Clothing Rig/Sim (for crowds)

[Totheroo]

I am building out a general crowd system with humans generated from the Mixamo/Adobe Fuse application. The clothing is not hollow, the tops/bottoms/ends are capped. (this would be obnoxious to correct for nCloth/Bifrost simulations and I’d really like to avoid simming anyways). The end product should be an FBX containing the bones/geo/animation.

Using the mGear biped template, with no modifications. ngSkinTools for skin binding.

The base human geometry came out pretty good, but needed some BlendShapes to fix for volume loss and creases/clipping.

I have a handful of characters to get through, with variations in clothing (shorts/jeans/khakis/etc). Each one has these penetration and crease issues.

I’d like to not get stuck in BlendShape land for hours and hours.

The Warp Deformer works pretty well as a starting point, but has a long winded process of duplicating the rig/geo, adding the deformer, bake deformer to skin weights, and still requires some BlendShapes to finish off.

I’m considering adding gimmick joints for the shoulders, elbows, & knees and RBF. I would also have to create a generic rig for the pants/shorts, but I wonder if this is overkill?

If anyone has any suggestions, I’m interested in workflows for how to get through this clothing task without going crazy.

[Sam_Noskov]

Hey there!
I think you had a good guess there with gimmick joints and RBF as those can fix volume loss and the weight data can be transferred to clothing meshes as well. Although skinning gimmick joints and setting up correct RBF data might take some time, the result would be quite rewarding as all your meshes would share the same weights and that just might solve clipping issues. Other than that I’m not sure what else you could do.
Making separate corrective blendshapes for each clothing is overkill for sure lol.

That said, are you limited to having only 1 humanoid mesh? You could actually split the humanoid mesh into parts (torso/legs/hands/head etc) and just combine it with clothing so that there’s nothing that clips with clothing meshes. A lot of games with character customization work that way as far as I know.