Rigged cloth simulation within a scene.

[Hammers]

Thanks to the many kind folk who post Blender help, I’ve got nearly where I need to with a cloth simulation in a project I’m working on:

But I’ve hit a wall and here’s my little cry for help

Firstly what works. The example above uses a linked rig group, and I’ve got a method for baking the cache to the local scene file. Great!

And the physics are more-or-less behaving as I want, collision and cloth-wise (with a few self-collisions I hope I can fix later).

The Problem:
My issue is that in scenes that I’ve already animated without the cloth, I thought I’d just be able to substitute the new group that includes the cloth object, and just bake the cloth sim. But this isn’t the case unfortunately.

Here’s a run-down:

First, my mod stack, cloth settings, and weights for the pinning group around the shoulders, head and neck only. Nothing strange here afaik. I’ve been using this pose as a rest pose to preroll with the actual animation.

So animating with the character at the scene centre is fine, but in my scenes I’ve linked the object group, proxified it, left the object at the scene centre, then positioned the character with its root bone. In the past this has been the most reliable practice I’ve found. Moving or rotating the group object = headaches.

But with only the shoulders, head and chest having deform weights parented to the armature, the rest of the cloak isn’t carried along with the rig into position. This makes sense, as I guess it’s only the armature and bones that are controllable in the proxy. So the result of moving the root bone forward e.g. is something like this, with the bone vertex groups following the rig:

I’ve tried various ideas for parenting the rest of the cloak mesh, including parenting the other vertices to the root, the torso, assigning automatic bone weights to the whole mesh. I thought ‘multi-modifier’ might have saved me… But these all create various weird issues, e.g. :

So I’m really hoping someone can save me from my exploding brain, and suggest something to try. Here’s the character rig.

http://www.pasteall.org/blend/32000

Thanks for your time, and sorry for the long post.

[Richard_Culver]

If what you are showing is just moving the mesh in the view port - no simulation - then this is normal. But I am not 100% certain that is what you are doing.

But if you are, my solution would be to wieight the rest of the cloth object along with the hip bone. So that just for positioning, you are set and ready to go. Once the simulation starts the dynamics takes over and those portions of the cloth object are taken over by the cloth modifier. Only the pinned group then follow the bones after that.

If this is not the case, I’d need more information.

[Richard_Culver]

Here is the result of doiing what I described. (shown in edit mode) Assigning your “all the rest” group to a new group called “DEF-hips”

Now you can move the mesh and the cloth around in the Viewport.

[Hammers]

Thanks Richard. Yes The above shots are just moving the root bone without simulation. The problem I’m trying to solve is when my character’s proxy rig is moved a long way from the scene origin when it’s instanced. So I’m trying to find a way to get the cloth to follow the proxy rig into its initial preroll position, ready for animation and simulation.

I was just in the process of testing the hip bone when you posted, and it looks like it works! Thanks so much for your help. Really appreciate you taking the time.

[Richard_Culver]

Great!

Glad it turned out to be simple.:yes: