Bind with or without clothing?

[silvermane]

Not sure if this is a modeling or animation question, but its connected to rigging so I will put it up here.

I have modeled a character, (nude female), that is in the bind pose. I am about to go through the process of skinning with wrap deformers, setting the weighting and then inserting influence objects.

My question is this, on the assumption that I DONT use Maya Cloth to generate the clothes, but instead I use other mesh objects that I have created specifically for the character, i.e a jacket and pants modelled with sub-d's, can I do this after the skinning process for the female character. If so, how do I get the clothes to follow the weighting etc of the female model given that they are a different mesh, surely parenting wouldnt be enough. By that I mean if I set up the female model so the arm bent correctly at the elbow, how would that translate to the jacket? Would I have to skin the female model and then also skin the jacket after as two seperate objects.

I dont want to generate the jacket and pants and attach them to the character and then skin them all as one mesh, mainly because I want to interchange clothing on the female model. i.e with the skinning, weights and influence objects set up for the female character I would then want to use that setup but then dress her in various outfits.

Hope this all makes sense, if not just say and I will try and re-explain.

Open to suggestions and comments.

[rivard]

the Deform Sets enables you to select which peice of geometry is affected by which deformer, meaning you could quickly add a jacket to a bind etc. Then I would have imagined that simply hiding or showing various layers would be suitable to changer her cloathing?

I don't know if this advances you in anyway. However, just my two cents.

[silvermane]

Is it possible to wrap deform the high resolution character AND articles of clothing to the same low resolution poly mesh ? In other words, can a single poly mesh act as a wrap deformer for more than one high resolution mesh at any one time?

If so then I guess that would solve the problem, the clothes should then inherit the weights and influence objects of the low resolution poly mesh ... except, the vertices on the low resolution poly mesh match the high resolution character mesh and not the clothing. Would this not cause a problem with creases given that the clothing would be a bit 'thicker' due to material etc ???

[silvermane]

Just tested out using a wrap deformer on two high rez objects and that works fine.

The only question left now is given then clothing mesh is offset from the main character mesh (i.e it has thickness), and the low rez deformer is matched to the high rez character mesh, would the clothes deform properly, i.e as per the weighting and the influence objects on the low rez poly mesh which is deforming the high rez character mesh ? Or would the offset / clothing thickness cause a problem ?

Just trying to get a good idea of this before I go ahead and skin the high rez character via the low rez poly mesh as a wrap deformer, set up all the weights with a soft bind and then add all of the influences. It would be a tad annoying to find then that the clothing wouldnt work.

[silvermane]

bumpity bump, still dont have the answer, anybody got any suggestions.

[gnimmel]

One thing you can try is to skin the naked character and get her all working, then bind the clothing to the same skeleton and use Maya's copy skin weights tool. This will transfer the same skin weights from the naked mesh to the clothing so they will deform the same. You will probably need to touch up the weights a little, but the weight transfer will give you a really good start.

Richard

[ragtag]

Just watch the memory usage with wrap deformerfs. Wrap tend to use a lot of RAM when used with complex models. Also make sure they work 100% by moving the whole skeleton 100000+ units in any direction, and see that all points are included.

If you plan on doing an influence object skinning on the naked body, and then wrap the clothes to that...your character is likely going to be very slow to interact with. Transfering the weights, like Richard suggested would probably be a better idea.

Add transperancy maps to the nude model, where and when it's covered with clothes. That way, nothing will show up if the body and clothes intersect.

Ragnar