3d clothing

stuh505 · Tue 19/10/2004 15:58:31

this is a little out there, but I know some of you guys dabble in 3d, so...anyone know of any good free or trial plugins animating clothing in max? I have got clothfx but my version is buggy.

if something like this exists for another 3d program like blender or cinema 4d that will work for me also.

MrColossal · Wed 20/10/2004 00:03:49

Someone will mention poser and I advise you not to listen to them

"Why poser is a viable blah blah" because Poser always looks like Poser

"But you can make it not look like Poser with just a blah blah" No sorry, it always looks like poser.

What do you need for cloth? Like a cape or just a shirt? If it's something that will really flow then yea, go for it but if you just want a shirt to move well on the body, I think that might be overkill

What 3d program do you have, if any. Blender being free would be a good bet I'm sure and it has [somewhere] cloth-a-bility

We shall wait for Shbaz

shbaz · Wed 20/10/2004 01:13:13

Soft body dynamics have begun and are actually quite reliable, but the only cloth sim plugin I've tried ended up sucking ass. I couldn't get the results other people have gotten from it. Instinctive Blender (Linux only) has good cloth sim because it was developed by a private studio aside from the Blender foundation, and it's features are supposed to be completely ported one day.

The latest developments in Blender have been small catch-up features, export/import improvements, extrudable faces, edge selection, etc.

Makehuman (Blender's "Poser" plugin) has progressed to muscle simulation, one day it will probably implement cloth, but alas, not right now.

Besides, Max users tend to hate Blender.

Neutron · Wed 20/10/2004 01:28:09

did you want to animate the cloth, or just render a still? are we talking pants and shirts?

shbaz · Wed 20/10/2004 02:27:26

Quote from: Neutron on Wed 20/10/2004 01:28:09
did you want to animate the cloth, or just render a still?

Quote from: stuh505 on Tue 19/10/2004 15:58:31
anyone know of any good free or trial plugins animating clothing in max?

Scummbuddy · Wed 20/10/2004 02:55:23

Quote from: MrColossal on Wed 20/10/2004 00:03:49
"But you can make it not look like Poser with just a blah blah" No sorry, it always looks like poser.

But you can make a Christina Ricci clone by being as skilled as Igor.

But I completly agree with your point. Poser, for most, will definitly look like Poser.

stuh505 · Wed 20/10/2004 03:47:07

I'm not sure what Poser has to do with animating cloth. I have Poser4 and Poser5 and I am very unimpressed with both of them...I do not think that either of them come remotely close to doing what their design specifications should have entailed.

I do not need to use Poser, I am capable of doing everything in max...but I am planning on using Poser just to grab the basic male and female anatomy from which to work from. I will not be using the crappy Poser faces...I'll be modelling the faces from concept art, and boning and texturing them myself, hairing them using Shag: Hair and rigging them with Character Studio.

But that is all beside the point...I am looking for a way to do good clothing for my character animations. I am looking into reactor cloth which is standard in max (just found out about it today) and perhaps this will be able to do what I want.

Basically I want to be able to just make the clothes, drape them over my character, and watch them flow around naturally while the character walks or does whatever. I'm not quite sure how to do this with reactor yet because it seems to ignore the position of rigid body objects after the first frame.

MrColossal · Wed 20/10/2004 04:45:20

reactor cloth can get good results but it's a tricky annoying beast.

also, depending on the complexity of the mesh it will seriously up your render times [calculating the dynamics of the cloth that is]

I also don't like the documentation that came with Reactor because it's so sparse but anyway, I suppose keep messing around with it or look for online tutorials

but really, if you're doing this for sprites and not big fully animated cutscenes, it might be overkill, in my opinion

Neutron · Wed 20/10/2004 23:18:19

I might try using an animated displacement map in blender. Alsoo you can make key frames for mesh distortions. ( RVKs )

stuh505 · Thu 21/10/2004 01:23:34

Reactor is a bit confusing. Sometimes things just fly off in random directions, or seem to implode or explode for no reason.

Isegrim · Thu 21/10/2004 16:23:39

Yeah, reactor sometimes does behave quite weird. C4D also has a (non-free) dynamics module, which is even worse.
But try to work with a high amount of simulation steps, a low amount of polygons (e.g. if you do subdivision modelling, use a coarse stage of the person model as rigid body to simulate with).
Also you'll have to fiddle with the parameters like stiffness, elasticity and gravity (if one of them ist too high/low, the scene explodes).
And, to my experience, what pays off most in this case: Simulate as little as possible! If you have a coat, for example, "nail" the upper parts of the coat to the body and let only the hem simulate.
That's what I do when I try to make "realistic" clothes. But still I'm frustrated quite often...
Maybe you're better off to animate it by hand

stuh505 · Fri 22/10/2004 15:18:08

Well, my problems seem to be solved

Because now I have ClothFX/Stitch working...it's pretty cool.

When reactor actually works, it seems to produce slightly better results...aka, for draping a cloth over an object....but reactor seems to be completely impractical for practical use of clothing...and seems impossible with character studio or for any moving animations for that matter.

So, I spent last night trying to learn how to use clothfx...it's really neat, you build the clothing parts as splines from a clothing pattern, then define the seam and it stitches the pieces together around a person and then you can turn on gravity simulation and it will drape naturally...and from what I was reading, it should be able to work well with character studio. So I'm pretty excited about that.