Clothing simulation: for artist or programmers?

[manel]

Hello, I've just seen this link: http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=66096

An application for trying on garments, and the clothing simulation is amazing. In this particular case, were that clothes animated by using some modelling software (blender, 3ds, maya)? or this kind of simulation is a matter of an physic's engine used by a programmer?

Thanks.

[duststorm]

That demo you linked to uses realtime cloth physics simulation. Probably something like Shroud for Ogre.
The clothes themselves are probably modeled by artists in a 3D program like blender or max, and only a small part of dresses is simulated realtime.

If you want to "bake" an animation using cloth simulation, I believe that is possible in blender (maybe other tools too). The idea is you rig a cloth to a body and run the simulation while recording the simulated cloth as a keyframed animation.
Of course a recorded animation cannot react dynamically to motions.

[manel]

thanks duststorm. Therefore, an artist can achieve those effects by using Shroud for Ogre or, for example, Nvidia's APEX clothing ( http://developer.nvidia.com/apex-clothing ), right?
Thus, the programmer just has to move the skeleton, and garments will react/follow its movements. Am I right?

So, regarding the video a linked to, maybe the programmer didn't have to apply physics on the dresses, but it was an artist's work.

What I'm trying to unsderstand is the border between programmers and artists in order to produce fast animated characters. I think, as programmer, I could do a ragdoll with cylinders and make cloth simulations on top of it by using Physx, but I wouldn't know how to apply it on bone-controlled characters...

[manel]

Any thoughts?

I guess programmers don't usually do that sort of physical clothing simulations in video-game studios, right?

[LiMuBei]

I would say the video is 100% physics simulation, no animation involved. If you're interested in cloth simulation for video games, you should look for some making-ofs of the Batman Arkham games. I remember reading one where they explained how they did the cape (a blend of physics and animation).

I think you can go with simulation and a rag doll, if you let the bones of the animation rig control your rag doll. Havok also has some information on this, I think for non commercial stuff you can use it for free if you want to play around with it.