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.