Cloth Physics and Mocap Study

VIDEO DESCRIPTION:

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INTRODUCTION

I make computer graphics pictures and animations as a hobby. My current project is a short film which requires learning many aspects of computer graphics, Blender, and film making.

This video is a demo of my efforts to learn character rigging, animation, use of motion capture, and cloth simulation. My progress so far, problems encountered, and the resources used are covered below.

Motion capture is recording the movements of real people and applying it to CG characters for natural looking movements.

PROCESS

1. Make a character model in Daz.
2. Transfer the model to Blender.
3. Rig the model for animation.
4. Apply a motion capture file.
5. Create clothing models.
6. Apply cloth simulation to the clothes.

The character model is a Genesis 2 female exported from Daz Studio. I made her slightly more athletic than the base model using shape modifiers. I exported the model as a collada file and imported that into Blender. Collada format preserves the textures when imported into Blender.

In Blender I removed the Daz armature (skeleton), and created a new one with the Auto-Rig Pro add-on. Then I imported a BVH file containing the motion capture and used Auto-Rig Pro to re-target the mocap to the character. Now the character moves like the human who’s movements were recorded.

I modeled the top and skirt in Blender. They are fairly simple shapes but need many polygons for the cloth simulation to work well. I parented the vertices of the waists of the top and skirt to a bone in the character’s armature and pinned them in the cloth simulation. Those vertices follow the bone and are not effected by the simulation.

It took about 24 minutes to bake the simulation.

LESSONS LEARNED

Objects that interact with cloth will poke through it. Use higher general and collision quality settings to fix that.

This character is 15 feet tall. A minimum collision clearance makes clothes fit loosely at normal size.

Cloth behaves differently at different quality settings.

Mocap problems like her hand going through her chest and strange movements can be fixed in the animation graph editor or by deleting or replacing keyframes.

SOFTWARE and RESOURCES

Blender 2.81 – Main Program
blender.org

Daz Studio 4.12 – Character Model
daz3d.com

HitFilm Express 14.1 – Video Editing
fxhome.com/hitfilm-express

Auto-Rig Pro – Add-on for Blender
blendermarket.com/products/auto-rig-pro

Most of the textures are from textures.com

The motion capture file is from cgspeed. He converted the Carnegie Mellon University library of free motion captures to BVH format.
cgspeed.com
mocap.cs.cmu.edu

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