Maya how to animate clothes for a game engine?

Sunray

Hey,

I need to animate clothes on a character for a school project in Maya. It's for a game engine and I have no idea how to do it. Does anyone have any good links to useful videos or forums or anything like that?

Michael_Ingrassia

What kind of clothes animation? Like Batmans cape or gunsligers coat flaps? You need to create joint chains or a "skirt" then parent it to the main skeleton where it's appropriate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzrETjZ7S1c

illbleed

What engine in particular?
If you can get it to work, you could use Apex Clothing (real time clothing simulation).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tJSUOYHOSA
https://developer.nvidia.com/clothing

Sunray

@Michael_Ingrassia  @illbleed  

Thanks, guys this will help a lot probably going with the apex one it looks really good. And unity engine. 

Mark Dygert

Apex can be pain to set up, especially if you haven't used it before. It can also break easily and can into a nightmare pretty quick depending on what animations are running on the character and how you are blending them.

It can also be pretty tough to dial in the exact type of cloth you want with the settings that they have, mostly your options are jello, more jello and floaty jello. That's not to say you can't get good predictable results with it but holy hell does it take a while and just when you think you've got it, you find that it falls apart in some way, usually it's collision related...

In unreal I lean toward using Anim Dynamics for a lot of things and saving apex for when it has to be flowy cloth. Anim Dynamics is a joint angle based system that is computationally lighter than apex, easier to setup and much more predictable and controllable. 

~10:30
https://youtu.be/5h5CvZEBBWo?t=10m56s

It's basically a spring controller, which is good for dangly bits of cloth, scarves, tabards, pouches, and other things that need a little secondary  motion. It can even be used on shirts robes and dresses but it's not exactly flowing cloth like a flag or cape.

illbleed

Like Mark mentioned above, it is quite painful to use apex the first time around, but it does get good results when it actually works. I'm not an animator so this is the route i took when needing cloth animations!