Rigging for game character's baggy clothing. Need advice

Rigging
,
#1

Hello there, my first post! So tell me if I’m doing smth wrong :slight_smile:

Ok, so what the title says…
I have a skinny character with oversized clothes on him and the art guy needs it to feel like “stick-man wearing bed sheets”.
This needed for a game made in Unreal Engine 4 so I will most likely use clothing system in it.
My first idea is to brush clothing on almost whole model and add body-like collisions underneath to fake body inside. But honestly it feels a bit awkward. Plus elements with clothing do not support MorphTargets (Blendshapes) in UE4, which may be a problem for corrective shapes.

Another way is to weight cloth parts to a bones and simulate them in the engine. But it’s clother to “fat belly jiggle” effect, and I’m trying to get something opposite to that.

So I’m wondering if there any more elegant ways to do similar thing? Have you ever saw baggy style cloth simulated in games? I couldn’t find any references at all.

#2

Hello

I don’t much experience with Unreal so I could be stabbing in the dark here. But you could do the cloth sims in Maya? And then transfer the deformations to joints and bring that animation into the engine.

I do not know the style or the joint count limitations but it could work. It wouldnt be dynamic but you could dial in the look and feel of the cloth.

hope that helps?

#3

Hi @ritterrav !
Thanks for the input, really appreciate it.

The character is controllable, so deformations need to be dynamic, and joint count can’t be overly high. but I believe the solution in general is viable. So I did initial test with clothes skinned to bones, but it feels a little like body jiggle not like clothes. It’s hard to pin-point the problem, but I think it’s because there is no visible body shape under the clothes with that approach. I may try to resolve it by adding more bones and do some constraints to fake the shape. But I really think it’s a bit overkill.

Also I’m still looking for references, it seems like no one ever encountered similar problem. And it feels lonely being in my situation :laughing:

Or maybe it’s just my bad google-fu.

#4

I am glad it can lead to some kind of solution for you. I think these references might be suitable for you.
First make sure you get the simulation look correct before you worry about any game engine stuff. Then the quality of the transfer from deformation to skinned joints is a different matter.

I understand the character is controllable, but I imagine the animation is a series of canned cycles that the end blends between in visually appealing way. So in theory, if you run a sim on all those cycles, it may look good in game?

https://vimeo.com/123883474
https://vimeo.com/138048608

Hope these help. You probably want to look into Naughty Dog, cloth simulation and joint limitations as a combination of key phrases for google-fu.

Cheers