Need some guidance with real-time physics

I’m currently making a character I’m going to use in Blender Game Engine. It’s my first model ever, so it has some flaws like a little bit too much faces for BGE etc. but I guess I’ll deal with that later. The current task I’m trying to solve is physics.
Here is some screenshots of the character:
http://h.imagehost.org/t/0102/Model_1.jpg http://h.imagehost.org/t/0505/Model_2.jpg
And here is the concept:
http://h.imagehost.org/t/0473/Concept.jpg
So it’s obvious some cloth is currently missing. Cloth that should work with physics to be precise.
In the end it must be like this:
http://h.imagehost.org/t/0804/Model_help_1.jpg http://h.imagehost.org/t/0985/Model_help_2.jpg
I’ve decided to cut upper part into three due to the straps on the shoulders.
The problem is that all this should obviously react to character’s movement, wind, other objects etc. And I’m kind of lost here. I know baked pre-made physics won’t cut it, so I need a real-time one. At first I was wonder if it’s possible with Blender at all, then I’ve seen some videos like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H56A9xss8zw&feature=related (wandering if it is a real-time or baked one), then some impressive Havok video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daZoXzBGea0), then I’ve seen other Blender example: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=159083&highlight=cloth.
But I still haven’t managed to figure out how exactly can I pin every needed vertice of the cloth to the body to provide feeling that character’s shirt is a single object (or if I should make it as a part of the body mesh), how can I pin the skirt etc.
Any help will be appreciated.
Sorry for my English and a little bit muddled thoughts.

Softbodies in the bge are currently very buggy and not very efficient- as well as having to be pinned. For something like clothes to properly work you’d have to be able to weight some vertices to not be softbody, and you can’t do that yet. It’d probably be better for performance to attach ragdoll joints in the armature, but Blender can’t do that yet either.

My best suggestion is to hand animate the cloth for the actions, and then add another action or two that are activated if wind is blowing (if you take a look at GTA:SA, when you’re driving a motorcycle or a helecopter flies overhead people’s clothes and hair react in a way that looks pretty decent, though I’m pretty sure it’s pre-animated)

Also, if something is guaranteed to be under the cloth at pretty much all times (say, the pelvis area, unless the dress flips up) you may as well delete it entirely to save on polygons. Also, things like belts and such should be textured/normal mapped in, rather than modelled.

I’d also add that I don’t believe there are ANY in-game characters in retail games that have realtime cloth clothing with full physics. Maybe some of them have a cape that behaves somewhat realistically, but in terms of all the clothes? We won’t see that for quite a long time… softbody physics are hard to calculate!

-Sam

If I’m not mistaken, Tremere girl character from Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines has a real-time skirt. Because I remember its physics was buggy sometimes and buggy means not pre-made.
Anyway, thanks for the tips to both of you. I guess I have to try baked physics now.

In professional-level games, softbody clothes are becoming somewhat common (characters in Vampire the first ones I saw, probably because the source engine is about eight levels beyond fast) but Blender, being open-source and created by unpaid programmers, will naturally be a bit behind on features.

I doubt baked physics will show up in real-time, you’d need to rig the cloth with a few bones (3-4 chains of 2 bones should do it for the skirt part, and one bone for each sleeve is probably enough), and hand animate them. A pretty simple method is to move them against the motion of the body (if teh arm moves forward, the sleeve moves backward) in sync with the animations, and then take all the cloth keyframes and slide them a few frames so it lags behind a bit.

In professional-level games, softbody clothes are becoming somewhat common (characters in Vampire the first ones I saw, probably because the source engine is about eight levels beyond fast) but Blender, being open-source and created by unpaid programmers, will naturally be a bit behind on features.
Well, it’s not BGE vs. Valve Source Engine really. It’s Bullet Physics vs. Havok.
Bullet can show some good results too, for example I’ve downloaded .blend file from here: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=159083&highlight=cloth, subdivided cloth plane to 4000 faces, pressed P-key and got my 60 frames per second.
The problem is that I can’t pin real-time cloth and, as you’ve said, there is even no such option.
Well, it should be more buggy with a character then with a simple sphere I guess, but anyway I can’t check it.

I doubt baked physics will show up in real-time…
Oh, that’s really bad. Maybe there is a way? Well, what’s the point of cloth simulation if there isn’t one? Ah, rendering, I guess… Got it.

One more question then. How can I apply the changes provided with cloth simulation? I’ve done a skirt that looks not as good as I want in frame 1, but when making a cloth simulation with collisions with the character it gets nice shape on frame 40. I wonder how can I replace the original shape with that one.