games with deforming clothing on characters?

wannabeartist · Oct 2010

Hi all,

Are there any games out there where the characters' clothes would deform when they move? walk, run, etc.? Like third person games for instance?

I have to confess that I'm no expert in the latest games - quickly looking at a few reasonably fresh titles, I didn't see any deforming clothing. Armor seems popular and - even though it's natural in many genres - I'm guessing it's also partly due the fact that it doesn't deform?

So is this actually ever done and if, then could you give me an example of such a game?

Thanks!

Snowfly · Oct 2010

I'm not much of a gamer myself these days, but off the top of my head...

-Practically every recent basketball game has physics driven cloth
-Alan Wake's coat
-Soul Calibur 4, Tekken 6, practically all characters costumes are cloth, with a lot of long flowing extensions, sleeve cuffs, etc.

wannabeartist · Oct 2010

Thanks for the examples!

Any ideas how these were made? Sculpted and turned into morph targets or something like that? Or do they actually use a physics engine?

Wahlgren · Oct 2010

Here's something interesting for ya.

[ame]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrtwESnTOwY[/ame]

IEatApples · Oct 2010

Very sexy example of cloth physics for you to check out.

[ame]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf26ZhHz6uM[/ame]

Edit: Damn you beat me to it....

wannabeartist · Oct 2010

Thanks,

That first one probably also had the best youtube comment of the year

Ok, but seriously that's not probably quite the reality in current games yet, is it?

I mean, I'm guessing the current games, like the ones mentioned, do not actually use physics for clothing (or do they?) Sounds like a rather heavy solution for the current hardware.

Rick Stirling · Oct 2010

Red Faction: Guerilla.
RDR had some on Marstons long coats.

Gav · Oct 2010

They would use a basic cloth simulation - I know Unreal can handle it, if you look at some recent baseball titles I know they have it as well. The trick is that not everyone and eveything can have it, so you would most likely LOD it out. Characters in focus would have it with characters further away dropping down to bone weighting. Games like Red Dead Redemption also use vertex animation to give shirts slight movement (notably Irish's shirt in cutscenes)

wannabeartist · Oct 2010

Thanks, Rick and Gavin!

So, if that's already done by simulating and probably much more in the future, then I guess there's little point in spending lots of time learning to sculpt clothing?

Seems to be a popular topic among ZBrush tutorials, for example, but I guess that sort of thing is not really meant for games?

neolith · Oct 2010

Champions Online does it for the chars' capes I think.

JacqueChoi · Oct 2010

One day (I hope).

For the most part we generally have cloth and muscle deformation that looks like bending prosthetic latex.

The cloth simulation you're seeing is really secondary motion rather than per-poly collision cloth-sim (which is folds and wrinkles forming in a densely tessellated mesh).

One day.... one day...

^_^

Snowfly · Oct 2010

Well, you're talking about two different things. If you look at the examples in the videos posted, the cloth moves like real cloth, but the finer wrinkles are still static, and those are still done in the texture. At the moment it's still more efficient to blend in wrinkle maps for the small creases that don't have anything to do with the overall shape and volume of the cloth, and that means sculpting or modeling them into a normal map.

Maybe if it were more efficient to handle denser cloth meshes with physics, but I think because of performance issues most games stay away from any heavy cloth simulation.

Fuse · Oct 2010

wannabeartist wrote: »

Thanks, Rick and Gavin!

So, if that's already done by simulating and probably much more in the future, then I guess there's little point in spending lots of time learning to sculpt clothing?

Seems to be a popular topic among ZBrush tutorials, for example, but I guess that sort of thing is not really meant for games?

That's like saying animators don't need to learn the fundamentals of animation since motion capture is used extensively in the business.

Besides, cloth simulation only works on light freeflowing fabrics, like jerseys, shorts and long coats. If you want to sell the illusion of weight and texture of clothing otherwise, you gotta sculpt it.

wannabeartist · Oct 2010

Thanks for the replies,

So, Jacque, I took a look at your gallery (very cool!) - How was the clothing generally handled in your characters, when they are animated/in game? I'm guessing that you sculpted those wrinkles in the Malika character, for example?

wannabeartist · Oct 2010

@Fuse,

Thanks for the reply - I'm not trying to make a statement, but sincerely just asking how it is (usually) done. I would love to learn to sculpt clothing, but I want to know first if it will be something I can use in game assets.

Farfarer · Oct 2010

Check out Unity3D - the latest version has cloth in it that'll be affected by physics and that you can set to be tearable, etc... It's a little clunky compared to dedicated implementations (especially that CCP demo) but it's not bad.

Ideally you have it on trailing bits and not the whole garment - lots of errors and glitches lie down set-entire-garment-as-cloth path :P

wannabeartist · Oct 2010

Right you are,

I am actually familiar with Unity (in fact just making a terrain here). Here's a nifty video on the cloth.

But still, I'd really like to know how this clothed character-thing is usually done in the industry

Ged · Oct 2010

seems to me like cloth is still a way off. Its a similar problem to the way hair is handled, even now alot of games have bald or short haired characters or completely static long hair, so you still have to sculpt hair/cloth and make alpha textures, its probably going to be at least 3 years before any realistic widely accepted solutions to these problems arise and even then those games will have to use high end hardware so if you ever end up making handheld games or something with a special visual style you would probably have to use our current sculpt/alpha methods.

danshewan · Oct 2010

Can't believe nobody's mentioned Batman's cape in Arkham Asylum yet...

BluntPencil · Oct 2010

There's quite a bit of physics-based cloth in Mafia 2, actually. No mobsters without trenchcoats flapping in the wind! It's probably the best-looking cloth I've seen in a game yet, lovely weight to it. The CCP stuff is looking mighty impressive too, but I'll believe it when I see it ingame... xD

crazyfingers · Oct 2010

For Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom a PS3 launch title, the dev team didn't know what to do with the spare cell processors in the PS3 so they dumped in some real time flowing cloaks that looks pretty spiffy. It's not the poly count really that makes it so intensive it's the real time physics checks. Character models using pre made animations can have very high poly robes and such without too much trouble.

wannabeartist · Oct 2010

Thanks for everyone for mentioning these titles!

It would have been difficult to me to find them on my own, as my (previous) active gaming days were some 15 years ago

JohnnyRaptor · Oct 2010

[ame]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoQh4R1-Vjs[/ame]

Mark Dygert · Oct 2010

There was a write up that explained how they did the cloth sim in Alan Wake over at gamasutra, pretty good read.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4383/the_secrets_of_cloth_simulation_in_.php?print=1

games with deforming clothing on characters?

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