Bone-Driven/ Cloth-Sim Cape Rig: 3ds Max

Chris Kuhner

I had a question regarding rigging. This weekend, I plan to rig a Batman character and I've been tossing a few ideas back and forth about how to rig his cape. My goal is to have something similar to that of Arkham City, where it's a combination of both bones and cloth-sim; except, all done through 3ds Max. I don't need a real-time solution, as I only plan to create animated shorts/cycled animations with the character.

I don't have much experience with simulation, but I've done some tinkering and came up with an idea that I'd like to pass by you guys:

After messing with the cloth modifier, i found a way to skin part of the mesh to his body and leave the rest for simulation. I also saw that you can have up to two different properties on the same modifier. That leads me to think I could possibly animate between the two properties and end up with a bone-driven cloth sim. Maybe that also means I could create morph targets for more specific/stylized shapes and drive the sim via shapes?

Do you think an idea like this could work with Biped? Or would I need an all custom rig..?

I'm really in unfamiliar territory here and would appreciate any feedback/advice you guys might have. Thanks everyone!

monster

If you have access to the Apex PhysX plug in it does something similar to what you want. You skin cloth to bones, loosely animate the bones, and finally run then run the sim. Its a little more involved then that. And you'll want to save a backup of your UI customizations as installing the plugin erased mine.

Here's some info and video tutorials.

https://developer.nvidia.com/apex-clothing
https://developer.nvidia.com/apex-clothing-3dsmax-tutorials

If you dont want to use Apex, the method you are decribing is as good a place to start as any.

Chris Kuhner

Oh wow- this looks perfect! I heard they did Arkham City with PhysX, but wasn't aware of this plug in that makes it much more artist friendly. Hopefully the process of getting it isn't too long. Thanks man, big help!

poopipe

I've done this by blending my deformation rig between bone and cloth sim driven rigs but it gets slow due to havinng to track cloth vert positions all the time. we opted to bone animate and run the cloth sim stuff as a second pass im the end.