Simulation - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 257

When you use a cloth simulation on a character for clothing, there will be instances when the cloth collision
does not work as well as you would like, causing the character's underlying body to show through. In Figure
14.29, the Beast's body is showing through a tank top he decided to wear to protect his delicate skin from the
blazing sun. The solution to this problem is to assign any “covered” areas of the skin with another material
that has been made completely nonreactive to rendering. Figure 14.30 shows such a material. The key parts
are Alpha 0.0 , Ztransp , and Shadeless , with Traceable and Shadbuf disabled, which make it completely

unreactive to light, shadows, or rendering. This way, even if a portion of the body accidentally pokes through
the clothing slightly, it will not render.

Skin showing
through shirt

Figure 14.29 The Beast's body showing through his shirt in the interface, but not in the render

Figure 14.30 A material for bodies

A cloth simulation will not necessarily be the best solution for your character. Like other physical simulations,
it can be tough to manage and to force it to do exactly what your shot requires. If you've been working with
a cloth simulation and fi nd that it just will not “behave,” you will have to simply model the clothing and
deform it as a part of the body. With the failure of the cloth simulation for the mother's skirt in The Beast ,
this was the method that was used throughout the production. The clothing was simply a part of the charac-
ter, deforming with the regular rigging tools. Fortunately, the use of the Mesh Deform modifi er gives signifi -
cantly better results for prewrinkled clothing like the Beast's diaper than previous methods.