Just a brain picking question regarding cloth physics

[throttlekitty]

lol you are drunk, but thanks all the same. (did i even release any mods for skyrim? i did nifskope and some tutorial stuff to the best of my knowledge.)

[tomshepard308ci]

Yo ThrottleKitty, your name makes me think of 2 things, a cat being throttled or a cat in the drivers seat of a hot rod mashing the throttle while looking all serious. Just thought I would toss that out there since I am currently drunk.

 

@tomshepard308ci The majority of your original questions is answered quite a bit for non Bethesda games tutorials. "Character animation and rigging" is one term for a Google search. Once you get an understanding of the basics that's used across all games figuring out what's used for FO4 is far easier to understand. Basic character rigging is confirmed, vertice weighting for bones is the name of the game for FO4 armor and clothing files(hairs are nothing more than an armor or clothing item just like the base body is).

 

I really do suggest reading/watching Skyrim and older Bethesda game tutorials to get a basic idea of what's needed. FO4 doesn't need an _0 or _1 version of every armor/clothing because they realized bone scaling does the same thing with less than half the work to make it work so that part of Skyrim tutorials can be ignored in regards to FO4.

 

Oh fun personal fact.. I think throttlekitty is one of the greatest mod authors for Skyrim. Always excellent work and advice coming from that kitty.

Thanks dude, I'm trying to read the bits that you suggested, and trying to work out what you meant earlier by vertice weighting for bones. So as I visualize in the amateur way, FO4 clothes is basically the top part with no bones, and the bottom part are just strips of bones that are applied with physic? So it is NOT the same way Blender cloth is rigged then, you know, they import a body, and create a mesh, create its divisions(squares) , designate as cloth, and add modifiers, and place it around the shoulder and make it collide with the body, etc.... What do you think?

[throttlekitty]

I only took a quick look at some of the cloth data, but no, it's not quite like you'd see in a typical 3d suite. I'm not really certain it will be a job that NifTools can or will handle, so I haven't looked that close; which might be a huge letdown for blender users if we don't come up with a good solution.

 

There is a lot of vertex data and all the cloth bones, so a weight system at the very least. The game doesn't fly OMG CLOOOOOTH up in your face, it's pretty subtle and nice. I keep forgetting to watch to see if it ever breaks, I've never seen a characters' legs break it and have the cloth freak out. I'm curious if the cloth system/data also has collider shapes built into it.

[tomshepard308ci]

Agreed, in terms of modifiers and legs collisions while running, it's done very nicely. As in cloth behavior observation, I'm your man because I have literally knit picked every details in every action I can get my character to do, which includes: JET it and jump off the building, weld rifles and jump sideways, VATS melee actions, jumping up n down continuously...I even went as far as picking up NPC body with the dress still worn to assess the behavior.

 

Conclusion:

1.the back cloth bones tend to clip and hang to the front quite regularly, when you combat and jumping up and down frequently. After that, it's almost impossible to flip the back bones back to where they were. The opposite does happen too, the front clips and hang at the back. And the funny thing is, if you run and turn around enough, you can get the clipping from the front to "travel" to the back, it's kinda funny.

It doesn't bother me very much, I can just hit TAB the cloth bones reset their behavior.

2. No simulation whatsoever when sitting and swimming, it kinda sucks.

3. Like you observed, it does not break when your character breaks. I started to understand why there are only 2 NPCs with Laundered Dress Dress and no spawn NPC wearing things like this cuz a, it's not lore friendly, b, the cloth does not collide with ground.

 

What annoys me the most is how the bones start very low on the body, while they should have started at the waistline at least, so that you get more flow, looks more realistic for what they are. I really hope there is a way to fix that in the future.

Despite what you said, I kinda like the cloth up my face stuffs, lol, wow matrix, such super heroes.