animating cloth with bones

Ruz

I have to animate a jacket flapping as my character runs about. At the simplest level
I could just create a dummy as a bone and skin the jacket flaps to it, then animate the dummy roughly , but I would welcome suggestions to make to more natural
It would be cool if the dummies would react to the motion of the particular cycle I was usng ie walk or run.

hyrumark

How complex does the flapping have to be? If it's just the tail of a jacket a bone or dummy with a spring controller would work, with the z-axis damped a bit. You can then collapse the controller to keyframes to fix up inter-penetrations by hand.

Piflik

Simplest thing (in Max...) would be to use Spring Controllers on your Bones...other possibility would be to use some Kind of Cloth simulation on a Spline controling the Bone Chain and baking the motion of the Bones into Keyframes...

Ruz

ok thanks guys i will have a look at that. it does n't have to be very complex though

Mark Dygert

Yep spring controller might work well, it would settle back into a root pose eventually and would be driven by the motion of the character, but it might look more giggly than cloth like.
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mPRM_GulCc[/ame]

Using a cloth sim would work you can attachment constrain a helper dummy to the surface of the cloth and snap the bones to the dummies as it animates so every 5-10 frames. You would then skin a secondary mesh (your final low poly for export) to the bone.

I covered it in painfully long detail here: http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=66993

You can also use this method to make it loop back to a root pose:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=96&t=722383

Ruz

cheers for that vig, will have a look through it, though I am starting to think this is probably out of my remit for this job:) nice flag tut BTW.

I will make my small brain understand it