hello, i begin to learning a bit about clothing, i see few tutorials, all tutorials bind the cloth to a character and exported, i want exchangeable cloth, my test characters ATM are nude i want to do the cloth, export and attach.
at this momment the only way i think to do this its attach to a socket, but i think this isn’t the way, and going to have problems and that not going to work right.
anyone can give some words the best way to do this? a few basic concept about this topics? or any link.
You will not want to attach clothing to a nude model, the use of attachments seems better suited for things that do not require skinning such as glasses. You will want to model the clothing as part of your exported skeletal meshes.
Otherwise you will have unused geometry under the clothes which will likely cause you headaches with skinning as well as being inefficient on rendering.
Another approach for clothing your characters is to go the route of making “modular” characters that would be comprised of many skeletal meshes. These can then be swapped. The problem with this approach is you will need to spend a lot of time making sure there aren’t visible seams. Also the design of your rigs will likely require some careful thought. It will be more challenging then just exporting different versions of models but will ultimately be more flexible.
For simulated clothing Nvidia Apex physics is used to handle the cloth simulation. There are tools/exporter for Max I believe, not sure about other software. You can use this for making skeletal meshes that have some simulation. I believe they need to be rigged to your character skeleton.
For most clothing you will probably not want to use simulation. It’s best suited to skirts, flowing jackets, and other parts of the mesh you want to dangle and flop around. You could use it for ears for instance I believe.
thx. i known how do that things, i try do some clothes and ins’t hard (i do something basic), i check few tutorials, the problem its some basic concepts i want to know before begin something more complicated.
if i understand you right, in a game when the character have example 20 shirts and 20 pants (ex: GTA), they are using a modular character since have all that combinations with skeletal meshes its near absurd. Right? then i need to work with a modular character, not attach or in another way.
a game with a character with very few combinations or few suits the approach its have various skeletar meshes right?
It really comes down to a personal choices.
You can just have lots of character models using a single skeletal mesh, you can just do the editing in the modeling program and export them.
The benefit as you say for a modular system is that you can just change the shirt, pants, or any other items and just mix them together at runtime, with a lot of options this will likely save you time in the long run.
The real benefit for this design I think is if you plan to have a character creation screen as in most RPGs.
Here’s a link from UDN regarding developing modular characters for UE3 as well, might be a good read if you haven’t seen it already.
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/DevelopmentKitGemsCreatingAModularPawn.html
Edit: Actually I don’t think that was the article I read before, I’m sure I saw a more in depth article somewhere ages ago but I can’t find it now. You could look at the UE3 assets to see how they are made. Also games like Fallout and Skyrim use this system and you can get the assets as they allow modding.
since i begin in UE4 (few months ago) i always got stuck how approach things and this basic concepts. :mad:
thanks alot for the info will look to that all.