Cloth resolution question

[Jslave]

Hey D-T Team'

I have a question..

I have a high res character that I am using in an animation and for this years project I decided to add some wardrobe..

here's the problem, when trying to add clothing you can't get the resolution of the cloth to be high enough to keep from getting inner-penetration

so my solution was to make a proxy lo-res geometry underneath the existing surface

is this a common problem ?

is this the wrong way to fix this prob ?

it would appear to me that the film characters (in like starwars for instance) are extremely high res

I am wondering how they overcome this ?

I could see when smoothing your character you could just leave the mesh lo-res under the clothes, but what about where the cloth meets the high res geometry such as the end of the sleeve and the hand ?

any help or ideas will be greatly appreciated

Thanks
Jslave

[DjVoyager]

Hmmm...interesting issue. One way I can think of is to have your geometry be low-res and apply a Zbrush displacement map to make it look high-res. You can also use render passes/layers to assign further details.
The movie industry uses various applications that are specifically designed to deal with different CG procedures, for example, Motionbuilder runs a powerful real-time animation machine BUT it is not made for modeling. So you can model high-res characters in Maya, and real-time animate them in Motionbuilder.
The cloth simulation in Maya is a killer if it's for animation, so to cut render time, I'd go for displacement or bump mapping on low-res geometry. :)

[Jslave]

So essentialy your suggestion is to go for gaming resolution having just enough geometry to make it round from a distance and use texturing to make it appear real....

then possibly use another version for close ups ?

[papa]

I would recommend syflex to solve your clothing. You can build a low res mesh and apply the deformations to a higher res object.

[Jslave]

Hey that's the guy I wanted to hear from !

thanks :-)

hope all is well and better than ever with you and your family and endevors

I have syflex for maya 6 ...

I will install both and give er a shot

[DjVoyager]

Hey, this thing is totally awesome! There's even one for XSI (tapping Brandeil). Though this is the first time I've heard of it...after looking it up...yup, like the Man says, go for it! ;)