Rigging Clothing

knuckledusterharris_b01188de76

I would like to have several items of clothing with parts that move independent of the character; things like tuxedo tails, coat-tails, capes, etc. Where do I start? I've made clothing in Hexagon and Zbrush and fit them to Genesis using the transfer utilities, but I've never done any rigging.

Richard Haseltine

Once you have the basic rigging done, create new bones using the Joint Editor tool, place them to control the parts of the clothing that you wish adjusted, and use the Polygon Group Editor and Weight Map Brush to give them influence. You may want to turn off the auto-normalisation of weight maps, in Tool Settings for the Weight Map Brush, as otherwise adding weight to one of the handles will remove it from the other bones affecting the area - though in some cases that may be welcome (you probably do want to remove the leg bone influences from the jacket tails, for example).

knuckledusterharris_b01188de76

Many thatnks--I especially needed to hear the part about getting the coat-tails to separate from the legs. I'll experiment and see what I can come up with!