A while back I found a link to a Blender tutorial (somewhere on the forum) for creating Custom Cloth. The general gist was to take the custom clothing mesh, parent it to the iClone figure armature, transfer weights from CC Body to the custom cloth, export as FBX and import into Character Creator.

I followed this tutorial and managed to create some custom cloth bases. However, I ran into a problem when creating skirts and/or dresses because the transfer of the weight mapping from the CC Body would cause the bottom portion of the cloth to act like pants instead of a skirt/dress. I inquired about this on the forum and my conclusion was confirmed: I needed to modify the weight maps for the shirt/dress portion to correct the behavior.

I studied how to do this in Blender and discovered that it wasn't too hard. At least the process of editing the weight maps was not difficult but painting it would be more difficult.

As I understand it, weight maps just indicate how much areas of the mesh (cloth) bends/stretches to follow bending of the armature bones. An area of 0% (for any given bone) means the mesh remains static when the bone is bent. An area of 100% (for any given bone) means that area of the mesh fully follows the bending of that bone. However, all of this is relative to the bending of bones of the parent armature and in no way connected to a physical point in space. Thus if the armature position is changed, it has not effect on the mesh - only bending of the armature bones causes mesh bending/stretching according to the weight paint.

As a starting point, I wanted to take the default CC Dress and change the weight maps so that the skirt portion would have 0% weight mapping. I realize this would not be correct mapping for a dress but I just wanted to try that as a starting point. As I understood weight mapping, this should have created a static skirt which would not be affected by bending bones (e.g. character walking). I imagined this would probably generate legs that go right through the cloth since they would have no effect of the skirt portion of the dress.

What I got instead was very unexpected...When I placed the dress on a character in iClone and had the character walk, parts of the dress seemed to stick to the character/dress's initial location while the rest of the dress moved with the character. See below video. As far as I understand, no matter what kind of a weight map is applied, it should never cause such a "sticky situation". In the video I have hidden the character mesh so that the dress itself is more visible.

Can anyone suggest what is going on here and why I am not getting the result I expected?

  

On a related note, I recall that when weight painting the cloth in Blender, I had to create Empty Weight Groups and then transfer the Weight Maps from CC Body to the cloth. I recall Blender's Automatic Weight Map option did not work (i.e. created an FBX file that could not be imported into CC). Is there any way to get around this? (i.e. be able to use the Blender Automatic Weight Mapping as a starting point) 



"We often compare ourselves to the U.S. and often they come out the best, but they only have the right to bear arms while we have the right to bare breasts"
Bowser and Blue, Busting The Breast