Finish the Clothing and Animate It

Before you animate the clothing, there are a couple of steps to improve the general appearance of the clothes.

Set up the scene:

Continue from the previous lesson.

Use the Relax modifier to improve the appearance of the skirt:

If you render the skirt at this point, you will see that the skirt drapes well and the pleats look fairly good, but there is bunching along the pleats that it would be nice to remove.

Rather than twiddling Cloth parameters, you simply can apply a Relax modifier.

Select the skirt.
From the Modifier List, choose Relax.
On the Parameters rollout, change the Relax Value to 0.75.

Now the pleats look smoother when you render the model.

Change the color of the skirt:

In the Name And Color area, click the color swatch for the skirt.
In the Object Color dialog, click the dark red color swatch, and then click OK.

Use the Shell modifier to give the clothes some thickness:

At present, the pullover and the skirt are extremely thin: In fact, technically they have no thickness. This can become a problem when you animate the cloth, especially the pullover: Patches of skin might appear through the fabric. To avoid this “wardrobe malfunction,” use the Shell modifier to give the garments some thickness.

Select the pullover.
From the Modifier List, choose Shell.
On the Parameters rollout, change the value of Outer Amount to 0.002m.

Two millimeters is a realistic thickness for a piece of cloth.
Right-click the modifier stack, and choose Copy from the pop-up menu.
Select the skirt.
Right-click the modifier stack, and choose Paste Instanced from the pop-up menu.

Now the pullover and skirt both have an equal thickness.

Animate the clothing:

Select the pullover.
On the modifier stack, click the Cloth modifier to make it active.
On the Object rollout, click Simulate. Let the simulation run for all 200 frames. This will take a few minutes.
Go back to frame 0, then select the skirt.
On the Object rollout, click Simulate. Let the simulation run for all 200 frames. This will take several minutes, because the skirt is a dense mesh.
Go back to frame 0, then play the animation.
The pullover clings to the model’s body, while the skirt sways according to gravity and the movement of the model; it also moves from colliding with the model’s knees.

Stop playback when you are done watching the animation.

Save your work:

Save the scene as fashion_costume_animated.max.
To see a completed version of the model with cloth, you can open fashion_model_completed.max. You can also see a completed movie of the model’s walk by choosing Rendering View Image File, and then opening fashion_model.avi.

Summary

The Garment Maker and Cloth modifiers work together to create clothing that animates in a realistic manner. Garment Maker operates on patterns constructed from splines, similar in form to the paper patterns used by clothing makers. It adds a mesh to the pattern, and lets you specify other details such as seams and pleats. Cloth takes panels set up using Garment Maker, joins seams, and deforms the modeled fabric. Cloth can fit fabric to a character mesh, provide the effect of gravity, and animate garments.