I am making a character wearing baggy pants, similar to army BDUs. Here is a picture:
I have the pants draping nicely over the body, even when I change the pose. But what I want to get now is proper wrinkles. In the current state, the cloth is fairly shapeless. But real cloth will pull and bunch up, and be stiff enough to maintain some shape of it’s own.
You can see where the cloth is hung on the body beneath, causing wrinkles to spread most of the way down the leg. These are caused by the fabric being taut in some places, but loose in others. But in the Blender simulation, it’s technically loose everywhere. Could I get these sorts of wrinkles with pinning? Or weighting different amounts of pinning across the mesh?
What sort of settings or pinning do I need to get the cloth to properly behave like actual pants, rather than like really flexible rubber?
First of all, you could let the pants collide at its bottom with something, either the foot or the floor, so it is constrained to bend somewhere along the legs, as you can see in reference images.
After that you can play with the Mass, Structural and Bending parameters, it’s a try and error thing, maybe you could gain practice by experimenting with some other lighter meshes and understand better how such parameters do work, then apply that to the pants and future garments.
EDIT: Another very important thing is how dresses are actually cut before the simulation; I mean that a dress modeled around the figure like a tube or a ‘second skin’ will never behave like a well cut cloth by a tailor.
You can also use weight painting to paint the areas that are more rigid (for example the cloth on the thighs) while still allowing the cloth below the knee to be more loose. Simply paint the weight, and then enable “cloth Stiffness Scaling” and specify the group to adjust the stiffness.
Also, as sourvinos stated above, the base shape is very important to how the cloth will drape, so if is not looking correct you may want to try and find some flat cloth patterns to get the initial geometry correct. this will allow things to fall much more naturally.
