Once again I’m going to attempt to continue my work on a Cloth plugin for Carrara and release a new version.

I’ve been working on and off on this project for the last few years (mostly off)…

Where I left off in 2011 the released plugin worked with fast primitive draping and collisions.  These results were very reliable for a proxy figure covered with cylinders, spheres and capsules, also with floors, seats and stairs using scaled cubes and planes.  The problem was that the underlying primitive shapes would show through.

I had higher hopes for the Bullet Softbody physics simulator added to Carrara 8 but I’ve never been able to get any sort of reliable results from it to match my own amateurish attempt.  I also held out working on my own code for the release of a stable version of Carrara 8.5.

I picked up the project again in early 2013 and tried out lots of ideas but the best results started to come from testing the collision of thick vertices against facets.  I then realized that the flaw in this simple method was that too many face hits were occurring and that I needed to find the best surface collision.  It was at the corners or bumps, such as a knee, that things were obviously going wrong.

Cloth Simulation

This simulation uses code that treats all of the possible detected collisions as though they were part of a convex surface.  The figure uses a DAZ Genesis character with the model’s subdivision level set to 0, which gives a low and manageable polygon count.

Animations were okay but rippled and twitched over the mesh surface where they would slide smoothly over a primitive volume.  Once I started to get results like the above for still images I was already exceeding my own demands, but I wanted to keep trying to push it just that bit further.