Cloaks and Capes

[SirDanest]

Are cloaks, capes and robes (such as we'd find in a fantasty genre) harder to do in New Vegas' engine than in skyrim? I've been thinking of adding more religious representation to my game, both wasteland-odd cults and mundane religions. Got me looking for robes that aren't based on the brotherhood scribe or Veronica's armored robes. The best ones are still found in Skyrim.
Before I go looking into trying to duplicate a Skyrim-esque robe in New Vegas, I thought I'd just ask if there's some huge roadblock in the engine that is going to make it really difficult comparatively.

[kingbeast88]

If you want them moving like in Skyrim you'll run into a rigging problem with lot's of clipping during animations AFAIK.

[SirDanest]

Ah, thanks. I figured it was some added complexity like that, that didn't happen with typical armor or swords.

[madmongo]

Yeah, as kingbeast88 said it's not so much a game engine problem as it is a rigging problem. There aren't any bones in the existing armatures to support cloaks, so there's no special animations for cloak movement. Long, flowing cloaks just won't flow, because there's no animation to make them flow.

 

Clipping is easy enough to avoid, I think.

 

For a short cloak, just having it weighted off of the existing armature pieces works well enough. There are some Legion armors that have cloaks on them, and they look fine in-game. Anything that doesn't descent below roughly knee-level or so should be ok. You might be able to rig longer cloaks to work reasonably well by weighting them to thigh bones and not letting your 3d modeling program weight them to the much closer lower leg and feet bones. A really long cloak might look a bit stiff, though.

 

Robes tend to move with the player/NPC's legs anyway, so I would expect most of those to port fairly well to FNV.

Edited April 3, 2018 by madmongo