Hi,
I modeled a body without clothes because it's easier for me to visualize, and I want the character to be able to have different clothes added at later times.
Does anyone have a link to a good tutorial for this? Or, if you have a good workflow, could you give me some insights?
I'm a bit stuck as to where to start. In the character modeling course here, the boy with the hat is rigged in separate pieces, with the sweater being directly influenced by the rig.
Is there a way to model a character, rig the entire body, and then have the model's rig effect clothes added at a later time?
It seems inefficient to redo weight paints for each added piece of clothing (and have to hide the body mesh that is underneath to avoid clipping). However, I haven't seen a worflow that will let me avoid this. Cloth simulation for every single article of clothing seems too computationally expensive, so I think I will need to use old fashioned rigging. Is there a way to use physics simulation (not cloth) to detect when an outside mesh (clothes) has collided with the inside mesh (the body), and push it outwards to prevent overlap? Or do you do it a different way?
Thanks!
You're getting into a very difficult corner of computer graphics. There's a good reason you don't find many good tutorials about this subject...
There's a few ways of rigging of characters with clothing. If you can get away with transferring weights from your rigged body mesh to your clothing, that's the easiest way. If the clothing is tighter than it is loose, it's the more practical option.
If your characters are wearing loose clothing like a trenchcoat, a cape, or baggy clothes, simulation is the only real option for believability. It's a very hard thing to setup and achieve efficiently whether you're using Blender or another package. But currently Blender isn't leading the pack in clothing simulation.
A third option, which is more common in games, is rigging something like a cape with bones and animating clothing-like motion by hand. As you can imagine this is quite tedious.
That said, I really can't point you many places that teach this stuff well. I've shied away from teaching the topic myself due to difficulty..
@theluthier Ok great, thanks for the answer! I looked into a bunch of tutorials on the subject, and it definitely seemed to be something that no one agreed on. There's a lot that can go wrong, and a lot of people "cheat" and just hide the mesh underneath with a mask modifier after rigging the clothes. (An excellent solution in my opinion)
Is Maya the leading program for cloth simulation? I wouldn't mind learning Maya just for the animation, and continue to model in Blender as it is my favorite package.
polygondust In my experience, Maya's built in cloth tools were not much (if any) better than Blender's built in tools. But of course maya supports some great 3rd party cloth plugins which are way better than Blender's cloth tools.
If you were dead-set on learning another app for cloth sim, I'd recommend looking at Houdini over maya.
