How to rig baggy clothes?

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi, all! I was wondering if anyone has knowledge or suggestions (or even maybe a rough workflow) on how to rig baggy clothes. Using cloth dynamics? Bendy bones? A bone grid? A combination of all three?

The intended usage that I’m thinking is having a rig ready to interact with the body and/or assets in the scene. For example: if a character with baggy sweatpants seats on the floor, the sweatpant would flatten against the floor, and when the character runs, the sweatpants would add a secondary movement with a bit of delay regarding the legs.

But the issue I’m thinking If I were to use just cloth dynamics is that I’d lose control if I want it to fall or interact in some specific way.

What do I mean by baggy clothes? Something like an oversized sweater, sweatpants, or an open jacket, for example. Something like these:

83ac090475f849d8f02685205e66a3d5
83ac090475f849d8f02685205e66a3d5736×1044 117 KB

1e09306cb54fa80916169442c10ae38f
1e09306cb54fa80916169442c10ae38f500×713 69.9 KB

2875574e2a53c71d324dbd22c3a826eb
2875574e2a53c71d324dbd22c3a826eb736×1144 63.2 KB

I’ve watched these tutorials that miiiight work, but they don’t address specifically this usecase:

What do you think? Do you have any examples of something like this?

2

You’re not going to like this answer, but the answer is- you don’t. Quick, name a video game that has clothes in this style. You’ll be hard pressed to do so, because this is without a doubt the most complex, difficult, and error-prone rigging challenge there is. Even when 3D characters have baggy clothes, they’re usually not actually rigged- at best, you’ll see clipping (see any video game cape), at worst, wrinkles and puffs are just baked in, static and unmoving.

This and hair rigging are the two areas where 3D animation falls far behind 2D animation in terms of efficiency.

That said, there is an add-on that will help:

1 Like
3

That’s really a bummer :pensive: I had hopes that someone somewhere had done it. In the mean time, I found a japanese youtuber that made a rigify-compatible dynamic rig for skirts that with some thinking couuuld be used for what I’m looking for.

And, aparently, Auto-Rig Pro just released a new setup for skirts, which, who knows, might also be useful: