Would it be possible to make clothes for my characters using the cloth simulation and collision detection and/or vertex pinning?
Yes. How successful it may be depends a lot on the specifics of your model and the kind of clothing involved, though. Some kinds of clothing are better done with other methods.
For animation?
For animation. How would I make a simple t-shirt and pants? Whenever I try to use the cloth simulations, it seems to ignore my model so that I get pieces of him sticking through the chest and knee areas. Any ideas?
As I mentioned, a lot of how Cloth behaves is model-specific, such as how dense the mesh is (both the body & the Cloth meshes), how much default clearance between body & Cloth there is, how you’ve weighted the pinning group of the Cloth mesh, even what scale the model is. There are no “generic” ways to do Cloth sims, particularly for clothing.
The kind of animation you plan is also important – a basic walk cycle should present no major issues, but doing gymnastics certainly does!
About the only way to advise you specifically and maybe suggest reasons for the “breakthroughs” is to take a look at your model & Cloth setup, i.e., post your blend.
My file is too big to post on the forums, but I made my model and the clothes using this tutorial:http://www.davidjarvis.ca/dave/blender/tutorial-05.shtml
There is a download at the end which is presumably the end result of the tutorial. after that I added collision detection to the model and the clothes and a cloth modifier to the clothes
First off, the figure mesh looks OK in terms of topology & mesh density, should provide a fair basis for collision calculations with the Cloth.
But the way the “clothing” mesh has been formed leaves a great deal to be desired if you’re using it as a Cloth mesh:
The mesh is significantly lower density (i.e., resolution, number of verts/edges/faces) than the body itself, which means fewer vertices to use when calculating collision, thus less accuracy on figuring collision at smaller areas of the mesh like elbows & knees, where it’s most critical. Also, the clothing mesh is (in the d/d’d example), fully triangulated, with quite irregular topology. This makes the “flex” in the cloth very irregular as well, since the cloth mesh deforms only along edges.
To get a better cloth-like response, you need to have a quad-based mesh with regular topology and sufficient resolution to interact with the body accurately in all areas. This often means increasing mesh density (number of loops) at places like knees and elbow.
By analogy, think of how real cloth is made – a series of parallel threads (the warp), crossed at right angles by a series of threads of equal or greater density (the woof) – sounds a lot like a mesh, right? Now make it a lot less dense (fewer threads), stiffen the thread so that it only stretches long its length but doesn’t bend, and make the intersections between the threads like tiny U-joints, and you have something like what your Cloth mesh should be like. Think of it folding up on itself – if the mesh topology (how all the mesh lines are arranged) is irregular or even random, you won’t get nice folds that look like cloth but kind of a jumbled distortion, more like wadding up a sheet pf paper. Making it all triangles compounds the problem because then there are edges that don’t flex in concert with one another like parallel edges do – they can actually fight each other in terms of achieving a relatively smooth and even distortion.
The upshot: Body should work OK, but the Cloth mesh will need a lot of work to correct, if you followed the tutorial method of making it. I’d build the clothing from scratch and completely avoid the Decimate tool, which is virtually uncontrollable in terms of the resulting mesh topology.
Thanks! I’ll try that.
I tried what you said, but the collision detection is going wacko on me. I tried a sleeve as proof of concept and it expanded to maximum size, like it thinks the arm is bigger than it is.
I changed the ‘outer’ collision detection interaction for my model to 0.001 and it seems to work reasonably well for most purposes. But when I add selfcollision to my sleeves, they ball up and end up floating.