Hit a brick wall | MD Cloth simulation workflow for animation
To keep it short, I've hit a brick wall when it comes to the pipeline for cloth simulation for animation. There are plenty of tutorials and blogs talking about how to create, retopo and sculpt on clothes but nothing the covers the final simulation of it.
I have a fully retopologized clothing model with but I know of no way to simulate it.
How do I simulate the clothes in a way that keeps the topology and details?
Below I'll describe the problem and some of the solution I've tried in greater detail.
These two articles show the workflow to create retopologized clothes with thickness.
https://www.artstation.com/blogs/emilie_boisvert/RDKR/marvelous-designer-to-maya-part-1-retopology-domo-arigato-auto-retopo
So now I have great looking garment with good topology, thickness and sculpted details.
The problem is where do I go from here if I want to simulate the clothes for animation.
The preferable option would be to take advantage of the intuitive simulation functions in Marvelous designer but the problem is that when you import a retopologized garment into MD it gets triangulated and all your hard work destroyed.
Alternative option is to use the cloth simulation tools in Blender or Maya. However it is much slower and doesn't understand thick garments. Instead it sees each side of the garment as separate pieces leading them to fall in on each other.
The desirable outcome is a way to simulate the retopologized mesh in a way that maintains all the details of the completed garment.
Replies
Try this, i see the tutorial is in 3ds max & idk about any options to do this in 3dsmax nor any plugins but worth a shot,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFAfqW0Zlqk&t=347s got to figure out where in your pipeline this fits in.
Hope it helps, while you wait for a better solution.
I’d look into simulating a single-sided simplified version of the clothing, then using that as a control for the more complicated & textured model.
Many ways to transfer the animation, for example Skin Wrap in 3ds Max.
This is very similar to the workflow I used to retopo my garment except I use blender. It's really good for the sculpting phase but not usable within MD. Simulating more simple mesh like this t-shirt with Ncloth or blender is possible though if you only add thickness after the simulation. Thanks for the response.
I had an idea of a similar method and seen people mention it. I don't have access to 3ds Max so I use blender. A similar modifier to Skin Wrap is the Surface Deform modifier in blender. I tried to target the retopod mesh with the MD simulated mesh but only get an error that the target has invalid or convex cases. I tried both with triangulated and quadrangulated MD meshes.
I also tried using a similar modifier called Mesh Deform. If I use solidify modifier on the simulated mesh I can create a cage around the retopod mesh. But even with all the vertexes inside the mesh would still tear.
This is probably the right solution though. I've seen on similar posts that this progress is extremely complicated and mostly done in Houdini. I'm going to continue to try finding ways to simulate detailed clothes in a way that looks convincing. Thanks for the response.
I'd say keep focusing on the Surface Deform approach, as the concept of simulating a detailled garment using a lower-res proxy version is indeed the way to go IMHO.
The error about the target being invalid is likely to be solved by triangulating the proxy mesh. Once you get that solved you'll be able to fully dedicate yourself to getting the lowpoly version simulated nicely.