Creating Clothing and items for a Model

Ok, I need to revisit this little irritant.

I have a system thanks to some help that will parse through a model, like pants for example, find the bones in it and parent those bones to the Main Character Model so that when the model animates, the pants follow it. It works great except for the fact that no matter how much time I spend tweaking the vertices of the pants, the underlying mesh will still show through.

So I looked into just using textures to represent clothing and such on a character model. The problem here is I have 1 texture that creatures the skin texture for the model. I tried creating a duplicate of this texture and masking the items that didnt represent the pants. Of course it didnt work. I gave up on this because I believe this to be a more complicated solution. The clothing doesnt look right when created from a texture and what if you want to add items to the clothing, like make the pants more baggy and such? or add bigger pockets? Sure, Dungeon siege did a fine job of doing both, creating Clothing and Armor through textures and standalone models. But for ease of use, Im just trying to implement 1 part of that right now.

I was curious to see if any one was willing to share how they conquered this mountain so that anyone can save a heck of alot of time by not trying to reinvent the wheel.

Thanks for any input

Maybe you could apply the same animation to both the character model and the cloth model ?

Thanks for the help there B32, I tried that, but the underlying model still pops through. I'll Keep at it though.

are you using boned meshes?
Why not export the clothing ie skirt with the bones it uses ie pelvis, rthigh,lthigh and then like said animate them the same. You shouldn't get it popping through then if you rig it correctly.

Let me see if I understand, export the Clothing with the bones, like Im doing now, keep the animation in each model. Then Manually position the clothing to fit the model. Then Manually control the animation of the seperate clothing?

That could mean having to control over 20 objects at once if you consider, weapons, jewelry, hair and clothing, plus apply any transformations to each object as the main character model moves. Im sure a function could be created to do all this, but it seems alot of work that parententity could handle all by itself. Unless I misunderstand.

I Have a function of 20 lines that parents each bone of the clothing to the main models bone of the same name, the function only needs to be run once after a piece of clothing gets loaded. that piece of clothing then follows the animation of the model. It works almost perfect, I just need to tweak my rigging to compensate for popping more. Plus see if there are any other tricks I can use.

This post was actually just looking to see what others have done for this kind of system, If they used textures 100%, models 100% or a mixture of both. And if theyre feeling generous, post some psuedo to show how they did it.

Thanks again for the input, Ill keep pluggin away and think of your recommendations.

The way you have just posted is probably the same as the way i mean.
You should run the model in the 3d app and see how the clothing runs on the model and tweak it there.

lol, thats exactly what I did, I had to merge the original Model with the piece of clothing to see how it looked and as I feared, the popping is apparent there. At least I can tweak now without having to run through exporters though. Im looking into a new tweak right now, hopefully thisll work.

I'd sure love to see how anyone else created a clothing/Armor/ Equipment system though. Hehehehe, please?

Xyle, perhaps it's possible to let your main character model (ie. without clothes) be totally without geometry! Bones only. And then dress it with either FLESH or CLOTHED body parts??? Depends on your clothing-design of course, and if you have multiple races... just a thought..

A short sleave t-shirt would cover belly-torso-upper arm sections. And use the 'naked flesh' parts for the lowerarm+hands. Similarly with legs, head (helmet/caps/whatever), etc. ??

Besides that you won't have models showing through, you'll also be using less geometry/surfaces/textures at the same time. But this ofcourse could affect your design.... dunno... ?!

danny

Thanks for that little insight Danny. You originally helped me with the DressMesh Function that works great. My problem has been on the modeling side of it all. I used a few modifiers and my models are completely covered now. I tried seperating the body parts so that I can attempt a system your recommending, but the model really looks like a puppet. This is something I can attempt to improve down the road, since models look good with clothing on now.

Thanks again!

I'd still love to see how other people are equipping/ clothing their models in a blitz game.