I am trying to set up a game where the character can switch it’s clothing.
I’m trying to use the set master pose in blueprints for this. I’ve designed the character in ZBrush and rigged and animated it in Mixamo.
The body is being used as the master. I took the body’s skeleton and did a basic smooth bind on the gloves and pants in Maya and then imported them into UE4. In the import process I selected to use the body’s skeleton.
Hello Wmufson, I think that your problem is that you are using a very thin mesh compared to body mesh, when you anime your body and the skeleton deforms both meshes, as they are so close, you have problems with overlapping.
One solution could be making the wear bigger. But if you cant or just dont want to do it, you can separate the body itself, having 1 mesh for the legs that you set to another mesh master component, then, you canghe the whole mesh regarding to the body legs with another containing the body legs +pants.
Thanks for the response. I tried making the gloves bigger (around two times thicker) yet the issue is unfortunately still there. Also, I’m unsure breaking it up is going to work for what I want to do because the character’s will be able to add way more stuff than just one piece of clothing per body part (i.e. cape, shirt, and jacket for the body).
The only way to create clothing which is that tight on the character, without any penetration, is to use identical topology. So basically duplicate the body mesh and push out the normals a bit to make the pants. If you’re crafty (using 3dsmax) you can do it without losing the original weighting. I don’t know how that works in Maya.
In the case where the clothing or armor meshes don’t share the same topology as the underlying body mesh, and in the case where it’s just a smooth binded skin, you will never avoid any penetration between the two. They don’t bend at the same points and they don’t even bend the same amounts in the same general areas. It’s like distinguishing two clouds that are in the same spot…not really two anymore. It all just turns into a blending mess and fixing one breaks the other for an eternity to come.
You only have two options and that is to swap or hide the underlying body geometry that the pants would cover. I prefer to hide the geometry as it’s less asset management.
I show how you can achieve it here, but for a different purpose (severing limbs)
I made the clothing in Zbrush by copying the topology of the body mesh. When moving, the clothing does seem to move very close to exactly the same as the underlying mesh but clips through some of the time.
Unfortunately in this case the topology has to be pretty much identical and skinned exactly the same way as the original faces. It can be done np, but you have to be careful because you will lose the concurrency between the body and the clothing if you reapply an automatic skin-weighting algorithm to either one of them. If there’s a way to directly copy and paste the skin weights onto the clothing from the body, that would be optimal. Each matching vertex needs to be taking on the same exact influences from the bones…down to the .001 to avoid any slip between vert positions that will show passthrough when triangulated edges don’t align.
how did you accomplish that - copying the weights?
Edit* I came up with my own workaround (actually from PyroDev’s video)… i just made the clothes thicker in blender by adding ontop of the clothes… its not thick enough to notice but thick enough that the body wont clip… so… here is the link btw… : Battle Royal Series - Character Replicated [UE4] - YouTube
