What is simulation in clothing?
TL;DRClothing simulation places rows of joints through dresses and jackets so the engine simulates collision and movement, including floating in zero G, with a Maya tool to set them up.
So imagine you have dresses or skirts, anything, long jackets. We can either do vertex animation or bone animation, but basically what we're going to do, for the sake of, I guess, the cost of processing power, we put rows of joints down these jackets or dresses and then the engine will simulate how they collide with the body, how they rotate, and then they basically just do their thing and they simulate. They'll fall around the collision meshes and then in zero G they'll interpret the lack of gravity and sort of just float in place, that kind of thing. Actually, I'm sure Riggs can go into the whole thing on simulation too.
Yeah, we use joint-based simulation at the moment. It's exactly like he says: draw basically the skirt or dress as joints and then set up a bunch of values. A lot of math, a lot of values, a lot of setting stuff up. We've also set up a tool for setting up dresses in Maya to make it a lot easier for these guys, because otherwise you have to literally place 10 joints, 20 joints around, manually place them all. So this does it all for them automatically. The next step for that tool is, Maya has the same types of simulation stuff in it, so again, to try to make the digital content side the same as the engine side, we would try to make it simulate in Maya and then export those settings to get a good baseline. And then in engine, obviously, it's always going to be a little bit different because the math that's being done behind the scenes is different. So then we would tweak it a little bit in engine to make it better.