Posted on April 29, 2018, 2:33 p.m. by pharah-best-girl • Last updated on Dec. 26, 2022, 7 p.m.
Here’s the method I use to attach clothes to a rigged model. The result might not be as polished as I would normally want, but it will be enough to illustrate the point.
There are 2 parts to this process:
For the sake of the example I will use this Cassie outfit from LordAardvark and my Pharah model. This is a good example of an outfit as it includes both loose fitting and tight fitting items (the jacket and pants respectively) which you might need to approach differently.
You can use this tutorial to import models from Source FilmMaker.
You’ll most likely get some clipping (like the pants in this case) or poor fitting (like the jacket)
Next, you’ll need to make the clothes fit nicely over the body
Use the proportional editing mode to make things easier. You should obviously leave a bit of room between the mesh of the jacket and the body, in this case.
This was the easy part, now comes the hard one: attaching a tight fitting piece of clothing. You can obviously do the same as above and manually edit the vertices, but that would be too time consuming, What you should now is use the Shrinkwrap modifier
and give it a name, I will call it “fitting” in this example. You’ll need to use this in conjunction with the Shrinkwrap modifier
With these options selected it would look like nothing has changed. That’s ok :)
and start painting around the areas where the pants don’t fit the body
You might be tempted to paint the whole mesh red but I would advise against it. Meshes might have details such as small creases or indentations that you would lose (would get flattened) when painted over. That’s why you should paint over as little as possible.
This should eliminate the last of the overlapping parts.
When everything looks good you should Apply the Shrinkwrap modifier, otherwise you might run into problems when posing.
Now that your clothes fit nicely over the body, it’s time to rig them.
Then press Ctrl + P to set the rig as parent to the jacket. In the dropdown menu select “Armature Deform (with Empty groups)”
Now the jacket is connected to the rig, but it has no vertex (deformation) info.
Then press the “Generate Data Layers” button. This will copy all the vertex groups from the body. At this point you might as well press the Apply button on the DataTransfer modifier
Now your jacket should be rigged.
Congratulations. you now have a fully rigged outfit. Give yourself a cookie.
As you might notice the end result is not perfect. This solution is meant to take you like 95% of the way, and the rest 5% will be polishing which you can do by editing the meshes some more, changing the weight painting and so on.
The method above might increase your file size a bit since it adds a lot of unneeded vertex groups on the cloths (such as vertex groups copied from the face). To remove them you can use this script.
Have fun rigging ;)