Ripped clothes and rigging

[christopher england]

Does anyone have any clever mwthods for putting holes in meshes and creating the appearnece of rips?

Also I have retopologized this model and will be rigging and detailing it shortly. I would like to pose it in a very dynamic position which would lead to a bit of stretching in all parts. Should I produce the texture maps after rigging or can I do that now? And can I keep the shrink wrap modifiers when rigging or must they be applied for best results?

[Matthew Fricker]

From what iv’e learnt about rigging, it is best to leave any unwrapping and texturing till afterwards as you may have to make topology changes as you rig to get better deformations which could then make any UV’s and texturing invalid and you will have to start again. I can’t remember if I linked this or not, but @danpro ‘s great series about using rigify will train you how to rig and weight a character efficiently for posing and animation. It has everything you need to know about rigify and weight painting in there and I thoroughly recommend anybody to take the time to go through it. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIZ-kCFASKE

As for the shrinkwraps, I’m not sure, it’s not something iv’e personally come across yet, but Dan may be able to help with that. 

Also, I got your PM , ill get back to you when im back on my computer and can reply to it 🙂 

[danpro]

I think it should be safe to apply the shrinkwrap modifiers if they have served their purpose. With any modifier it’s important to keep in mind that the modifier is doing some work on the mesh so the mesh itself is not being permanently changed. Applying the modifier will make those changes permanent so there is no going back after it’s been applied. Worst case, make a copy of the mesh and apply the modifier to only one of them so you can revert to the unapplied version if something goes wrong.

For my workflow, I avoid texturing and unwrapping until “Stage 1” of rigging is done. “Stage 1” gets me to a point where the main body of the character is rigged and weighted. This allows me to transfer weights to clothing, (huge time saver) avoids having to redo any unwraps if the topology of the mesh is not allowing good deformations, gets the most out of the Rigify rig before any customization of the rig is done.

For your project, I still think using mesh deform modifiers and a deform cage for both clothing and body may be the best route to go. The meshes that make up the shirt, hand wraps, pants, etc will have very different topology and that makes weighting them to deform correctly very tough. Using a deform cage, every mesh will be bound to the same cage and will deform equally, despite having different topology. This method is a little advanced so it can be a bit harder to accomplish if you’ve never rigged before.

Good luck!

[christopher england]

Great answers, really got to the source. I appreciate the indepth info, thanks a lot for the help!

[Chuck Shultz]

Danpro,  where do you do you caging tutorial?

and does anyone know if 2.79 is improving rigging of multi-layer clothing or are we still needing the caging technique?

Thanks

[danpro]

Sorry, I do not have a tutorial on using the mesh deform modifier and cage. I did do some research and testing recently and I re-discovered why I do not use this method very often. Binding can be buggy, file size gets extremely bloated and dealing with the transitions between using an armature modifier and mesh deform on the same mesh can be frustrating and tricky.

If you’d like to see a few examples that use this method look at blendswap.com for Sintel and Judy Hopps. 

Good luck!

Edit: I was unaware of any new mesh deforming methods until I watched the 2.79 Live Stream. It looks like there is a new surface deform modifier that may help with “rigging” clothing. I say rigging, but it actually uses cloth sims. Take a look at the stream around 45 minutes. 

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