I have read a fair bit on PINNING cloth (flag, cape etc) but in all cases (after selecting a vertex group) the cloth is pinned in space!.
I have not yet seen cloth pinned TO an Object or armature or rigged character.
Once this is done, moving the object or character would induce the cloth to follow in a natural way, such as a woman swaying about in a gown.
BUt can this be done in Blender?
It seems it can be done this in Maya. I don’t know MAya at all but I happened to see the steps involved in Speffects.com
One example showed a cape pinned to the top bones (shoulders and neck) of a character (an armature in fact). Here are the steps outlined:
Step 1: Select a few vertices on the top border of the cape which is located close to the armature. “The vertices need not touch the character”
Step 2: Turn the cape into a cloth [Blender would use the Physics tab here]
Step 3 [and this is the crucial step] Select the vertices (chosen earlier) as well as the armature (or character). Then select constraint > Point to Surface.
This attaches the cloth to the character.
If now the character moves about, the cape follows nicely.
The big question: Does Blender have the equivalent of the above constraint to pin a cloth to a character? It would be so helpful.
Help would be much appreciated.
Cloth pinning in Blender does not “attach” the object to anything, ever. What it does is modify how the mesh behaves according to the Cloth physics sim. So, if in the pinning group a vertex is weight 1.0 (fully pinned), it won’t act like cloth but instead will act like any other mesh – in the absence of any other influences, that part of the mesh will just stay wherever it happens to be.
“Any other influences” is the critical thing here. The vertices free to not be cloth can be influenced by an armature, a parent/child relationship, a constraint, or any other method that controls how a mesh may or may not move in an animation.
So, for your cape example, if you have some verts around the neck weighted at 1.0 for cloth pinning, then the mesh can be: 1) parented to the neck bone, perhaps, or 2) have an armature modifier with weighting to a bone that controls these verts, or 3) use a constraint (such as Copy Location) that makes the verts stay in place as needed. Or even combinations of all of the above or other influencing methods. All the other vertices (weight zero, let’s say) will respond to the cloth physics settings, giving you a flowing cape.
For an example of cloth pinned to an animated character, check out the Kata thread in my sig, and the video produced in that project. Her pants were fully pinned around the beltline, and used gradual cloth pinning weights down the legs until at the part below the knee the mesh acted completely like cloth.
NOTE: This is very much the same as you describe for the Point to Surface constraint in Maya.
Thanks, Chipmasque, for replying so promptly. I was in fact hoping you would respond, as you seem to be the Cloth Sim expert on this forum. You have now shed more light on this pinning issue which has been befuddling me. Somehow Maya’s method seems more logical and intuitive but Blender’s approach seems rather different and I am grateful to you for clearing the matter up.
It is not the first time you have enlightened your readers - I have already read a number of your posts on cloth sim and am getting hopefully wiser all the time. I will have a fresh look at your KATA project.