i am reading that on big movies and game cinematics they model two type’s of clothing. one is a finished model of the cloth with details and the second is a low res cloth for dynamic simulation. they calculate the low res cloth and the high res cloth folows the low res cloth.
so this is why i am trying to do. i have pants with details. i modeled second pants without the details. i want that the detailed pants folow the low res pants.
Why not simply bake your high-res details into a normal map to be applied to your lower-res mesh? That’s a very common approach and doesn’t require linking the low and high res meshes in any fashion for the cloth dynamics.
ok lets say for example that you have pockets on pants or a jacket. pockets that are in 3D dimension and are not a video game fake with bump or normal maps.
Neither pockets nor buttons require a high-resolution mesh to accomplish. If you’re using the Blender cloth sim (you mentioned “dynamic simulation”), then you’ll probably want a relatively dense mesh to start with since that generally gives a better result. Certainly dense enough to incorporate a pocket, and some relatively fine detail as well, like seams and cuffs. With Blender a big issue with such overlapping mesh areas is self-collision, which is kind of chancy in the current Cloth implementation. But cloth meshes can also be set up for both shape key corrections and armature control, so that these problem areas can be dealt with using a number of methods.
Buttons can be done a number of ways but one often used is to parent them to a three-vertex cluster on the garment. Probably shouldn’t make them part of the cloth mesh because they’ll either deform or not move properly due to pinning.
I guess I was thinking very high resolution in terms of mesh density, on the order of resolution necessary to sculpt fine details into the garment. These can be animated directly but it’s not uncommon (nor limited to video games) to use normal-mapping techniques to reduce the demands on the animation system. A lean, clean mesh is always going to be less trouble to animate.
i was also thinking using the cloth system for hair. for example i have braids.the braids are modeled. and i was thinking using the cloth system to simulate long strands and then use them for the braids . any tips on that?
The particle hair option uses the cloth simulation approach for its Hair Dynamics, so you’re on the right track. One concern you’ll have is maintaining the structural integrity of the braids while still gaining some flexibility using the Cloth sim. Cloth has a tendency to distort from a given initial state pretty radically, but you can adjust the settings to modulate that. You’ll be tweaking the parameters a lot, probably, but I’m pretty sure it can be done effectively.
One thing I urge is that you scale your model accordingly. Using a 1BU = 1m scale, the default scale the Cloth and other sims is based on, will help prevent issues with the Cloth response being out of proportion to any motion of the character the cloth is attached to.
You can braid using particle hair, btw, but I have no experience with how complex or successful it might be, something to look into, at least. Particle hair using Hair Dynamics does not collide well, either, so you may be better off using modeled braids than particle hair. Depends on your model, I guess.