Ncloth is pretty tricky!
Right, I think that trying to learn how to generate clothes with ncloth is not the sort of thing that you can learn in about two weeks. There are just far too many statistics – collisions, resistance, object properties and all of the nucleus stuff (gravity, wind etc), I just can’t figure all of this out in such a small amount of time. I managed to get something though! It’s just not quite as I imagined. It’s almost exactly the same as if I had just skinned the jumper as part of the body. It is likely that I didn’t use the correct pipeline for making something like this, not doing things in the right order or testing with a model with a high polygon count. (I found a decent tutorial towards the end…)
Every time I got a cloth ‘consistency’ that I liked the jumper would pull/stick/fly apart and lose it’s shape or fly through part of the body. This resulted in the jumper being too sturdy and not flowing like a knitted jumper should, but at least it didn’t explode anymore.
I used a mixture of techniques; hanging the cloth around the body by fixing groups of vertices, using proxy objects in limbs to collide and force the cloth to follow it and finally using the whole character’s body as a collider object. It’s all pretty slow work and horribly frustrating when experimenting with variables that you don’t quite know the exact function of. Guessing by it’s name is not always the wisest thing to do 3d software.
Anyway, the jumper (dynamic objects etc) was never the main focus of this experiment – the pencil lines were. The computer generated clothes were just there to contrast with the hand drawn lines and textures. Besides, I can’t quite seem to get the right ‘normal map’ to give the impression of the soft wool, so it doesn’t really matter that it’s not perfect – at least I know a shit tonne more about this stuff and about exporting/importing between Maya and Max.
