Mesh constraints on skinned mesh

[theodox]

Im attempting to add some cloth doodads to a conventionally skinned model. The cloth garments are built from curves as per usual and the resulting meshes are constrained to the rest of the model via mesh constraints.

Running a local sim more or less works as I expect -- the cloth drapes and the mesh constraints attach it to the body correctly. It even works fine if I translate, rotate or scale the mesh. However animating the mesh via the skeleton produces very strange results -- the attachments points where the mesh constraint connects the cloth to the body move , but they don't stay fixed to the mesh. I can't see the logic of what they actually do at all, although it is vaguely like they move in the XZ plane only and don't move up or down with the deforming character mesh.

Has anybody seen this before? Is there something obvious I'm overlooking?

[bfx]

Collision objects on Maya 5.0 cloth are buggy in the extreme, I've run into problems where cloth wont react to deformations due to clusters, pole vectors, the list goes on, then there's goofy screwups that occur around pinched geometry, after months of hair pulling and numerous tests I've found that if you want your cloth collisions to run quick and efficiently, you;ve got to build simple proxy objects - Like a low res rig - for the cloth to collide with. Using nurbs surfaces helps and so does ensuring none of your collision objects interpenetrate with each other. Remember, your sim only has to work 95 percent, if there are bubbles or pops in the animation you can always bake the control shapes and manually fix goofy frames - This bogs everything waaaay down but is sometimes the only solution for net rendering cloth scenes.

Anyways, have fun!