Underneath all the clothes?

[Anthony]

Depends on the character. If you're going to be using it in a lot of shots, throughout a movie or TV series, then you'll want it to be detailed enough to accomidate any type of clothing likely to be called for. If you know for sure that he'll be in full body armor, then there's no need to model.

[Iain McFadzen]

I'm of the impression that very few of the well-modelled naked characters we see posted on these forums will ever get animated, or even clothed for that matter. I reckon most of them are pure modelling exercises. For animation you'd probably try and get away with including the outer clothes as a part of the model and rigging them directly. Adding cloth simulations into the mix adds an enormous layer of complexity to a scene and simply isn't worth all that extra effort unless it is REALLY notiable or the cloth is a focal point of the animation.

If you did decide you needed to simulate cloth all the way then yes, you'd do all your calcs and rigging on a low density stand-in (your level-0 cage, or your pre-subdivision poly character, possibly with some modifications to ensure proper cloth behaviour).

[Lunatique]

So, if I didn't use cloth simulation, I'd just use softbody dynamics on the modelled clothes? Would that calculate a lot faster than Maya's cloth?

But what if my characters will have more than one set of outfit? How many sets of outfits would require that you model the character in full nude? 2? 3? 4? If I didn't model full nude, I would then have to remodel different clothes on the same character--is that redundant work, or is it still faster than using cloth simulation?

[Iain McFadzen]

Unless the clothes are really loose and baggy, or the animation is hyper-realistic, I don't see any need to simulate the cloth at all, even with Maya sofbodies (which I admit I am not familiar with, but I reckon I can tell from the name). So long as you have a certain amount of folds and wrinkles modelled into the clothes' mesh it should look pretty convincing once it's moving.

Even if your character had 100 different outfits you wouldn't need to model any part of the body which is never going to be seen, you'd just model the outfits. Obviously if one of the outfits was sleeveless, another had a plunging neckline, and yet another was backless etc etc you'd pretty soon get to the point where you are going to see the whole body at some point, so you might as well model all of it. That wouldn't necessarily mean you'd use that model in every animation though, since with clothes over the top of it all that extra geometry would be doing is slowing down the renders.

[Lunatique]

Iain- Thanks for the tips dude. I guess I'll have to experiment a bit to see which renders faster. Gonna have ta cross that bridge. . ..

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