i need to rig a this female character’s skirt, it should be able to move automatically(if possible) or manually while she walks, runs or does some any body movement… Just like cloth… And what would be the preferable way of rigging the skirt (As far rendering speed goes)? is it rigging or using cloth mechanism on her?
I think because your character is cartoony that the cloth doesn’t have to move entirely realisticly as long as it is believable. Maybe you could use the wave modifier o some well placed bones.
On the other hand, most pixar movies use cloth sims, and blender has an excellent (if basic) one, so you could try it and see how it works for you. It’s fairly straightforward, and there’s a manual page on the blender wiki as far as I know. Just pin the area around her waist and maybe turn on self-collision(on account of the pleats) and you should be good to go.
A couple tips:
If the girl’s not going to be interacting with her skirt much besides the movement of her legs, you could make a lower-poly ‘collision mesh’ just of her legs (and maybe her torso if you feel like doing a shirt, too) and set it to render invisible (available from the outliner), so the sim won’t have to figure out if the cloth is colliding with the denser mesh in her head or fingers.
The second point is just a practical one, in that I wouldn’t personally leave the skirt visible while actually animating her–as the sim is fairly computation heavy–but once you’ve finalised animation you can just bake it in one pass, which is a bonus because baking the simulation opens up the possibility to do a bit of manual sim tweaking in case of any glitches, rare though these are.
Anyway, she’s a cool looking character so far, and I’d love to see what she looks like when she’s done; there’s been a dearth of good uses for the cloth simulator since its inception and it’d be great to see it doing something besides calculating elaborate ‘draping over monkey heads’ animations.
John makes some good points, you could eventake it further as to making a simpler mesh for the skirt as well, if the pleats don’t have to intercollide for instance. You could make a less dense mesh for the “skirtproxy” give that one clothsim without using selfcollision, and use meshdeform to have that control the actual skirt.
Just an idea, I don’t know if it will be practical, or save much rendertime, but it might be worth to try.
thanx for your valuable replies… i will definitely try over your suggestions… And also i am thinking about using hair system of blender to this character… As her hair will be of medium size is it a viable option to use hair system? doesn’t it slow up the rendering? or should i use the old technique of using alpha poly hairs? And one more thing… any suggestions on character design?
Re: The hair system. Particle-wise, fur works very well; and hair works, but is not a sure thing. The hair is only compatible with the soft-body engine, for some reason, which means it’s very stretchy and tends to catch on things. If you make the hair fairly short-to-shoulder-length, it’d probably work fine, but I wouldn’t bet on being able to complete a character like Violet(from the Incredibles) without a lot of extra work. On the other hand, polygons are limited by their texture’s resolution, and do not allow dynamic effects at all.
Rendering-wise, if you’re planning on using strand rendering then you will either have to use strictly buffer shadows or work at mixing shadow types, because the strand renderer does not get picked up by raytracing. Polygon shading does get pick up by raytraced transparency, but a) this takes forever, and b) can only go up to ten polygons deep, so if you have very thick hair then could wind up with black spots.
About the skirt, it might be better not to use a mesh deform modifier unless you absolutely have to because the mesh-deform modifier needs a closed mesh to work, and since a skirt mesh would have to be open you’d have to create some very fancy work-arounds. The mesh-deform option might be better if you’re computer is really slow, but I think you should try the plain way first. The more layers you have between a problem and a solution, the more things can go wrong with it along the way.
i didn’t have guess that a poly hair could have so many technical problem… As i am using this character in animated series environment, rendering speed is crucial for me… thanx for your suggestions. i love this community…