MAXON Computer Cinema 4D Tutorials: Painting Cloth Properties

Tips & Techniques - MOCCA

MOCCA:
Painting Cloth Properties

Works with:
MOCCA, XL, Studio Requires:
Version 9.012

Fitting cloth garments to a character can take some serious fine-tuning. Luckily with Clothilde many properties of cloth can be influenced by a vertex map.

Step 1: The first thing that needs to be addressed is to actually create a garment for a character. Start this garment by creating a Polygon Object.

Switch over to the Polygons mode and activate the Create Polygon tool.

Hit 'V' to access the General Popup

Step 2: In the Front view (F4) draw the front panel of the garment. Make sure that in the Attributes Manager both Create and N-gon Subdivision are set to N-gon.

Step 3: In the Perspective view, activate the Move tool and move the panel in front of the character.

Go back to the Front view and enable the Knife tool. Make sure the Mode for the Knife tool is set to Line.

Now distribute cuts evenly throughout the panel. Try to maintain a quadrangle topology as much as possible.

Step 4: Create the back panel for this shirt by using the Clone function (Functions=>Clone). Set Clones to 1, make sure Axis is set to Y, and Rotation is at 180 degrees. Hit OK.

Step 5: Activate Edge mode and the Live Selection tool.

Select edges, for both front and back panels, that need to be seamed together. The image shown will help clarify this.

Step 6: You now need to create the geometry for the seams. Activate the Stitch and Sew tool (Structure=>Stitch and Sew).

While holding the Shift modifier, click and drag from one edge selection to the corresponding selection on the opposite panel.

Step 7: Select the polygons that make up the front and back panels. Make sure not to select the polygon that comprise the seams that were just created.

In order to simulate the geometry like a cloth garment, the geometry will need to be subdivided. Use the Subdivide command to do this (Functions=>Subdivide). Use a Subdivision value of 2 or 3.

Step 8: The garment is now ready to be simulated. Invert the current polygon selection (Selection=>Invert) so that only the seams are selected.

Step 9: Add a Cloth tag to the polygon object (File=>Clothilde Tags=>Cloth).

In the Attributes Manager change the settings of the Cloth tag to match those shown in the image. This makes the garment a little more rigid, with less bouncing against the colliding object.

In the Dresser tab Set the Dress State using the button provided. This stores the current position of points for the geometry. This state can be returned to at any time by using the Show button!

Now Set the Seam Polys for the garment. Based off of the current polygon selection, this tells the cloth engine what polygons will be treated as the seam. Lower the Width value to about 4m.

Step 10: The cloth engine now needs to know what object it will collide against. To do this, select the object that contains the characters geometry and apply a Collider tag (File=>Clothilde Tags=>Collider).

Match the settings found within the Collider tag with the image shown.

Step 11: Now simulate the garment onto the character! Back in the Cloth tag under the Dresser tab use the Dress-O-Matic command.

Step 12: Now make the bottom of the shirt larger! Go into Points mode and select all points (Selection=>Select All). Create a Vertex Map for these selected points (Selection=>Set Vertex Weight). Use a Value of 50%.

Activate the Brush tool (Structure=>Brush). Change the following settings for the tool: Falloff = Linear, Mode = Paint, Strength = 25%, and Radius = 45m.

Using the Brush tool paint the bottom half of the garment. This is the area that you want to enlarge.

Step 13: Switch the Mode for the Brush tool to Blur. Now smooth out the transition for the vertex map.

Step 14: Select the Vertex Map tag and rename it to SizeMap.

Select the Cloth tag and enable the Effects tab. Drag and drop the SizeMap into the Size field. Also increase the Size value to 125%.

Step 15: In the Dresser tab Set the Init State for the garment. Now use the Relax command. This will take gravity and other forces into account to rest the cloth against the character. As you can see this also takes vertex maps into account.

You can use vertex maps for any of the fields shown in the Effects tab. This allows for garments to be completely customized and tailored to your needs.