With Skinned Meshes live, is it somehow possible to make 3D armour / clothing fit & animate along?

[TheEldritchDreamer]

Description

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Hey everyone! I’d like to use a character model using the single-mesh method which I modelled & animated. However, a question came to me by surprise: is it possible to have clothing / armour animate along with the mesh (so that it always covers everything)? And if so, how can I do this without having to combine the armour with the character mesh? I want the armour & clothing to be very customizable, so combining it is no option.

(Possible) Issues

My biggest concern is: even with attachments and such installed, I fear the body might just glitch through armour & clothing at certain spots. So I started thinking, would it be possible to somehow let the gear animate along with the character? Or is there another way to prevent body parts from sticking out?

Example

Goal

I’d like to find a way to keep using the single-mesh models without having drawbacks on the coverage, such as armour & clothing, on the model.

It was pretty difficult to explain with the limit of what I can visually show. If any questions arise let me know, I’ll try to clarify them

So what can I do to achieve this goal?

[VegetationBush (FartedAtLightspeed)]

Maybe one day Roblox can incorporate cloth physics and this wouldn’t be a problem, but as of now, it’s really hard to make this sort of mechanic(the only way I can think on if raycasting, but there might be other ways).

[nooneisback]

Some basic verlet code should do the trick. The only issue is that making it detailed and performant is practically impossible as it is. It is definitely possible for clothes such as capes or coats, but it would be limited to ~6-9 points per cloth. You’d also have to get greedy with collision surfaces, so don’t even bother with proper limb collisions.

Even if Roblox were to add an actual Cloth instance, I’d imagine it would be optimized for stuff like swinging flags instead of accurate character related stuff, so you should expect a lot of clipping, twitching and generally inaccurate collisions (floating above surface).

[WhiteCat_Fan]

Are you talking about cloth physics or clothing being animated along with the character itself?

[TheEldritchDreamer]

@nooneisback

Some basic verlet code should do the trick. The only issue is that making it detailed and performant is practically impossible as it is. It is definitely possible for clothes such as capes or coats, but it would be limited to ~6-9 points per cloth. You’d also have to get greedy with collision surfaces, so don’t even bother with proper limb collisions.

Even if Roblox were to add an actual Cloth instance, I’d imagine it would be optimized for stuff like swinging flags instead of accurate character related stuff, so you should expect a lot of clipping, twitching and generally inaccurate collisions (floating above surface).

It’s a shame indeed that colissions & physics aren’t supported, I hope they will at some point in the future. Thanks for the information.

@WhiteCat_Fan

Are you talking about cloth physics or clothing being animated along with the character itself?

About clothing being animated along with the character. But I already figured it out.

[WhiteCat_Fan]

Could you explain the solution for myself and other people stumbling upon this post?

[TheEldritchDreamer]

Good that you mention it!

@TheEldritchDreamer

Basically, in case your question is similar to mine, the solution is to weightpaint everything including rigid parts if any (unless you’d prefer using attachments for these). Rigid parts get the full 100% weight to whichever bone it’d be applicable. (e.g shoulderpads could be the shoulder-bone)
Non-rigid parts should be weightpainted more carefully, but most of the time you can automatically weight the right bit of the mesh to the corresponding bones in Blender. If something doesn’t appear normal, just do a few edits in the weightpaint editor until you’re satisfied.

Then finally you can export the rigged mesh. Make sure to export the rig, mesh and the clothing altogether. Also remember to have the T-, A- or I-Pose, whichever you’re using, as ruling animation. Then import the other animation(s) you may have made for the character using the Animation Editor. I’d recommend exporting all the animations as separate .fbx files.

If done successfully-ish you’d get a result like this:

[CartoonBlur (Dunold_Turmp)]

Sorry, What do you mean by “weightpaint” the parts? I’ve only started getting into rigging.

[TheEldritchDreamer]

Weight-painting is a term used in animation to indicate which sections of topology move with the specified bone.
The more weight it’s got, the stronger the affection is.

There are dozens of tutorials out there who are probably able to explain it better than I do.
Perhaps this one might help:

Best of luck!

[CartoonBlur (Dunold_Turmp)]

Hey its me again, I need to know how exactly you attach all the clothing parts since in our game the player should be able to switch them out (within the game).

From what I know I should export the piece of clothing with the whole rig, and just attach it onto the character using the plugin Roblox released.
Is this correct? I need to be able to switch between many male clothing parts and they should move along with the character animations.