Characters - clothing considerations - model part of, or seperate?

[Morne]

Hi all

What implications and considerations need to be taken into account for cartoon characters in regard to clothing?
IE, Model the clothing as part of the character, or model a naked character and add clothing on top of him?

What's the pros and cons for either?

[joconnell]

Depends on the design - if you're not doing any cloth sim stuff at all, just model the clothing with nothing underneath - the head goes onto the neck and the neck goes down a little bit further than the neck line of the jumper. Hands have the wrists modelled but only go up far enough to overlap a bit with the cuffs of a jumper and so on.

[Morne]

the clothing will be "dress" like or "robe" like
kinda like bible times

[joconnell]

If the majority of the body will be hidden under cloth, don't model it. And if it's a cartoon style, skinning will probably be okay for the "dress" part of the robe, unless you want to do something really fancy with cloth sims.

[Morne]

I'm up for a bit of a challange. How much of a mission is it to do these cloth sim things with built in tools from max, or with free things like simcloth? Draping a cloth over a table is simple enough, but I'm a bit of a 1st timer with cloth for characters.

Any advice? - or prayers

[joconnell]

It's not too bad - what smarter people than me do a lot is to make simple shapes like cylinders for the limbs, parent them to the character bones and then use those as the colliders for your cloth mesh. The built in cloth is pretty decent and you've gotta start somewhere Ideally model your clothes with nice even quads as it'll make the cloth solvers life far easier.

[Morne]

can I use simcloth as a solver in this instance, or will the max one be more "suited"? hehe

[joconnell]

You could but there's a lot of good stuff in cloth - it's very quick and easy to pick up.

[Morne]

cool looking forward to this!
thanks again for all your guidance John

[joconnell]

If you want a really good grounding, this is well worth a look - http://www.turbosquid.com/FullPrevie....cfm/ID/271968

[Morne]

This looks awesome!
great find

[joconnell]

Paul's written a lot of scripts to make using cloth faster if you're using his workflow - http://www.hyperent.com/

[Morne]

on a sort of related note, although maye a silly question to some people:
Does CAT also have "auto" animate tools like character studio (biped) like for example walk cycle where you just place footsteps and your character auto follows the footsteps? I know both systems can take mocap data. How does CAT and Biped compare to manual systems like bones etc? I mean if you don't use mocap data, what makes the one system better than the other?
I want to make sure I'm learning and devopling the right set of skills for current and future technologies. I'm leaning towards CAT, just would like to know what other pros are using and what they recommend to some1 new(ish) to character animation.

It would be helpful if some1 could state the pros and cons of the various systems.

[mike_kennedy]

Cat has it's odd issues and bugs but kills Character Studio for ease of use. That and real curves....
it's auto walking tools are a little over the top first pass, but once you tweak the auto walker it looks great and the layer system lets you correct a lot of things.
Character Studio was good ...ten years ago
Mike

[tammo]

Yes CS might be old, but its very stable and you wont find bugs anymore.
It has all the tools you need to animate a two legged character.

if you buy a high end character for max (or even low end),
it will have a Biped rig 99% of the time.

If i had to animate something with more then two legs, i would use Cat instead.