Clipped Clothing

[Cerez]

Any tips for avoiding/reducing clipping on garments laid over the model while weighting?

[mrwonko]

Have vertices in roughly the same places, I suppose. How do you weigh that it becomes a problem?

[AshuraDX]

yes, first weight your unclothed model then apply a skinwrap modifier to the clothing and pick your allready weighted model as source.

 

Then tweak parameters and test deformation unitl you get a decent result, once you are statisfied press the covnert to skin button and admire your work

[minilogoguy18]

It's also best to just remove the geometry underneath as much as possible to reduce clipping and poly count.

[Asgarath83]

Yes, JKA not have joints , so you need to rig the cloth with bones.... the bones used for the cloth are  the thoracic, clavicals, upper lumbar, lower lumbar, the pelvis and the femurs and tibia. the legs clothing part is the more hardest. make cloth after rigged rest of model and use the rig of near mesh as guide to lead you into the clothing rig.

sometime i try a "ring" work with clothes

example: the lower vertex line of the cloth:

Front view of model

first to right of model : rigged to rtibia

first to left of model: rigged to ltibia

central verrtex : rigged 50 \ 50 ltibia \ rtibia.

if there are vertex at middle distance between central and edge section fo legs, rig at 75 rtibia \ 25  ltibia and 75 ltibia 25 rtibia.

seems stranbe, but should be work. in this mode, every vertexes is affected not only by the nearest bone, but also to the opposite bone. and more a bone is near, more hight is its influence on the vertex.

[Archangel35757]

@@Asgarath83, bone = joint = bone... they are the same thing-- just different names in different software.

[Archangel35757]

It's also best to just remove the geometry underneath as much as possible to reduce clipping and poly count.

Use the .Skin file to turn off surfaces underneath garments-- if your model is intended to have an un-cloaked/un-robed version... otherwise do like @@minilogoguy18 and delete the underlying hidden geometry.

[Cerez]

yes, first weight your unclothed model then apply a skinwrap modifier to the clothing and pick your allready weighted model as source.

 

Then tweak parameters and test deformation unitl you get a decent result, once you are statisfied press the covnert to skin button and admire your work

 

Thanks @@AshuraDX! I didn't know about the skinwrap modifier. I hope this old version of 3DS Max has it. I've already weighted that section of the body, so I'll give this a shot.

 

And thanks everyone for the great advices.

[Cerez]

I've just checked, and 3DS Max 5 doesn't have the Skin Wrap modifier. I only have the Skin Tools interface to work with.

 

To be clear, all that you're doing with the Skin Wrap modifier is transferring the current weight settings from the body to the clothing, right @@AshuraDX? Then you're tweaking that to make sure that the distance the two meshes are from the bone does not cause overlaps/clips when the model bends, right?

 

I'm asking because I already have the same weights on the clothing mesh, but with extreme model bends, such as the movement of the legs, the two meshes still end up overlapping, no matter how much I assign the weight to the leg bone on my clothing mesh. The bends are just too extreme to keep them from clipping.

[Cerez]

I've managed to solve my problem using some trial and error. If you have tight clothes to match to the model -- and they need to be a separate mesh -- make sure you give them a few points distance from the body mesh (even if they are meant to be tight-fit on the body), as well as weighting them closely similar to the body parts underneath. JKA needs some room for deforming the mesh so that the meshes don't overlap. You have to count with the bone to vertex points distance/relationship. If you don't distance the clothes mesh too much, they still look close-fit, but you eliminate most of the overlaps. It's a very fine balance; it takes much trial and error.

 

And you can move mesh vertexes even after they have been weighted. Just don't add or remove any.

 

Of course that still means that I'm getting some clipping happening at the front of the legs, but I guess some clipping in the models is just unavoidable in JKA, especially where the arms and legs join the body.

 

It's a bit annoying, to be honest. After so much work on getting a model to look right, JKA takes it and squishes it into shapes and positions you'd rather not see your model in... XD

[Archangel35757]

I've managed to solve my problem using some trial and error. If you have tight clothes to match to the model -- and they need to be a separate mesh -- make sure you give them a few points distance from the body mesh (even if they are meant to be tight-fit on the body), as well as weighting them closely similar to the body parts underneath. JKA needs some room for deforming the mesh so that the meshes don't overlap. You have to count with the bone to vertex points distance/relationship. If you don't distance the clothes mesh too much, they still look close-fit, but you eliminate most of the overlaps. It's a very fine balance; it takes much trial and error.

 

And you can move mesh vertexes even after they have been weighted. Just don't add or remove any.

 

Of course that still means that I'm getting some clipping happening at the front of the legs, but I guess some clipping in the models is just unavoidable in JKA, especially where the arms and legs join the body.

 

It's a bit annoying, to be honest. After so much work on getting a model to look right, JKA takes it and squishes it into shapes and positions you'd rather not see your model in... XD

 

It's not just a matter of weighting the mesh to the skeleton in the root basepose... you need to add some simple deforming animations to the joints to test out your weighting.  You refine it further then so as to optimize it for joint deformations.

[Cerez]

Yes, that's what I'm doing. With clothing it gets difficult. Sometimes you have to weigh it to a different bone than what would be logical, so that it will deform well and stay clear of clipping...

[Cerez]

Some of JKA's animations are really strange. The way they treat the human body is really unnatural (upper spine split in half, etc.)...

[eezstreet]

Yeah, I'm not really a fan of JA's skeleton either. JK2's was better.

[Archangel35757]

@@Cerez -- Skin Wrap modifier was added in Max7. There is a download link to older, free, legal trial versions for Max 7 & 8 in my ROFF WIP thread.

[Archangel35757]

Yeah, I'm not really a fan of JA's skeleton either. JK2's was better.

The Jedi Knight enhanced skeleton will include all of the JK2 bones-- and then some new ones as well.

[Psyk0Sith]

Yes, that's what I'm doing. With clothing it gets difficult. Sometimes you have to weigh it to a different bone than what would be logical, so that it will deform well and stay clear of clipping...

 

You'll want to have very similar edgeloops / vertex placement on the additional cloth meshes, shared topology will take care of most problems since both meshes will deform in roughly the same manner. Skinwrap does a pretty good job of averaging the skin weights to match different meshes...when available.