I’ve recently started using Blender and have found this site to be great assistance, so I come with a question.
I have an exported human model from Makehuman, and a shirt I’ve downloaded somewhere else. When I watch multiple tutorials trying to set up the physics for cloth/colliders I do it perfectly, but it still ends up going strange. Basically the cloth separates and falls to the ground, acting like the body is causing it to shred & explode for some reason. I’ve uploaded the file so you can take a closer look at what I’m doing wrong.
I’m not sure if it’s a pinning thing, or something else I’m missing.
iam not sure bout ur problem coz ur file is not working in my blender…anyways…i think u should select both the character and the shirt & then (ctrl +j) it will join both of ur meshes…i think that will solve ur problem…and welcome to the blender community…
Setting up clothing for cloth sim is fairly complex. There are many things to consider - especially for animation. If you can get a hold of 3D artist magazine issue #28. http://www.3dartistonline.com/back_issues.php I wrote a tutorial that covers a lot of these issues.
One thing you have going on is the buttons are not attached. They will just fall away. Then where the shirt comes together in the front, there is nothing holding it there and it will just separate. Then you have to solve the collar and many other things. Then you have a shrink wrap modifier on the shirt. Might be a good idea to just apply it with plenty of offset. But that is something that takes testing and tweaking.
Trust me. You won’t solve it in one afternoon. You will wind up applying some kind of stiffness scaling, some pinning, and other tricks to get it all working. Reading my tutorial will save you a lot of that testing and get you in the ballpark.
And then you have to animate it, yes? That is another series of tests after you even get it working. However your tests need to be with the animation in mind because that will determine what works and what does not.
As Richard Culver implies, your cloth object is actually working exactly as expected from the way you have things set up. It collides well with the body mesh (as long as it isn’t being animated – that challenge comes later) and looks very cloth-like.
But a shirt isn’t just a single piece of cloth, it has pieces and seams and structure that gives certain parts, like the collar, a different response than the rest. So you have to imitate that by using the parameters Richard mentioned to make certain parts act differently.
The buttons are part of your cloth mesh object but are separate geometry, so they drop because they have nothing to keep them attached – they’re responding to gravity. If you keep the buttons as part of the cloth object, you’ll have to find a method of “stitching” them onto the main shirt mesh by merging some common vertices. You can then use stiffness scaling and pinning weight adjustments to get them looking more natural.
But another way is to make the buttons totally separate objects and then using vertex parenting to “attach” them to the cloth. This takes some planning of the shirt mesh topology so you have vertices in the right place to do that, but it works well.
You currently have no vertex groups on the cloth mesh, so there’s nothing to modulate how the cloth sim and the shrinkwrap affect the mesh – you can create vertex groups and apply various vertex weights to control how the mesh responds to the two modifiers. You can also have the shirt move under armature control, which will be useful when animating – pure cloth sim rarely works well for this. But it’s a complex task balancing all these influences, so take Richard’s advice to heart and don’t expect it to happen in an afternoon.
Yeah that is a great overview with most (if not all) of the info you’ll need to research and test for the cloth object. Vertex parenting is a great idea for the buttons. Probably the best solution.
For the other half of the equation, you have the collision object - the body. For that you don’t need to include anything that is not colliding when making the simulation. So remove the head and hands and and lower body where the shirt will not come into contact. Remember that the cloth sim takes into account all of the vertexes. The more you have the slower the simulation. And when testing, you’ll be doing a lot of simulation so it is best to optimize your object for this purpose. When you finish the simulation you can bake it and then put back the parts of the body that show on the outside.
On a scale from 1 to 10, how hard would it be to execute a human character wearing a bushy thick fur coat? Think semi cartoonish. Second question: what about soft bodies over cloth for this purpose? Am I crazy?