Best way to animate cloths?

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I’m working on a game, and I was going to use the images rendered to make sprites for the game. I have the model looking decent now, but I seem to be having issues with clothing. I’ve been trying to get the clothing to move with the character most of this morning, but most of the time it doesn’t move the same way, or moves slower, faster, or just distorts massively when moving the armature in pose mode.

I’d really rather not have to delete the body under the cloths; as that would make me have to use a different model for the same person for every outfit, and while that’s not an issue in this game, i’d rather learn to do it in a way that leaves me free to work as I want or need to.

I didn’t see anything in the stickies about animating cloths, so I was wondering what is the best way to go about animating cloths so they don’t clip into the character?

2

If they are supposed to be close fitting clothes, here’s a trick I just learned…
First model and rig the character with no clothes. Once you are happy with the rig and the bone weights, model the clothes by duplicating the part of the body the clothes will cover. Fatten the new polys (Alt-s) and then tweak as needed.

Now the clothes will have the exact same weights as the skin underneath them and should remain above the skin when deforming.