Leaf skirt--shader and rigging

sharsein

So I have this skirt made out of leaf strips, with three individual leaves at the tip of each strip:


I want to render this in a game engine such as Unreal.

1) Since the skirt moves around a lot, would it be better to use a double sided shader rather than duplicating and flipping the normals? I'll be using diffuse, normal, alpha and spec maps.

2) What's a good way to approach rigging this skirt?

GlowingPotato

1) i think that using a double sided shader, you will have wrong lit in your leafs. I may be wrong, but in my opinion duplicating the mesh and reversing the normals should give the best results. The you can tweak those vertex normals to have a better lit.

2)Humm, If is not dynamic, i would approach by placing joints chain parented to the hip, and then use a curve control point to control those joints.

jfitch

1. I wouldn't duplicate it just because skinning it is going to be annoying as shit, but thats just me. I'm not an expert in that kind of thing, though I wish I were!

2. I would add a couple of bones for each leaf chain, and make it simulated cloth for unreal. It can yield some great results--though it can be expensive. Check out their cloth demo to see how it works, they have it rigged up with a leather jacket and it looks pretty great.

Eric Chadwick

Only use a double-sided shader if you don't case about how the other side looks, because as GlowingPotato said, the vertex normals on the new faces are going to be default angles which means the normal map won't be transformed properly on the new faces.

Also a double-sided shader should be confined to only the faces that need it, otherwise you're going to double the vertex count on the whole model.

Yeah, cloth is probably the best way. If performance is an issue, here's how I've seen game developers solve it... set up the cloth in your 3d source app, simulate it there, and for each character animation bake the cloth down into pure bone animation.

GlowingPotato

@jfitch You can duplicate after the skinning process. So the skinning information would follow.