Thursday, April 7, 2011

Cloth Cheat #1 (tutorial?)

So I'm a big advocate of cheating as much as you possibly can when you simulate hair and cloth.  Am I supposed to say that in public?  Oh well.

Here's a cheat I love to employ.  I don't 'think' it's a tutorial but, whatever.

Say you have a character who's running about a zillion miles an hour down a street.  You try to simulate the cloth but it keeps flying off/failing because the character is moving around so much.  What do you do?

Select the character.  Right click on all of the translations and freeze them.  The character is now moving in place.

Simulate the cloth.  Add wind if you want.  You can even key the direction the wind is coming from.  Do whatever you need to make the cloth look good.

Cache the cloth.

Do the same with the hair if you can.  Simulate it while the character is moving in place then parent it to the body.  This might not be possible considering your rig/character set up.

Now, parent the cloth to the body.  Unfreeze the translations on the character.  The cloth is moving with the character.  Nice, huh?

~Melissa


1 comment:

  1. Hi!
    This seems like a really great technique but I can't get it to work for me. Is it the character mesh or the control you are freezing the transforms of? Neither of these work for me. Are you animating using a local SRT?

    Thanks!
    Alex

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