How to make dangling/loose clothing objects for Fallout?

[kungfubellydancer]

Specifically, I like to model clothing but I have no idea how to get certain parts to be less rigid. In other games, things such as ribbons and strings of beads flutter in the wind, but I don't know how to do that for Fallout. What should be skirts that sway around the legs while walking/running is just a rigid mesh, and what should be loose chains or strings of beads are stiff. How can I get them to move/swing/flutter naturally?

[Quetzlsacatanango]

When you weight paint, make it less than 1.0. Try .5 and then go up and down from there depending on how you want it.

Bone weight copy doesn't work very well for things like dresses, *unless* you have another dress that you can copy from. So that's something to try if manual weight painting is not something you are interested in.

[baduk]

Hi!

 

If you want to make the skirt move real nice you need to add bones to skeleton.nif and then add animations for it for all the animations and thats a lot of stuff to do.

U can find on youtube a video of sephs outfit with such animations, but i dont know if those are released, and its for oblivion anyway.

 

For making the skirt move along nicely with the legs, not clipping when you sneak and stuff there is a shortcut from manualy painting it.

 

Try copying the body mesh and delete all its vertex groups. then take all vertices inside thigh and legs and stuff and delete em. then make faces between the outermost vertices from global y axis of the legs.

 

Then you can use linear algorithm of proportional editing to flare it a bit on x and y axis so you have something shaped kind of inbetween the body and the skirt.

 

use bone weight copy lowest quality setting to copy weight from original body to this modified body mesh.

 

Then subdivide it with control r and make it about as dense as the rest of the body. Then in object mode give it subsurf modifier and then

Then copy with quality 3 of bone weight copy from the modified body mesh to your skirt. This should get a more smoother rigging on the problem area, the inside of the thighs.

 

You still are going to want to delete armature and import skeleton.nif with animation for testing and tweeaking the weight. You can have it in a pose and turn on x mirroring for weight painting and do just tiny edits to one leg side of the skirt to see how it affects both sides, while in a pose such as crouching or striding.When the skirt is deforming smoothly congratulations! you have very nice rigged skirt.

 

Make sure you save before running script.

 

edit: i cahnged the order of some of the operations cause i had em backward. :) u take advantage of blender bone weight automatic gradient creation when subdivide mesh. to get smoother weights.

Edited February 9, 2011 by baduk

[AllanOcelot]

Baduk, If I were to make a cape, for instance, how would I go about that.

ive meshed it up and added the paint, what next, do i really need to skin and rig the thing with animations just to ensure that it does not clip? Is there not a way to add collision to clothing or something =/

[baduk]

Hi!

 

Yea that would be cool huh. But anyway i think in order to do that you either have to script it to follow aroun the player or you have to modify skeleton.nif.

 

I am not aware of such a skeleton having been released for fallout 3 or new vegas tho. You can look up coronerras maximum compatibility skeleton for oblivion to see an example of what they got.

 

It has wings and a whip bone and 9 tails on it, pretty cool looking. no havok on the added parts tho. but thats not hard to add, at least its pretty easy to make a normal havoked object. I dont know how to get the bonelodcontroller and transform interpolator thingys on there tho its something i was gonna look into but havent gotten around to it. The keyframed animation tho will only use havok for animating the skeleton when the player is dead. I dont know if you can just add dangling bones with havok on em to the skeleton.nif and have em bounce around as you move. With the oblivion one, you need to create animations for the cape parts, i guess you just change the existing animations to include movements for the bones you need.

 

Its nice but you may find there are people complaining about compatibility issues.

 

For other cape rigging, on oblivion the khajits and argonians have tails and so you could use skeletonbeast.nif to rig the capes to the tail bones. on fo3 and nv tho u dont got that so u can try rigging it carefully mostly to the pelvis or spine and maybe a little to the legs. if its positioned correctly it should move a bit but i think it will go through the floor when you crouch.

 

 

So dont make it a very long cape if you go that route.

[AllanOcelot]

I think I will leave it then baduk.

 

Also, are you going to be posting a tutorial for those awesome snakes you made!

Thoese where FANTASTIC!

[invalidfate]

Baduk, If I were to make a cape, for instance, how would I go about that.

ive meshed it up and added the paint, what next, do i really need to skin and rig the thing with animations just to ensure that it does not clip? Is there not a way to add collision to clothing or something =/

 

MM... I try to do this by morphers although it only flutters slightly ( I am not good at animation... animation loop is very critical...). I use cloth modifer and manually convert it to morphers(dirty works) in 3DS but I believe this can be achieved in Blender. Now I guess I need to learn some scripting to convert cloth modier automatically.... Another issues is the animation looping, making the fluttering loops right is hard to me....

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynUyDKFrHwU

(fresh-experienced version can be found in my FNV files)

Edited February 15, 2011 by invalidfate

[baduk]

That looks very good!

 

I think i heard somewhere that someone was speculating about using such a method and that it might work, but no actual experiments.

 

Not having to mess with the skeleton is great for compatibility.

 

So anyway in your example, the cape is rigged entirely to spine2?

 

I guess the limitations is that it needs to be far away enough from the feet to not have clipping at each stride and far enough from the ground so it doesnt go through the floor when you are sneaking.

And it would not be able to change movement depending on whether you are inside or outside or the weather or your animation without some fancy scripting?

 

Well im gona look at your nifs anyway :D

[invalidfate]

That looks very good!

 

I think i heard somewhere that someone was speculating about using such a method and that it might work, but no actual experiments.

 

Not having to mess with the skeleton is great for compatibility.

 

The most important thing is that the realistic fluttering is very hard to implemet using only skeleton since the dynamic is very complex.

 

So anyway in your example, the cape is rigged entirely to spine2?

 

No , it is mainly rigged to the shoulder and spines

 

I guess the limitations is that it needs to be far away enough from the feet to not have clipping at each stride and far enough from the ground so it doesnt go through the floor when you are sneaking.

And it would not be able to change movement depending on whether you are inside or outside or the weather or your animation without some fancy scripting?

 

The cloth modifer in 3DS can take collision into account but I guess it will look unreal while the body moves. In order to change movement depending on conditions, the easiest way is to change the cape on the fly, and another way(just a thought, not confirm yet) may be to embed morphers into NIControllerManager and bind the corresponing morpher to a kf animation.