Using MD to Deform Pants Without Them Being Penetrated By Legs

[DigiLusionist]

Hi, all. Can anyone assist me in rigging a character so his oversized pants that are held up by suspenders conform to his body and legs as he bends and walks without the pants being penetrated by the legs?

I have looked at a number of tutes and have experiented with this for a while but I am at a loss.

E-mail me if you can help. It would be greatly appreciated.

[3DBOX]

http://www.newtek.com/products/light...ner/index.html

[trick]

Very important for Char Anim and MD:

- make sure your cloth mesh has a higher refinement then your characters

- if using patches only the control points will be seen on the cloth: set subdiv on the character to LAST

- in earlier versions of MD, if materials were NOT 2-sided only collisions were seen between opposing normals: characters mesh pointing outward, clothes mesh pointing inward !!! I don't know now, but setting materials to 2-sided in the MD-material setup result in long long calc.times..

- as a last resort you can play with skin thickness parameter

- as a final last resort you can enhance the number of calculations in the setup

[matzofast]

If the charachters legs will not be seen during the animation there will be no need to have them eat up calculations. Just make sure the ankles extend up past the cuff of the pants a little bit and delete the rest of the model. of course you want to experiment with a duplicates of your model as well as a duplicate scene. just for safety. I read about this technique in a lw7 animation book. Their reasoning was: if it's not seen, then it doesn't need to be there at all.
plus you don't have to worry about collision detection and all that really fun stuff.

[matzofast]

I forgot to mention ... you will have to build morph targets of the full range of motion. then you just blend the targets... presto!

I wish it were that easy.