Clothilde and Animation

[Srek]

Make sure that the mesh does not have reversed polygon normals and that the objects axis is not scaled (should be 1/1/1)
Cheers
Björn

[ChrisCousins]

Hey Kevin - ran into this not long ago. The advice I got from Maxon was odd but seemed to work - you need to put the collider tag at the top of the heirarchy on the hypernurb object you wish to act as a collider.

I've also heard about a recent clothilde bug that stops it working with animated objects, ie the sphere in your case.

If you're trying to clothe an animated character I'd recommend belting over colliders for all but the loosest items.

Cheers - C

I have a character model driven by baked mocap data (fbx brought over from 3DS max).

If I apply the collider to one of the body meshes I do not get any interaction with the cloth.
If I place a simple sphere in the scene it will interact, but if I make it a child of one of characters bones it no longer interacts.

Do I have to bake something somewhere?

thanks

Kevin

[BigAl3D]

Hey Kevin - ran into this not long ago. The advice I got from Maxon was odd but seemed to work - you need to put the collider tag at the top of the heirarchy on the hypernurb object you wish to act as a collider.

I've also heard about a recent clothilde bug that stops it working with animated objects, ie the sphere in your case.

If you're trying to clothe an animated character I'd recommend belting over colliders for all but the loosest items.

Cheers - C

Hi Chris:

I was wondering if you can elaborate on a couple of things.

I've also heard about a recent clothilde bug that stops it working with animated objects, ie the sphere in your case.

Does this include objects that are animated/deformed via a character rig?


If you're trying to clothe an animated character I'd recommend belting over colliders for all but the loosest items.

Do you have and good tips on how and where to belt a shirt on a character so it can move with the rig?

Thanks in advance!

[ChrisCousins]

Hi Chris:
I was wondering if you can elaborate on a couple of things.

Does this include objects that are animated/deformed via a character rig?
Do you have and good tips on how and where to belt a shirt on a character so it can move with the rig?

Thanks in advance!

All good questions - wish I had some good answers ;-) I was just getting to grips with a personal project involving a clothed character when some damned jobs turned up and I had to drop the fun stuff.

For belting, I think the answer is actually that all points should be belted - it just seems that any other way, whatever the settings you always get bits of mesh sticking through. This might be something to do with the bug I mentioned. You could always use some jiggle underneath the shirt to simulate cloth waving, this seems to work.

This is a simple movie (http://homepage.mac.com/chrissyboy/.Movies/Cleo/dancer.mov) showing a character with some clothing that's entirely belted at 100% strength - the movement was just testing a hand setup that I was working out. Her breasts have a subtle jiggle that works fine with the cloth. Ideally I want the bottom couple of loops of the top to be looser, but that'll have to wait until it all dies down again...

[BigAl3D]

Wow, that dancer looks great! I never would have thought to belt all the points. I'll have to give that a try. Will post if I find anything new. Thanks again.

-Alex

[danb]

I do not have any problems using clothilde and imported mocap .fbx. I have succesfully and easily applied clothilde to imported motion builder characters.

Are you using joints or bones?

Chris is this bug related to joints? I use bones in my clothilde scenes and it all works like a dream.

I can post an example movie if you guys need it. I entered the strange behaviour contest and had 2 characters and one dragon that worked great with bones and clothilde. Couldn't make the contest deadline but am still working on the animation in my spare time. I could post up some examples if needed and give some pointers on how i did things?

[bobzilla]

Hey Kevin - ran into this not long ago. The advice I got from Maxon was odd but seemed to work - you need to put the collider tag at the top of the heirarchy on the hypernurb object you wish to act as a collider.

I've also heard about a recent clothilde bug that stops it working with animated objects, ie the sphere in your case.

If you're trying to clothe an animated character I'd recommend belting over colliders for all but the loosest items.

Cheers - C

Chris...NOTHING to do with cloth (nice animation, BTW), but how did you do the eye blinks? Is that a manual thing or an Xpression you set up?

[ChrisCousins]

Chris is this bug related to joints? I use bones in my clothilde scenes and it all works like a dream... I could post up some examples if needed and give some pointers on how i did things?

Hi dan - I've used joints in my character, the information about the bug comes from this thread. (http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=47&t=584412). I believe it's specific to 10.5. I don't know if this also applies to deformed colliders, but I assumed that this was what was happening in this movie, showing the problem:

Broken cloth (http://homepage.mac.com/chrissyboy/.Movies/Cleo/cloth_broken.mov)

If you have a formula for getting this to work well in 10.5 I'd be very interested!

