Alternatives to Cloth

[kepeli]

I am about to start a new animation project which involves a character in a suit dancing. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get motion into the suit without using cloth. I am trying to keep the complexity of the model to a minimum since the focus of this project is animation.

The character also has a tie which I would like to animate. I am guessing that this could be done with an IK Spline Handle. Any suggestions on the best approach for this?

Thanks in advance,

Stuart

[ploi]

Sounds like what you are looking for is cloth. Everything else I can think of is complicated - more so than cloth.

[popsickle]

I have to do the same thing soon, and what im loosly thinking is binding the character to the skel but not the clothes, instead i was thinking of parenting, the clothes to the skeliton, to get them to follow everything, then appling dynamics, or turning the clothes into softbodies. I havent tryed it yet though so if you do will you let me know how it went? Thanks Russ

[gmask]

The following is the routine for using softbodies on characters and then painting the goal weights.

Bind the skin first.

To make a skin a soft body:
1 Select the skin.

2 Select Soft/Rigid Bodies > Create Soft Body to display the options window.

3 From the Creation Options menu, select Duplicate, Make Copy Soft.

4 Turn on Hide Non-Soft Object and Make Non-Soft a Goal.

5 Set Weight to 1. The lower the Weight, the more the skin jiggles.

6 Click the Create button.

7 Click on the skin with the left mouse button.. in the quick menu select the copy of the skin under paint and let go on goalPP. Make sure you are in leaf select mode or you may not see anything under paint.

8 You can now paint in lower values at the cuff over your character's pants so that they jiggle as the character moves.

You'll probably want to add a gravity field and tweak the envelope settings on the softbody surface.

[kepeli]

Sounds interesting. I assume this will allow me to make areas really stiff like the jacket collar, whilst allowing the bottom of the jacket to flow.

I think I might give this a go. The alternative as far as I can see is to put a lattice on the jact and skin the lattice. This will control the main deformations and I can just key the lattice points later as secondary animation.

Stuart

[gmask]

Of course the problem with doing clothes with softbodies is that it's hard to keep it from intersecting with other surfaces so it has to be used wisely. Skinning the lattice and using softbodies may make it easier to correct for intersection. I'll give it a try.

[kepeli]

I think I might just add clusters to specific areas on the clothing and key these by hand as secondary animation.