I've looked around, but I haven't seen anything else in either the message boards or tutorials on what I am trying to do...so here goes. I have an animated scene that I am working on, and I expected it to be a difficult scene to animate, but I figured I could work it out. After spending most of last night on it, I figure I'd better check to see if anyone else has any solutions that I might try, before I spend tonight doing exactly the same thing to no avail. I wish I could post some screen shots...but the scene I'm working on is at home. Maybe tonight I can do that. In the meantime, I'm working on a scene where a character is opening a closet, and inside the closet, he has a wardrobe of clothes hanging on clothes hangers...okay, so far so good. He pulls two shirts out of the closet, and I have that shot pretty well done. I just used Michael's Dress shirt and parented it to the hanger, then animated it. No dynamic cloth yet, and there is enough distance from the camera that it is convincing. The real trouble comes in the next shot, when I zoom in close to the character. I want him to hold up the two shirts in front of him, with the shirts draped over his chest, as he is looking down at them. I've tried several different methods, but every time I try to use dynamic cloth, things start to get a bit sticky. I can't seem to get it to behave like I want. The first thing I tried was to just clothify the shirt hanging on the hanger, piece by piece...and setting it to collide with both the hanger, and the character holding the hanger...but when I tried to calculate the drape, it took hours, and then got hung up. No surprise there, really. The next thing I tried was to export the shirt, and then re-import it as a solid obj prop, parenting it to the hanger and then clothifying it (again with the same collisions)...but the effect was nearly the same. Next, I tried setting it to only collide with the hanger, and not the character. Just to see if things went any smoother. Nope. Finally, I determined that the Michael Dress shirt may simply have too many poly's, or may not be set up to do what I wanted...so I treid something else that I was sure would work. I brought in the P5 fleece and just gave it the same materials as the shirt that I originally had been using, and I set it up so that it would hang on the hanger. Again I set the collisions to just the hanger and the character. This time the results were a little more favorable, but no matter what settings I tried under the dynamics controls, the shirt started to break up into a bit of a mess when it hung from the hanger. I've been leaning towards, turning the fold resistance and cloth density up...but that hasn't really alleviated the problem. I've also tried various other combinations, using the Additional Cloth Collision Options. So far, I haven't come up with anything that looks usable. I've used dynamic cloth before, so I'm no stranger to it, though I have not used it extensively. Like I say, when I get home tonight, I can post a few screen shots, but in the meantime, I thought I'd throw this out here, and see if anyone can help me to find a good solution. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks again!

I would go about it this way:-

I'd prepare the shirt and the hanger by importing the shirt OBJ and positioning it over the hanger. I would not want the hanger to be too thin. Possibly use a fat rounded top one then swop it for a wire one. Do a short simulation to allow it to fall into place. An alternative would be to pose the shirt figure over the hanger, position the sleeves, zScale the figure and export the OBJ. Now use this flattened OBJ as before to finish off the draping. Do not try to clothify a figure it will not work. When you are happy with the result export the shirt and hanger as one OBJ (shirt+hanger.obj)

For the animation with the figure, import the shirt+hanger.obj. Create the animation considering the hanger only, ignore what the shirt does at this stage. Now into the cloth room, clothify the shirt+hanger setting it to collide with the figure. Next set the hanger material to be in the choreographed cloth group. In this way it will moves as per your animation and not be deformed. The shirt should drape over the figure.

I hope :)

Good luck

Ah, very cool. Thanks Phil. I'll definitely try this when I get home :D That was exactly what I was hoping for. If it wouldn't be too much trouble, could you explain a bit more about choreographed cloth groups? I've got the manual sitting here in front of me, and I keep reading the short entry concerning this, but I can't seem to get my brain around how cloth groups work. I'm sure if I sit down and experiment, I can probably get it. Maybe I should still go back and re-read the chapter. Dynamic cloth is sooo cool, it's just hard to get used to the way it works. Thanks again for all the help.