Bob - the blinking is just posemixer and keyframes, nothing fancy there!

Cheers - Chris

[danb]

Hi dan - I've used joints in my character, the information about the bug comes from this thread. (http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=47&t=584412). I believe it's specific to 10.5. I don't know if this also applies to deformed colliders, but I assumed that this was what was happening in this movie, showing the problem:

Broken cloth (http://homepage.mac.com/chrissyboy/.Movies/Cleo/cloth_broken.mov)

If you have a formula for getting this to work well in 10.5 I'd be very interested!


Yeah i don't have 10.5 but i'll test it out in the demo and let you know how it goes.

What i am doing in 10.1 is just rigging my characters using the MB convention rig that was posted on the board a while ago. Then to speed things up i use the bone tool, which imo is still a very nice tool, to position the bones within my rig. Then fix bones and paint with claude bonet.

After this export to MB, animate and plot, erase all MB rigs in MB except the Reference rig. Then merge this back into my original c4d scene. When doing this the original MB skeleton in c4d inherits the motion from the merged MB rig as long as the Reference null is not under a HN or any other object when merging. After merging the Reference null can be put under a HN (hypernurbs) or anything else.

Now after importing i position the object i want to be a cloth around my character. Then put a collider tag on the imported base mesh. Then put a clothilde tag on the cloth object and solve using the cache.

This has all worked so well i was able to rig, animate and clothildefy 3 characters who had 3 minutes of animation each withing like a week. Well would have been able to if i didn't get a freelance project at the last minute and had to withdraw from the competition.

This may seem very confusing without an example scene to view. I'll see if i can find time to post an example. I don't have many characters that i can share publicly. I have those from the contest but they are such nice characters that i am too greedy to share. :( :)

[ChrisCousins]

Yeah i don't have 10.5 but i'll test it out in the demo and let you know how it goes.

Thanks Dan - I'd be interested to see how you get on with the 10.5 demo, but quite understand that you don't want to share any creations! My methods were pretty much as you describe, and the results were completely disfunctional so my prediction is that the cloth will break in 10.5, but we shall see...

[danb]

I just tried it and it works fine with bones and claude bonet in 10.5. I don't know about joints though. It would take a long time to make an example scene with joints because i don't have any characters that have joints.

I created the scene with bones pretty easily and quickly, just like in 10.1.

Wasn't there a bug with joints and MB on importing? You may be better off trying it with bones, i don't know.

[ChrisCousins]

Thanks Dan, shows what I know ;) You inspired me to go back and try again with this, it turned out OK with a jointed character, once I'd moved the collider tag to the hypernurbs rather than the poly mesh. Results Movie Here (http://homepage.mac.com/chrissyboy/.Movies/Cleo/clothtop3.mov). I still had to belt the top half but the way it's stretching/relaxing is much more like I imagined it would be. Will try with something a bit looser at some stage.

For the record my structure is:

hypernurbs: {collider}
-character mesh
-- deformers
hypernurbs:
-cloth mesh: {clothilde tag}{belt tag}

Cheers - C

[Sneaker]

Hi,

just checked back the issue with animated objects.
It seems to be working to add one joint to the object, bind the object and animate
the joint instead of the mesh.

-Michael

[danb]

So you guys, who are importing plotted joints from MB, do not have problems with this? I've avoided this like the plague because of the hip bone being split up when importing. Does this happen to you?

Sneaker, i'm kind of confused by your last comment. One would not animate a mesh when it is binded to a joint (etc.) anyways, right? Or do you have a special circumstance?

[Sneaker]

Sneaker, i'm kind of confused by your last comment. One would not animate a mesh when it is binded to a joint (etc.) anyways, right? Or do you have a special circumstance?

I tested a work arround for meshs not being calculated as collider when they are animated.
Instead of animating the mesh's position and rotation you can apply a joint to it (same position as the object's axis)
and move all keyframes to the joint. In this way the object is calculated as collider.

-Michael

[danb]

Hmm, still confused, :) but i'm glad it works for you.

[crackle]

i had read in another post that its best to have your cloth object and tag below the rigged mesh, as the animated mesh needs to be calculated before the cloth for the collider tag to work properly, again its, like xpresso, all about hierachial priorities...

[danb]

Sneaker, i get what your saying now. You're just talking about basic polygon objects. Gotcha. Jeez, how did i not get that? :shrug:

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