Correctly appending a simple shirt to a character in Blender

[taddmencer]

Perhaps this isn't the best forum for the topic, but perhaps it is ...

BACKSTORY
I'm working on a graphic novel that's years in the writings, dreaming and planning. I've tried several CG packages and, after consideration (price, quality, speed, etc) to use makeHuman and Blender as my software of choice. They're great, love them, moving in with them and putting my pictures on their mantle.

My experience in Blender is not what I would call 'expert'. At all. I can model and sculpt, eh, decent enough. But the makeHuman software presented a solution to 'speed' by creating great humans that are posable and importable to Blender. Blender is great for rendering, lighting, scene layout and over-all flexibility.

Now, I've gotten hair going well enough, and clothing I've modeled some 'tester' cloths and parent them to the character's armature and, sure enough, the shirt follows the arm bend .... for the most part.

Here is the settings in the panel for the shirt, parented to the character's armature.



And here is the arm bent - not even a lot - to show how badly the shirt is bending into the character




And just to answer any extra questions, here is the shirt's simple topology

[rfairhurst]

MY experience is that this is what you get if you just use armature in Blender with mesh clothes. I use MakeClothes to build my clothes. They can be used in MH on the character. The key difference between MH clothes and your clothes are invisible helper objects within MH that keep the clothes and body separated. The helpers include tights (used for shirts and pants and dress tops), a skirt (used for skirts and dress bottoms) and hair (self explanatory).

MakeClothes is tricky and the blogs are not up to date for the SVN version at all. MH a7 is somewhat documented correctly, but there are some tricks that I use to get better results. My experience for best results is to duplicate the helper object(s) as separate object(s) and then modify it/them to create my clothes (move, and delete verts, but never add verts). A few of my recent posts in the Newbies forum have hyperlinks to the blogs and gave additional procedures that got some newbies past the glitches not mentioned in the blogs. Here is my most recent post on the subject: http://www.makehuman.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=9335

Other posts that may help are: http://www.makehuman.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=9142

If you use this procedure, I would appreciate feedback on what steps worked for you to get your results. I am a help writer for MH now and am trying to make sure the steps work for more than myself before updating and revising this topic.

[taddmencer]

Thanks rfairhurst - I looked into makeClothing and as you said, they seem to be tricky and not terribly up to day on the documentation.

I'll check out the links provided and, if all works out, be back with a happy dance and a post of success!

Thanks!

[rfairhurst]

Thanks rfairhurst - I looked into makeClothing and as you said, they seem to be tricky and not terribly up to day on the documentation.

I'll check out the links provided and, if all works out, be back with a happy dance and a post of success!

Thanks!

If you are using an MH a7 mesh, be sure to use the MH a7 MakeTarget. SVN is targeting a different mesh.