Best way to clothe a character...

[Shuggs]

I'm doing my first character model in Maya and was wondering how you all clothe your characters? My character is a dancer that will have on pretty skin tight clothing. I was told to just extrude the basic shapes of the garments and work from there but I'm curious as to what the rest of you think. Thanks.

Depends on what you want to do.

If you're going to be animating the clothes, copy the respective geometry into a new layer and give it the appropriate thickness. I'm not sure how Maya Cloth Dynamics work (Lightwaver, here), but I'm pretty sure you have to get the clothes into a separate layer of their own in order to apply dynamics.

If you're not animating, I'd recommend the same thing, but copy them back into the main layer after you're done tweaking and editting.

[GrogMcGee]

With a really big stick - that way they won't fight back ... *sorry*

Joking aside, it really depends on what the goal of the clothing is. Assuming that we're talking about a leotard and maybe socks and that kind of thing, I'd extrude it off of the skin and then tweak it. There's no need for dynamics unless there's a dress or something involved.

[balekic]

Here is a link to the model that I'm working on:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=43&t=724150

There might be a simple animation involved, something like a standing pose into another one, nothing elaborate.

Thanks for the input thus far.

[GrogMcGee]

Just extrude the skin into as the cloth, model in the mostly permanent wrinkles and you'll be good to go.

[balekic]

Thanks for all of the input. I was thinking that but just wanted to get more opinions.