Refuge in Audacity

So, recently I've been experimenting with the Skinned Cloth physics component in Unity.

The thing about Skinned Cloth is, it only interacts with the Mesh it's assigned to. If a character is composed of more than one mesh then the cloth will only collide with itself. In this case, if I separated the Seraph (more on her later) into one mesh for her skirt and one for the rest of her body, the skirt would be completely unaffected by the movements of her tail. This is, obviously, unacceptable.

If I make the Seraph a single mesh, I run into a different problem - a problem that I am all too familiar with, thanks to my experience assigning joint weights in Milkshape.

If you look at the screenshot above…well, you might see the problem. How easy do you think it would be to assign the various attributes that govern the behavior of cloth when I've got to select each vertex by hand, with the vertices of the Seraph's body getting in the way? Not very easy at all.

The solution to this problem is actually really simple. It's also something I'd never have the nerve to try a few years ago.

Simply open the file in Maya…

…and move the skirt away from the body.

Adjusting the properties of the skirt is now a piece of cake! Just select the vertices you want to modify and you're in business.

When you're done, return to Maya and move the skirt back into place.

 The great thing about Unity is that it cooperates with Maya. When I was modeling characters for Warcraft III the summer before last, this would not have worked at all. I had to use five different programs on two separate computers to model, texture, animate, and import each character, and these programs did not work together well. Taking a model from one program to the next was a tedious – and frequently irreversible – process. Adding new animations after bringing the model into the game was impossible. Altering geometry after skinning the model was nearly so.

Seeya.