Sackcloth and gashes

There are a handful of visual phenomena that are devilishly difficult to simulate with a computer. Fluids, hair, fur and cloth are notorious for requiring complex and expensive software, talented artistry and powerful computing. But these effects, while feared by digital artists, are able to lend a sense of realism to CG work not easily achieved by any other means.

While the topic of this tutorial is cloth, all of these effects share a common trait: extreme complexity. You don’t have to look any further than your own shirt to witness the breadth of chaos exhibited by a simple piece of cloth. The cascading folds of material on a typical T-shirt would be enough to send any polygon modeller screaming for help.

Fortunately, help isn’t far away. This tutorial is meant to introduce you to a typical workflow for animating cloth with Maya Cloth. This is a powerful toolset which, in my opinion, deserves some serious attention. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to use, but it’s reliable. Novice users are often confused by its somewhat odd workflow, mistaking its steep learning curve for a weakness. The truth is that Maya Cloth can be hard to learn, but its difficulty is proportional to its flexibility. I want to mention that many people prefer the SyFlex plug-in for serious cloth work. In my experience, SyFlex has definitely been somewhat easier to work with and perhaps less prone to instability. The SyFlex solver seems to adaptively adjust itself where Maya Cloth requires a little babysitting from time to time. The bottom line: if you have the money, get SyFlex. However, Maya Cloth is still a capable solver.

This tutorial will provide an overview of a production-worthy workflow for creating believable cloth animation. We’ll follow the creation of a cloth garment for the Minx character from the upcoming The Art of Rigging Vol III. In the textbook, you’ll find every detail of this fascinating topic, including the creation of our character’s hair/fur, cloth and much more.

Click here to download the support files (~42MB)

This tutorial is adapted from CG Toolkit's The Art of Rigging, Volume III. For more information about the book, visit www.cgtoolkit.com