Cloth Creation

We now start to create the cloth and collider parts of the rig. This rig will only have one collider which will be the body and one cloth object which will be the shorts. Cloth is created by simply selecting the desired geometry and clicking create nCloth. When making sim rigs we need more control over the cloth object itself. The option for sim rigs is World Space Output.

Selecting World Space Output will give you this result. Maya creates a new input object, a cloth object and finally an output object. The output object is the original geo we had selected when we created the cloth object.

Keeping the naming convention going, I add a different suffix to each of the newly created objects which will not only make it easier to work with but also lends it to a simple wildcard selection, e.g. *CLTH will select all the cloth objects in the scene. The caveat here is that will be working for the majority of the time with a referenced rig so the wildcard selection will need to be updated to *:*CLTH to account for the namespace. Finally I group all the objects together.

When using World Space Output you’ll notice the input object looks similar to a group, this is because Maya sets the cloth input mesh to Current Mesh. To be able to manipulate the Input Mesh we need to switch it to display Input Mesh, this will essentially swap the input and output. This is very useful as we need to connect the shorts_simIN_INPUT to the shorts_CtA geo. The input mesh is static, often referred to as a Rest Shape, the blendshape connection works in a very similar way to Input Attract in the cloth settings.

The cloth needs something to react with in the rig, we need to turn the body geometry into a collision object or a Passive Collider. This is a straight forward operation, the result gives you a nRigid1 object and a bunch of settings to noodle. I tidy this up using my naming convention. The body_simIN_col will be the visual interpretation of the collision object but the body_simIN_COL is the genuine object. I do this because the collision object often requires modifications.