Recommended Character Scale for use with Cloth

Hi all,
I hope this is in the right section.:smiley: I’m relatively new to Blender, I’ve been modeling in it for a few months. I’m working on my first real character model and I want to use Blender’s cloth system to animated the clothing. In other 3D programs I’ve used the quality of the cloth sim depends a lot on the scale of the simulation. I was just wondering what scale or unit of measurement should I use make my character so it will work well with cloth simulation.
For example should I use:
1 BU = 1 cm
or
1 BU = 1 m
or
1 BU = 1 inch

Or whatever. Which would you recommend I use?
Thanks

1 BU = 1 Meter. Although you can scale every subsystem in Blender, your life will be easier that way.

Okay so it doesn’t matter what scale I use? The cloth sim will work just the same if 1 BU = 1 Meter or 1 BU = 1 cm?

You will have to scale your cloth sim.

Gotcha. Thank you very much.

Okay so it doesn’t matter what scale I use?

It does matter greatly for certain external render systems. While you may rush through character development, some issue do not arise until render time. For instance, the recently released George character is over 3 Blender units tall. This makes him 18 ft tall in the Lux environment. Scaling a character after it is rigged and complete can be a lot harder than dealing with it at the start.

Generally 1 Blender Unit = 1 Meter is a good basis.

Definitely use 1BU = 1m, or close to that, because that is apparently the scale factor used in writing the cloth sim. I ran into untold grief because I was unaware that the sim cannot be scaled as part of its normal usage – you have to “gonzo” a scale factor if your character is not to that scale by a substantial factor (such as 1BU = 1cm, the scale I used).

Part of the problem is that there are arbitrary limits on values that can be used in the sim setup (such as Gravity), so scaling must take those limits into account, and can sometimes hit a wall. Much better to use a conforming scale factor to begin with.

But you may also run into some value limits using the 1BU = 1m scale, depending on the nature of your models and animation. For example, there are arbitrary limits on camera clipping (5000BU) that could make creating expansive scaled landscapes a bit troublesome, but there are ways around such issues.

It’s unfortunate that the cloth sim doesn’t allow for more easy scaling to fit various model sizes, but so far it’s not been done to my knowledge.