example using the first method.