Making clothing, especially dresses?

zoombapup

Hey guys,

I've got to do a girl character for my game. I've got a base mesh done and wanted to start the sculpt. But I got to the point where I was wondering about how to do a flowing dress and realized I havent seen that done anywhere.

I know about the issues I'll have with animating a dress, but I still want to try it out.

Anyone got any tutorial links or ideas on how do model dresses? I would obviously normally use extraction in zbrush to make a base for the clothes, but a dress that hangs off the body?

My thoughts are to just extrude a line from the basemesh out into a rough shape and then sculpt that seperately, but I was wondering if there's another approach?

Thanks.

Mark Dygert

It doesn't get done often because its a monumental pain in the ass that requires some pretty intense cooperation between code and art/animation. Even the solutions that get worked out are normally small simulations like the coat tails in LA Noir and Allen Wake, nothing that would get beaten and battered by a long chain of unpredictable joints like the legs. A pelvis and a thigh? maybe. A pelvis, a thigh, a shin and a ball jointed foot that changes position... wait two!? That are independent and often working in opposite directions... oh wow that's just more problems than its wroth.

Then you have to worry about the dress flying around and interacting with all kinds of other things like doorways, props, other actors... Even if you work out a solution that works its still probably going to be a resource hog and cause the game to be trimmed back in many other areas.

We've talked about it a few times on the boards and I worked out a tutorial on how to translate a cloth sim to bone based animation. It's not perfect and doesn't simulate in realtime and the more unpredictable the animations the harder it is to get right. It's the unpredictability in realtime that makes doing cloth on characters so hard and why it is so limited. Often its just easier to rework the design and spare everyone the headache and let them concentrate on everything else.

The proper solution can't be worked out until the engine is known and the style of dress is at least researched. Once those two things start to come into focus then you can start to refine and create the systems to handle it all.

So which is it?
Giant cage dress that doesn't flow?
Tight mini-skirt?
loose short skirt?
A medium length dress?
Evening gown that flows from the knees down?
Wedding dress with a long train?
Split in the front?
Split on both the sides?
Split on one side?

Each one of those would require very different solutions and one solution won't fit them all.

zoombapup

Actually something closer to this, where there is a sort of chest line and then a sort of flowing dress part below. It's meant to be a kind of yorda (from ico) style thing:

zoombapup

Oh and the engine is a custom one, so it'll do whatever is needed really. Would prefer not to use cloth physics right now though. Although if thats the preferred way, then I might give it a try.

Mark Dygert

What kind of hardware will the game be running on?

Mobile: You're stuck probably rigging it with a few extra bones and hand animating it. The tutorial I wrote up helps get cloth motion without the headache of hand animating it. But you would want to do that on pretty low end hardware where the animations are set in stone, with cloth that went below the knees, and an engine that supported free floating bones.

Console: The hardware is very specific and only a handful of studios have been able to throw enough man power at the problems cloth presents to wrestle it and win. The ones that do often come up with an in-engine simulation that runs on specific portions of the mesh. Artists/animators define those sections through skin weights or bones or helper objects, its all worked out by the handful of people tasked with making it work.

PC: There is a lot of potential because the hardware CAN BE very high end. It can also be very low end and everywhere in between which drives just about everyone nuts.

Aside from the hardware the range of motion the character will do is pretty critical, the less motion the easier it is on everyone including the hardware. If you have to just provide a little secondary motion as a character shifts their weight while talking its different than getting it to look right on a character flipping all over the screen hacking enemies to pieces.

The outfit Yorda wears is a bit more simplistic than the one above. Since it doesn't have any folds and would be easier to work with but something could be worked out with the folded dress above, but if I had to choose which I would go with the straight lined Yorda dress. You could almost get away with a few extra bones and a little hand animation.

zoombapup

Its a PC/Mac game really. Might port it to iPad/Android Pads at some point. Maybe.

But yeah, I think I'll try a bone based solution for now and then throw together a cloth simulation prototype to test the performance later.

Thanks for the feedback.