Rigging Long Coats and Such

Lord McMutton

I'm a bit curious about methods of rigging things like long coats, and other things that kinda 'hug' a character. Do you attach it to the legs? Give it its own bones? Some combination of both?

And on that subject, there's that cloth physics stuff. Is that done in the modeling software, or in a game's engine?

arrangemonk

Yes

depends on engine, i recomend the rigging women tread(cant find it now)

cryrid

Do you attach it to the legs? Give it its own bones? Some combination of both?

If you want it to perfectly follow the legs, you can use those bones. If you want a secondary motion or a delay, I'd give it its own bones.

And on that subject, there's that cloth physics stuff. Is that done in the modeling software, or in a game's engine?

It would depend on the engine. If the engine supports it, hooray. If not, you could run a cloth-sim, point cache the result, apply some cluster centers to these verts, then constrain some bones to follow the vertex animation (turning a cloth sim into a skeletal animation, a la MGS4).

Mark Dygert

arrangemonk wrote: »

Yes

depends on engine, i recomend the rigging women tread(cant find it now)

This one?
http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?p=1025443

cryrid wrote: »

If you want it to perfectly follow the legs, you can use those bones. If you want a secondary motion or a delay, I'd give it its own bones.


It would depend on the engine. If the engine supports it, hooray. If not, you could run a cloth-sim, point cache the result, apply some cluster centers to these verts, then constrain some bones to follow the vertex animation (turning a cloth sim into a skeletal animation, a la MGS4).

The link above covers doing that in Max and its easily translated to Maya.

I don't see how creating a point cache would be relevant other then to make a back up of the sim?

cryrid

I don't see how creating a point cache would be relevant other then to make a back up of the sim?

I think their theory was that they can cache the simulation to a shape target, and then use secondary shape modes to fix any defects from the sim.
I did mess up my post though, instead of cluster centers, it should be cluster constraints (cluster centers would have the opposite effect). Cheers for posting a link with steps though :thumbup:.

Mark Dygert

Oh yea I see what you're thinking. In Max you can create mesh snap shots of the cloth sim at different points, then create morph targets (blend shapes in maya) to work around those little hick ups. I cover that in the write up also, because cloth sims never want to return to a root pose heh.