How would you animate a character putting/taking off clothing?

slicksta

I was just wondering how would you approach an animation where a character needed to put on/ take off clothing (like getting dressed in the morning, putting on a coat, etc)? 

Thanks in advance.

Blond

aaah..the sad limitation of 3D animation...actually, motions that requires meticulous care of clothing such as putting clothes on requires more tahn just your usual rig and cloths simulation...you would need some tech guy to manage scene like that...

slicksta

Ah...that's disappointing.  Thanks for the response. 

KielFiggins

Each article of cloth would almost require a different setup and could vary in difficulty pretty drastically.  I had to put on a full body suit for a commercial ( http://www.3dfiggins.com/scrap/0527_Skrull_suit_03.avi.mov ) and the setup consisted of about 200-300 free floating joints with a blend constraint on each.  So when the area was on the ground it was in global, and when it reached the point on the body it would snap the constraint to local.  It was tedious, but this was a long time ago before cloth was readily available.

antweiler

Long time ago i worked on a game with a lot of dressing/undressing. Given the amount of clothes, and corresponding individual movements, we did the undressing with one symbolic animation, and let the clothes simply switch at the end of the animation. A thing you still see a lot in games, when characters switch their weapons etc... The undressing animation was the character pulling an imaginative t-shirt over his head. It worked fine.

slicksta

Thanks for the responses guys. 

DragonmoyArt

Fear not. I was also trying to research this when I stumbled across this gem:

https://youtu.be/PS76m6ApOus

Hopefully this will help and keep you motivated with more intricate clothes changes.

Hito

I'd probably rig the upper torso/shoulder area with joints and animate that conventionally and try cloth sim on the remainder. or, you know, fade to black and back.

AGoodFella

I still notice games tend to cut to a different shot as soon as the character is either putting on clothes or if an NPC is handing the player something.

So I guess, it's still a tough thing to pull off.