Help Attaching/rigging Belt/loin Cloth To Character

[eternalnow]

Guys if I have a character setup and rigged/smooth bound etc, then I have a separate piece of geometry, say a belt around his hips... and I want to attach it and rig it TO him, so that when I move his pelvis controller, the belt moves with his hips, and is in total sync with his pelvis vertices's, how would I go about doing that?

I want the loin cloth to move with the pelvis of the character and be completely in sync, when I move the pelvis bone (controller) of the character. Right now I setup a few bones running down through its main forward/backward sections where the cloth hangs... I smooth skinned the cloth to the main characters pelvis joint as well as those extra joints..... Of course this isn't giving the results I need. When I move the pelvis of the character around, the loin cloth isn't synced to him...
It moves around in an odd fashion.... What I mean as well, the actual strap moves around in a weird fashion, the belt....

Is there someway to constrain some verts to verts, or should I maybe create rivets on the cloth and on the character and constrain them to one another? etc? Any ideas????

Attached: 2 pics to illustrate issue.

P.S: Someone mentioned that they achieved the results doing this ( however I really don't understand what they mean, the steps they took and or why they took them )

((( I had a similar situation once and solved it like this I created a nurbs patch roughly the size of the band going around the character and wrap deformed it to the character. then I created TWO follicles on the nurbspatch for each edgeloop the band has, and positioned them at the top and bottom of the nurbs patch. then I created a joint for each of the follicles and smoothbound the band to those joints. hope that makes sense )))

[jderiggi]

Try using the Rivet Constraint from Michael Buzhutkin http://www.geocities.com/bazhutkin/. It allows objects to follow deforming meshes like a button on cloth. Sounds like you may have this already from your post. Michael explains how to use it in his script if you simply open the mel script in a text editor.

Try creating rivet locators around your pelvis (I'd say at least 10). Create the same number of joints and either parent them under the respective rivet locators, or constrain them to the locators. Skin the belt to these joints. You could try the same thing for the cloth strap, although this would be probably be better controlled with simply joints that the strap is skinned to, where the joints are part of the main rig hierarchy. You could also try making the strap a cloth object (with Maya Unlimited), and the belt/character into collision objects for the strap. Hope that helps.

John