How do I handle animations for dynamic clothing on a mesh?

Development Character & Animation
1

Hey Everybody!

I’m new to modeling and animation but I already have the rigging and animation toolkit all setup inside Maya 2015 and I have already exported several models and animations into my game and it works perfect.

The next thing I want to do is to have my character to be able to equip different clothing and have the clothing follow the animation of the mesh.

Example:
I can attach a glove to a hand socket but what are some best practices for having the fingers of the gloves match the current placement of my mesh’s fingers?

My first guess would be to allow for multiple socket attachments from the clothing to the hand and fingers but to do this I assume I would need a skeleton for each article of clothing so I can match the socket numbers. However, I first wanted to probe the community to see if they had any recommendations.

Also, is there a term for what I am referring to? I was trying to look this up myself but having a difficult time wording my searches in a way to give valid results.

I thank you for any assistance you can provide.

2

Check out this Epic support stream…

https://youtube.com/watch?v=lo1wtMqX4No

They cover animation related stuff and customization is also covered in there. I would say, look at that and see if you find what you’re looking for, or at least part of what you’re looking for and take it from there.

3

Hello Obihb,
Thanks for linking that video, I watched it before but never noticed the quick segment where they were swapping arms. Unfortunately they do not go to much in detail about it. It looks similar to the example I gave in my original post.
However there is one more question regarding this method:
What are some best practices when swapping limbs to make it still appear like one complete person?
In the example they use a character who shoulder is simply a circle so it’s easy to repeat, but say I want to have my characters have the equivalent of a “equip-able” bicep?
I could have 2 arms and swap them out, but how do I make the shoulder seamlessly work with the body?