How do I make my model wear clothes?

Support Basics & Interface
1

I’m creating a half human model, and I was wondering if it was possible to make it wear clothes.
If so how would I do it to make it look realistic? As in flowing and moving like clothes, and not flesh.

Humphrey

2

This is extremely complex.

There was a plugin for that, but it is unsupported, and I never managed to have it work as I wanted.

Only way is tho build the cloths and animate them via Vertex key or the like…

(Have you seen last CG movies? do you think clothes are nice? Well if their result, with top men and professional software is that…)

Stefano

3

It’s not all that hard. Not easy, but not hard.

The simple way to do it is to take a naked model, duplicate it, cut off the arms, legs, and head, scale the duplicate out a bit, then shape it around the naked body. Lots of animation houses have used this technique for a long time, and since the clothes are then separate from your model you can animate them with their own armature, etc. You model them with vertex stuff or nurbs or whatever you used to make the original, tweaking vertexes.

As far as cloth simulations go, that’s far beyond the scope of my intelligence. ^.^ However, you can fake cloth stuff using armature and clever IPO stuff. The best thing to do is to dress yourself somewhat like your character, and look in a mirror at how the clothes change and shape as you move.

4

There was a plugin for that? Where? I want it!!! Even if it doesn’t work it would be nice to have a new plugin to inspect.

5

Plugin was on old Blender community site… maybe Al Capone, who collects these things, has it :slight_smile:

Stefano

6

Erm, I don’t think that plugin works very well. I toyed with it for nearly a week before giving up all hope with it. No matter what you do, the script doesn’t seem to be able to find the .dlls it needs to function :frowning: . This has been in pretty much all Blender versions I’ve used, unfortunately. from what I’ve read, it’s not that useful for character stuff anyway - the collision detection only works on spheres. So unless your character looks rather like a ping pong ball or a space hopper, then forget it!

I’ve been doing a lot of character animation recently, so I do have a few hints I can give you regarding cloth.

  1. Avoid it when you can!!! :wink: Try giving your characters tight fitting clothes, for example. Try not to put in too many cloaks if possible - they take forever to get right…
  2. If it’s reasonably simple cloth you need (eg. a flag fluttering, a cloak flapping in a breeze), try out the wave effect (by particles in the animation tab). If you use it carefully, and use several, all with different origins, a cloak effect if fairly easy to achieve.
  3. Forget NURB surfaces. They’re not yet advanced enough to be able to animate them and make convincing cloth. Maybe soon, but for now (unless you just want a single frame) forget it.
    4)Vertex keys? They’re not easy to use (I use point 5 for most of my cloth), but some of the results with them are fairly good.
  4. This is my favorite. Use armatures on your cloth. If you create a seperate skeltal system for your cloth, it’s surprising how good your results will be. Time consuming, I know, but it’s the best available for the time being.

Hope this helped.
LethalSideParting

7

So I guessing that clothes is one of those things that you’ve got to avoid at all costs! :frowning:

Humphrey

8

Yeah…well I wish blender had cloth functions and stuff… :frowning: Oh well :-?

9

If you are animating characters, RVK animation is essential at some point, and though it takes patience, it is also very rewarding, and can help you to achieve some really spectacular results. Here is one way of accomplishing a flowing cloth effect with RVKs:
1- set your first Key
2- go forward a few frames
3- apply the clouds texture to your material, and in edit mode, hit ‘noise’ a few times in edit buttons
4- Now set your second key
5- change the size/offset of the texture, and repeat what you did the first time, setting a key.
6- now in your NLA window, set a few keyframes, changing the NLA sliders around as you go.

There, now you have flowing drapes, or a cape, or whatever. yay!

note: using the proportional editing tool in this way can also help