Creating cloth

In this tutorial you will learn how to create/change cloth. You will also learn how to use XStoryPlayer for storing cloth states.

400px

Steps

1. Copy the /sources/scenes for this tutorial from the 'Tutorial resource pack' to the /pack/pack_adbucted/sources directory.
   The files contains the textures and maya cloth meshes for the Saiko (Alien) character.
   Open the body.ma file in Maya. Also open the body.ini file in a text editor.
   
2. A cloth needs two meshes to work. A bind-mesh that contains the actual pattern of the cloth. If we change this mesh the shape of the cloth is changed.
   Then there is also a render-mesh that is used for rendering the cloth. It has a higher sub-division level for more detail.
   The dress for example has bind-mesh "dressBindShape" and render-mesh "dressShape".
   The render-mesh needs to be positioned around the character so it does not intersect.
3. In this tutorial we want to change the shape of the dress a bit. We can use the bind-mesh for that.
   Change the "dressBindShape" so it looks somewhat like this:
   
   Save the body.ma file. Add the maya convert code to the start.ini of the filemaker:
   

   Maya scene
   {
     src_path = "[SOURCES]";
     run_path = "[RUNTIME]";
    
     in_file  = "[SOURCES]scenes/character6_cloth/body.ma";
   }

   Run the filemaker and the new cloth objects should be created in the /scenes/character6 directory.

4. We can use XStoryPlayer to view and re-position the newly created dress.
   Edit the settings.ini like this:
   

   runtime
   {
     start_mode   = TEST; // Start test mode of XStoryPlayer
    
     debug_sys    = BASIC;
     debug_render = NONE;
     debug_phys   = NONE;
     debug_brain  = ENABLED;
    
     pack2        = "pack/pack_abducted"; // Use this directory as source as well
    
     save_key     = "";
   }

</ol>