Cloth animation

[Sarsour]

Hey guys, Im in the process of working on my graduation film which will be animated in SFM.
I'm worried about the scenes where the character is in bed and needs to be covered by some cloth cover. I'm using Blender, and Im not sure how Im gona go about doing this cloth animation
Some say you can't export vertex animation and some claim now you can, and some use actual simulated cloth. Someone told me I should use maya 2012 because thats the version valve use for their source engine

here are some demonstrations I found on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZZ8xH_nvX0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBpCpsMCxLw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vASvU5v05wI


any suggestions to how this can be done?

[Sarsour]

Just found this :https://github.com/btdavis/sfmphys
but whats not clear is, How do I create my own custom cloth object to use in this simulation?
bones on all the verticies ?

[R234]

It says there's an example cloth model included in the /usermod/models/narry/ folder, maybe you'd get your answer from that?

[Sarsour]

Yeah. but I wanna know how to create those files in Blender before compiling them... I'd have to decompile that example model but that might not retain all the information about how it was modelled in the first place.

[raptornx01]

why not just take the existing cloth model and reskin it? IE just changing the VTF texture file.

[Sarsour]

Originally posted by raptornx01:

why not just take the existing cloth model and reskin it? IE just changing the VTF texture file.

I thought about that, but what if I need to resize/reshape it.

[Sarsour]

Sorry I'm being a nag... I guess I will have to figure it out myself... One thing, would you know if I'd have to create a phys model for my custom model if I want the cloth to react to the model (I guess this is rather obvious, but wanted to make sure)

[Pte Jack]

Did you see this?? http://youtu.be/AxK6saPpbW8

Here's another site with some tutorials http://www.youtube.com/user/TheDisabledLogic/videos.

[Pte Jack]

The problem with this is that the script is still in the development stage, there aren't many good tutorials out there as everyone is still in the phase of testing it to see what it will actually do.

[raptornx01]

I have this that I did, but it's not much

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHfEP0UVkzQ

And another time I was trying to push it to see how many models it could handle. See if I could fill up a container with smaller models (and I had planned to make a vid showing a character swimming through it, ala ducktales). the render time (or simulation time, whatever) goes up exponentially as you add models. I think I got to like 2000 before sfm crashed.

which is probably just my system. that bricks demonstration vid had 3,500 models.

Though before it crashed it was starting to look really good. the objects, which were round, moved and piled up very convincingly.

[76561198128290114]

Well, since steam keeps being a real **** to me lately and now won't let me create topics. giving me some bull**** error "There was an error creating a new topic: You've been posting too frequently, and can't make another post right now" despite the fact i never created a topic with this account I had to create because the ****s banned me for some reason. I guess i'll post this here.

The cloth model won't accept the rig for some reason. I go to attach the rig and nothing happens.

[Pte Jack]

I raised a ticket onthe create a guide thing and it got closed before i had a chance to respond to their questions.

[76561198128290114]

You can reopen it and respond.

I tried that when i was asking about clearing my cloud data and they just gave me the brush off. Told them it wasn't about making custom content, it was about having the cloud saying I have data when i don't. They just said "we don't give technical support for source filmmaker"

Ofcourse i'm like WTF? It's about the steam cloud, not SFM.

I dunno, some weird **** has been going on with them lately. I think they are trying to drive me away.

[76561198128290114]

still can't create a topic.....

came across this site.

{LINK REMOVED}http://ponylumen.net/

it's a pony creator site that uses the sfm/gmod models as a base. though the actual files are collada. was curious if there was a way to convert models created there into sfm.

[Pte Jack]

If they aren't in Valve format, you have to import the dae (collada) into Blender... Resize if required then export to dmx/smd. Create a qc and compile...

[Pte Jack]

I don't see a collada download button, All I see is a PNG downloader... I understand that this site saves something to something to the client, but I can't find where that is.