Wrinkles And Crinkles With Ncloth

[bastardloud]

Im getting Wrinkles and Crinkles that wont unfold when the cloth is at rest.

Im skinning a pair of shorts, for a character. I want the top of the shorts to be controlled by the skin cluster and then the lower area, by the legs to be controlled by nCloth. My aim is to use the dynamic deformation of cloth, to control the interaction of my shorts with my characters legs instead of using blend shapes or influence objects. So far I’ve gotten ok results, but only after hours of trial and error.
(Note Ive never used cloth before nor Syflex cloth.)

Work Flow.
1._ I duplicate my Skinned mesh(shorts) unlocking the transforms and deleting all history. I then create and new nCloth.

2._ I select all of the Cvs of the nCloth mesh, and then select the translate node of the skinned mesh(shorts). I apply the -Point to Surface- Constraint and then cache the nCloth.

3._ I Paint per Vertex the Glue Strength, Strength and Weight of the Constraint. I basically just selected the Cvs that make up the bottom of the shorts legs and flooded them with a value of .5 (Im not looking for realistic)

4._It seemed to work out ok, but the faces kept piercing themselves. I read somewhere that nCloth calculates the face instead of Cvs so I figured if I had smaller faces I would not get tearing. I smoothed the nCloth mesh x2 and it worked.

5._ Things were working well but I kept getting wrinkles that would not leave. They would stick as if the mesh was pinned to something inside the shorts. I added gravity to see if it wouldn’t force the cvs to drop back into position it worked ok but only 50 percent.
(I reCached always when retesting the simulation.)

So that is it, I dont know where to go from here. I tried using The Attract Constraint, but it sucked and I hated the end results. I tried dampening the affect of the nCloth particles but they are not like real particles and the attributes really seemed to no help at all.

Does anyone have any suggestions?
Does anyone have a better work flow?

[duncanbrinsmead]

Instead make your original skinned shorts nCloth. Make the inputMeshAttract 1.0 and then paint the per vertex input attract values black where you want the shorts to be fully dynamic.

Duncan

[milqito]

I've actually been working on the exact same problem for a character - making shorts - and I've found a solution that is working well. I first build the shorts starting from a duplicate of my character with the UV's already mapped, and I make sure the UV's are adjusted where necessary to match those of the character as closely as practicable. I then import the weights using only the relevant influences - those in the thighs, quads, hips and abdomen areas. For this you need to duplicate the weightmap file and weight map image folder. I change the name of the image folder to "shorts" and the weightmap file to "shorts.weightmap" (or whatever the extension is). I then go into the file and ctrl+F to replace all mentions of "character" or "body", or whatever the character name is, in the let column, and only the left column, to "shorts". I also delete all rows referring to superfluous influence objects, i.e. "left_elbow" and "neck". They just screw up the weighting.

After tweeking the weights to make sure the shorts follow the character's movements, I smooth the shorts geometry. Only then do I make the poly shorts into nCloth, and max the mesh influence slider so I have a skin and nCloth node on them. To prevent intersecting with the character's geometry, I make the character a passive. Even when I have the full input mesh going into the ncloth, the shorts still wrinkle and flap, but they also move with the character.

I also find that the input mesh alone is enough to keep the shorts from falling, so I don't use any constraints. In my case, the shorts are supposed to be a little stiff, like denim, so I don't want them to flap too much, but if I wanted a looser fabric I suppose I would remove some of the influence from the lower part of the legs. I hope this helps.