Non scaling "Hard" items in make clothes

[tre4bax]

Hi there.

I've just starting to play with making clothes. It is really easy and quick to model close fitting clothes and I've done a few other things. What I cannot figure out is how to make items that either do not scale at all or scale only in one direction.

For example suppose you are implementing a belt. This would stay the same width for multiple sizes of people however its length would alter so that wider people could wear it. If you model this how to you get it to fit progressively fatter people without actually scaling wider if the person becomes taller as well as fatter. Similarly what if you want to implement something that never scales for example badge. This wants to stay in roughly the same place on the clothing, however it should not get bigger or smaller as the person does.

I've understood "*" vertex groups will scale evenly (through the sword demo). What I am looking for is no scale at all. i.e. a sword that will always be carried in a hand that is large on a small character and small on a large character etc.

Is this possible? Or something on the todo list?

Trevor

[jwc]

A non-scaling item does not need to be made using make clothes.
Simply create the object and parent it to the appropriate location on your human model using your 3D modeling program. Then as the model moves, the object will follow, for example a sword parented to the palm of a hand.

A 1-d scaling item is trickier.
The 3 vertices picked for the "*" items establish the item scaling.
When configuring the human model in makehuman, these 3 vertices change relative locations, and a similar change is applied to the item.

I have not tried this, but if you were to use three planar vertices, the item should (in theory) change only in one dimension.

In real usage, I suspect a belt would not work well like this because as the model's girth changed between slender to stout, the 3 points would not provide enough information to keep the belt positioned next to, and just outside, the pants/skin.

For small items of jewelry like a bracelet this could be an option, taking care to pick vertices where the item would contact the model in the final pose.

[tre4bax]

Thanks JWC.

That's roughly what I thought. I'd wanted to model the full characters in Makehuman and just export rather than add supplementary modelling within blender or unity. It seemed to me that the system might support this, that maybe there were some non scaling nodes you could tie to or something in the core of the human model. I've tried your solution and it does minimise the distortion. It is difficult to know how the vertices will distorted if the character is changed though so I will keep playing this way. Likelihood is that the amount of body change should not introduce that much difference in size. I guess I build the models and see how they look

Might be an idea for the future of Makehuman though to allow items that scale in restricted ways and not at all, just to make the set complete.