Hey, so i am thinking about making clothes for characters (specifically to go into mixamo fuse).

I keep hearing about marvelous designer, but i wonder if is worthwhile to delve into a new program or to stick with houdini.

Has anyone used both for this? Can anyone comment on this? Thanks.

friends of mine have used it intensively, it's a good tool and just try it out if it fits for your requirement.

btw. they used it with maya

Simulating cloth is a potentially extensive discussion and, like “mandrake0” rightfully says, very much depends on your actual needs - including the question about “looks good” versus “is good” (=physically correct), which almost never aligns perfectly.

You can get quite far with bullet-, physX- or FEM-based cloth solvers, but those tend to be slow for “realistic” cloths (i.e. cloth meshes with lots - and I mean *LOTS* - of polygons). They also come with some built-in limitations (e.g. bullet, if you don't patch it yourself, has hardcoded thresholds for minimum collision distances, so you always need to keep your mesh data within certain size ranges) AND they can suffer from math precision limitations.

There are faster solutions like syFlex that use different mathematical approaches to “solving” cloth collisions. The results, in most cases, neither look realistic nor are they physically correct or even plausible, but thanks to the huge performance advantage you are at more freedom to play around until you hit just the sweet spot of “that's the looks I want, forget about reality”.

MD is a specilized tool that *only* does cloth simulation - and in that it is almost unequaled. Like most specialized tools it is costly, but if you need “very good looking, almost really realistic” cloth, there currently isn't much that would get you around it. Well, true, there *are* other specialized tools (as far as I know some cloth solvers are getting ported to Houdini right now), but those too are costly. For a reason.

In the end it boils down to: What's your budget, what's your need and how much time do you have to wait for the solver to do its thing? You can get *pretty* far with the cheapest version (I have done cloth simulations using bullet for a feature film, unfortunately I did not get paid for the time spent for doing that) …

Marc

Basically, im just doing indie video game stuff with limited budget.

Doesnt have to be realistic at all, just has to “look cool” and not be expensive once the normal maps are baked.

I will have a look at syflex. I like that it plugs into houdini and fast sounds wonderful.

The more i can do in houdini, the happier i feel on the inside.

check out Carbon, it was insanely fast testing it:

http://www.numerion-software.com/index.php/carbon-plugins/carbon-cloth/advanced-features/fashion [numerion-software.com]

you could probably get a demo if you email them

We use MD for the cloth design and look dev but the simulation is handled with low resolution versions inside other packages (houdini next).
Mostly due to workflow