Importing Cloth From Two Characters Into One Scene

[spynal]

Hi there. I've recently created two characters that have cloth and am trying to figure out the best way to put them in a scene together. They are gonna be animated so I need to be able to disable the solvers to animate. Unless I can animate the characters without the cloth then import it in when it's done and simulate it that way. The problems I am having are when I try to put two clothed characters into one scene it gives me an error when I try deleting the cache or disabling the solver of either character's cloth. It says "Error: Must select a cloth object to operate on". This happens no matter if I change the default solver it's using from each character or click the cloth and try it again. It seems like this happens when the second character is imported into the scene. The first character's cloth works fine at first. I guess it has something to do with the cache's clashing, since there's only one cache with two different clothes. I made sure the solvers and all were named differently so they don't clash. I would think that referencing the characters without their clothes and then importing the cloth into the scene after animating would be the best method. However, I can't seem to import a clothed character without his cache and solvers coming alone even after I delete the cloth, garments and panels before exporting. I know this shouldn't be too hard to do since most studios do this method of adding cloth after animation. Any help would be much appreciated. Thank you.

[haveaniceday]

QUOTE(Spynal @ 01/05/06, 01:27 AM)
Hi there. I've recently created two characters that have cloth and am trying to figure out the best way to put them in a scene together.  They are gonna be animated so I need to be able to disable the solvers to animate. Unless I can animate the characters without the cloth then import it in when it's done and simulate it that way. The problems I am having are when I try to put two clothed characters into one scene it gives me an error when I try deleting the cache or disabling the solver of either character's cloth. It says "Error: Must select a cloth object to operate on". This happens no matter if I change the default solver it's using from each character or click the cloth and try it again. It seems like this happens when the second character is imported into the scene. The first character's cloth works fine at first. I guess it has something to do with the cache's clashing, since there's only one cache with two different clothes. I made sure the solvers and all were named differently so they don't clash. I would think that referencing the characters without their clothes and then importing the cloth into the scene after animating would be the best method. However, I can't seem to import a clothed character without his cache and solvers coming alone even after I delete the cloth, garments and panels before exporting. I know this shouldn't be too hard to do since most studios do this method of adding cloth after animation. Any help would be much appreciated. Thank you.
[snapback]224024[/snapback]

Hi - steps to take are:

Animate characters interacting without clothes. Sign off on animation.
Simulate each seperately, get seperate cache files (or better, bake)
Import the two garments into a new scene
Run the timeline to check.
If problems still exist, bake out clothing and eliminate the solver

• It's a good idea to eliminate the solver asap anyways. Simulate and bake with corrective blendshapes is/was SOP for most all of my shots.

More than 1 cloth object per scene = greater than 2x complexity
More than 1 solver per scene = greater than 2x complexity
More than 1 cloth object + more than 1 solver per scene = greater than 4x complexity

fyi - i was the digital clothing supervisor for a number of films using Mayacloth.

[bohne]

hi,

why do you wanna have two characters with two cloth solvers in one scene to solve?
make for every character one scene to solve the clothes for this character and save the final cache.
when you have simulated both characters in different files, you have diffrent caches for ever cloth of each character.
make a new scene with the reference of both animated characters. also reference the two clothes of different characters with different solvers.
now reassign the caches to the accordingly cache nodes. this should be work fine, at least by my work.

also make different files when the characters interact each other and therefore the cloth will be influenced by the other character.

i hoe this will be a solution for your problem

bohne

[spynal]

Thanks for all your help guys. Fortunately I solved all these problems before anyone replied to my first post. The animations are done and the cloth solved for both characters in their seperate scenes. I am now doing the lip sync and brow animations for each character. Then I'll put them together according to your instructions. Thanks for the help, even if it was a little late, lol.