Animated Cloth Simulation Test 1 (Patreon)

Finally finished a version of the jiggle physics for the character, I still need to tune it a bit, but while it's very subtle not by design, it's there.

But I've decided to run a little test simulation for the cloth to see how it will react to the animation and specifically the jump from the first armature to the second armature for the model.

There's two separate armatures that the model uses in this animation, the one with the mocap data with Mixamo generated weights, and the original rig with the original weights. The issue comes when you use the shape keys designed for the original rig with the mocap rig, the weights used to influence and deform the model are different, resulting in the same pose looking different between the two armatures. 

I cannot use the original rig for mocap as it doesn't play nice with Mocap Fusion, the software I use to do the mocap in, so I generated a new rig in Mixamo, and used that rig and weights, and it worked significantly better.

I cannot fix this without creating entirely new shape keys for the mocap rig.

But I do have a workaround. I just transition to the original armature during a camera change. The model looks slightly different, but in the animation and from the camera views, it looks similar enough. You can see this armature change in Marvelous Designer, and it handled it extremely well.

You do lose the mocap, but at this stage, it's not necessary, so I think it's a fair tradeoff.

I'm using Marvelous Designer for this as I'm most familiar with it as I'm still getting the hang of Houdini. I've had successful cloth simulations in Houdini, but compared to MD, it's pretty slow, slow enough where I can't make reasonable amounts of iterations on it compared to Marvelous Designer.

I think it did a tremendous job on the simulation apart from the end where my issues with MD are still apparent with the stretching of the cloth and collision with the ground ruining the pants at the end, but with some manual work, I think I can get it looking good. But the main thing I'm impressed with is how it handled the transition to the main armature from the mocap armature. The very first frame is a little janky as it determines where the model is, but solving it the very next frame was most impressive, and that accurately, with just a single frame, is honestly incredible. I expected it to just glitch out and not even work, but this exceeded my expectations, it's great.

This will be the outfit in the animation, I'm planning on removing the hood. With some minor tweaks to the soft body physics and manual cloth adjustments, I think this'll turn out great!

I'll update more as I continue iterating!