Advice for Rigging Clothing

#1

Hi!

I’m starting to think more about clothing for my character and I could really use some advice from more experienced users.

Here are some of the questions I have. Answers to any of these would be greatly appreciated. :grinning: Thank you!

  • What’s a good rule of thumb for when to model the clothing into the character and when to simulate cloth dynamics?
  • In the case of cloth dynamics, are any of you using Marvelous Designer? It’s pretty expensive for me at the moment. Can Cinema 4D’s Dress-O-Matic & Cloth Dynamics get similar results?
  • In the case of modeling the clothing into the character, how do you typically handle the body geometry? i.e. if the body is covered by clothing do you keep the underlying geometry and weight both the body & clothing or delete the covered geometry?
  • In the case of modeling the clothing into the character, How would you mimic the bunching of the fabric in the elbows and knees? Pose Morphs? Displacement maps?
  • How do you typically handle ornamental geometry like buttons, patches, badges? So far I have tried Skin Deformers (copying the weights tags with VAMP), the Surface Deformer, and Constraints. I would like to hear others’ approaches to this.
#2

“What’s a good rule of thumb for when to model the clothing into the character and when to simulate cloth dynamics?”

depends on many things: how realistic you want things to be, what kind of animation you need to do and so on… there’s really no clear answer to that.

“In the case of cloth dynamics, are any of you using Marvelous Designer? It’s pretty expensive for me at the moment. Can Cinema 4D’s Dress-O-Matic & Cloth Dynamics get similar results?”

no, marvelous designer is far ahead of c4ds cloth engine

“In the case of modeling the clothing into the character, how do you typically handle the body geometry? i.e. if the body is covered by clothing do you keep the underlying geometry and weight both the body & clothing or delete the covered geometry?”

that also depends. if you need real cloth simulation you need the underlying geometry, so the cloth has something to collide with. if not, definitely just model the clothes and not the body underneath.

“In the case of modeling the clothing into the character, How would you mimic the bunching of the fabric in the elbows and knees? Pose Morphs? Displacement maps?”

you can get nice wrinkles with a tension tag and smoothing deformer in relax mode.

“How do you typically handle ornamental geometry like buttons, patches, badges? So far I have tried Skin Deformers (copying the weights tags with VAMP), the Surface Deformer, and Constraints. I would like to hear others’ approaches to this.”

for things like patches that should allow to deform the surface deformer is your best option. if you need hard objects to stick to the deformed geometry you can use a clamp constraint. it’s a bit tricky to get the settings right to avoid any lags or gliding, but once you got the settings right it works very well.

#3

Basically what everfresh said.

wouldn’t simulate in c4d, but i have come up with this technique for creating clothes, which could be useful to you:

#4

Thank you two for your replies. I have seen many of your works online and greatly appreciate what you do for the Cinema 4D character animation community.

@everfresh
Thanks for the detailed advice & I’ll definitely try the tension tag & smoothing deformer!

@AlekseyVoz
Thank you for your tutorial link. I saw this in my searches and the result looks fantastic! To get this working with a character animation, would I need to start every scene in a T-Pose, then go into animation similar to Marvelous?

#5

I wouldn’t simulate it. I would just use a surface deformer or weight paint it on.

to be fair i only did limited experimentation with the cloth in cinema, but it almost always exploded…

maybe the soft body tag will behave better.

but yeah, you start with a t-pose, not sure there is any other way in anything.

#6

I do all the soft clothes (modelling and simulation) in Marvelous designer (on steam, version 7 I think), with sometimes a couple a touch-up and detailling in C4D or Zbrush.

I find C4D cloth only usable for table cloth, flags and curtains.