Rigging/painting weights for a long skirt (polygons)

#1

Hi all,

I’m wondering if anyone has any advice or links to a good tutorial on the best way to paint weights for a long polygonal skirt (it goes below the knee to about mid-shin).

The thing I’m really struggling with is that I don’t seem to be able to weight a polygon to more than one bone, so it deforms more like a pair of trousers - the middle of the skirt tears during a walk cycle. I feel that if I could paint the front of the skirt to be partially influenced by both knees it wouldn’t tear, but I could be wrong as I haven’t had an opportunity to test.

The other thing I’ve been considering is adding extra bones to the rig so the dress could be weighted to those.

If anyone has any good advice or links I’d be really grateful - I’ve had a google but can’t find anything Maya speciific, closest thing was a few tut’s for Blender.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

#2

Just did some no-dynamic skirts at work and we did a mix on regular skinning to the legs. The tricky thing about this is that you really can’t use the standard mirror skin weights to get the fall-off across the front and back of the skirt…at least I couldn’t. So I spent a little extra time weighting it across. The big thing to keep in mind is that tight non-stretchy skirts make people walk very differently. So if animators complain that the weighting looks funny when you pull the legs apart for a full stride…maybe find some reference of how short a stride becomes when you are wearing a tight pencil skirt.
On top of good skin weights you could build an extra skirt rig with clusters, bones lattices…whatever you need to give extra shaping control.
I like to put all my deformers on a copy of the mesh that gets hidden an left at the root. Then all the controls are connected directly to the deformers and the deformed mesh is connected to anim mesh with a blendshape.
Now since the blend shape will need to be before the skinCluster your great looking skin weights might start looking a little wonky depending on how much shaping animators are doing. So you might just want to go with a separate deformer rig with no skinning attached to the hips. It all depends on your needs.

Now, if this skirt is actually a full flowing skirt…well then you should get some cloth on that.
I think that was a whole lot of nothing there…coffee!

#3

Not at all, theres some useful ideas there! Plus its always nice just to receive a response, makes you feel a bit less like you’re wading through the mud alone :wink:

I’m pretty much a one man band animation wise on this project, so I’m doing all the rigging and animating myself. Issue is that it’s a dress up game we’re working on, so adding a bespoke walk cycle when that skirt is worn could cause some complexity on the coding side, although its a nice idea. Also its a Unity project, and I’m not sure how many of these rigging features Unity supports, although I’ll certainly look into it (pretty sure cloth will be a no-no though!)

Thanks for the input - enjoy your coffee! :slight_smile:

#4

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