Animating cloth (skirt in this case) really hard?

[DeadlyNinja]

Recently, people wondered why Nintendo didn't put Peach into NSMBW, and they response was that they had trouble animating Peach's skirt. Today, there's another interview about Zelda Spirit Tracks for the DS, and they said one of the reasons why Zelda's a ghost is because the skirt would cause issues.

"People on the staff have wanted to have Zelda in the game for ages, but if we did that, then her skirt becomes an issue. Having girls in dresses in an action game is kind of hard to deal with. That's how we got the idea of having her body stolen and her soul going inside Phantom Guardians." - Eiji Aonuma

My first thought was the Wii's lack of vertex shader, and the same is even more true for the DS. Is it really the lack of raw horse power that's preventing, or could it be done if they really put their mind to it?

Peach and Zelda both wear skirts in SSBB/M and those seem to work well, but they were really stiff -- like they were made of plastic or something. I think the same is even true for the flag in Company of Heroes (I only have the regular version with DX9). My guess is these games probably aren't what Nintendo had in mind when they think skirt animation. Come to think of it, are there any examples of animated skirts on the PS3/360?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Cloth animation comes with lots of clipping and collision issues, and is very processor intensive, at least in conventional solvers. I don't know what realtime hacks there are. It's generally something avoided. I know of two titles with it. the first is "Untold Legends : The Embarassingly Poor and Miserable Game" on PS3. They were tooting their cloth physics and "Power Of The Cell!!!" for capes. It's fairly weak, as though the capes have no weight. The other title is "Justice League Heroes" on PS2 and XB. This also has animated cloth dynamics, which looks very good, although I don't think they are true physics as there's something of a repetition in animation.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

I'll try to youtube some videos of Justice League Heroes to take a look. Which characters used cloth dynamics in the game?

It's fairly weak, as though the capes have no weight.

Would it by any chance look something like this:

This is the best example I know of with cloth dynamics in a Wii game. It's not very good, but this is by Intelligent Systems, one of Nintendo's weaker departments in terms of graphical know how.

Now that I think about it, does this mean the cinemas in Super Mario Galaxy are pre-rendered? I remember seeing a very realistically animated flag on Bowser's ship during the game's intro cinema.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Here's Dark Kingdom

What you can't see there is the stretching of the cape that happened, IIRC. Although I try not to recall correctly with this game!

Here's JLH

You see some of the cape goodness at 1 minute in.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

The Untold Legend video looks pretty amazing if you ask me. It is light, but it's 1000x more amazing than anything I've ever seen. The cloth physics I mean. I don't know anything about the actual game. The JLH one is kinda hard to see. It flashes by way too quickly.

My guess is Nintendo had Untold Legends kind of cloth in mind when rendering Zelda/Peach's skirt, and not Fire Emblem. Is it safe to assume that animating a skirt where cloth surrounds someone from all sides is going to be easier to animate than a cape?

 

[Karamazov]

it's a tech demo but may come in future games in near future

 

[xatnys]

Is this a graphics issue? I thought the trouble when animating skirts, at least with Nintendo, is that they want to avoid upskirt shots. Programming skirt behavior has been done before; I doubt it would be so strenuous to achieve especially in NSMBW.

 

[archangelmorph]

Have you seen Ezio's cloak on Assassin's Creed II?

 

[link2877]

Miyamoto seemed to be joking when he said this about NSMB Wii. So this might just be a running inside joke with Nintendo. I mean both the games aren't made in the realistic style, so these no need for the skirts to look or move realistically. Not to mention spirit tracks is 90% of the time a top down view, so it's not like you'd even be able to tell that it's even their; with Zelda herself only being in about 40% of the game.

 

[DRS]

RE4 has some good looking animated curtains.

 

[London Geezer]

Not that i've played many, but on most games and demos i've played on PS3 there is some kind of cloth physics. When they don't know how to use it on characters, i see that they use it on flags, banners, curtains... almost like they have spare performance they want to use up. Only they don't, or the framerate wouldn't fluctuate like it usually does, but i digress.

I found that the cloth animations (on top of the character modelling and animation themselves) on Top Spin 3 were quite realistic - even though there were some very entertaining bugs which occurred rarely - like half of a t-shirt or a skirt disappearing... I do find TS3 a very, very pretty and polished game.

The banners and curtains on Killzone 2 were very realistic to my out-of-training eye. Even though that might have been easier because they didn't have to interact with anything, they were just there, looking pretty.

 

[Delta9]

The banners and curtains on Killzone 2 were very realistic to my out-of-training eye. Even though that might have been easier because they didn't have to interact with anything, they were just there, looking pretty.

You could shoot some of the banners with a rocket and they would set on fire and burn up.

 

[Neb]

It's present in lots of games even from lastgen and unless you can interact with it it probably is just animated. Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, FC and more games with interaction, racing games with animated cloth. This gen DIRT games, GRID, those mentioned here and others. Waving flags, banners, drapes etc. Both with and without phsyics or perhaps just collision detection.

 

[nightshade]

Well Batman had nice cape in Arkham Asylum.

 

[London Geezer]

You could shoot some of the banners with a rocket and they would set on fire and burn up.

And waste a whole, very valuable rocket?!!!! you crazy!!!?? you get, like, 3 and a half in the whole game

 

[assen]

Well Batman had nice cape in Arkham Asylum.

Yep, and in some kind of postmortem they said it was a source of many problems, and took lots of tweaking to get right.

 

[nintenho]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFio7wMTQ2k

mirror's edge on PC went a little crazy with cloth physics if you turned on physx. None of it was on character clothing afaik but it moved and teared realistically.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Actually Assassin's Creed 2 seemed like some sort of a hybrid approach to me. Sometimes the cape had dynamics, but sometimes it behaved like it was manual keyframe animation, ie. when Ezio pulls the cape on himself to cover up his arm while standing. It did show some stretching in some cases, too.

I think they have a few bones that they can animate with both dynamics and manual animation, and blend between the two.


The general trouble with clothing like skirts, BTW, is that it has to potentially collide with a lot of objects. All the limbs of the character, any weapon equipped, enemies the player interacts with, the level itself, etc. etc. Whereas a simple flag only needs a wind force and that's it - far, far less possible causes of trouble.

 

[Sigfried1977]

Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 actually had some nice cloth physics. Hard to notice because the other more obvious physics can be a little distracting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGCLGEzEFyg&feature=related

 

[DeadlyNinja]

Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 actually had some nice cloth physics. Hard to notice because the other more obvious physics can be a little distracting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGCLGEzEFyg&feature=related

I'm pretty sure those aren't cloths...

But seriously, getting back to the point, SSBM and SSBB had characters with skirts and I seriously doubt they used any physics for that. They're work well enough for the console, I don't see where they couldn't have just kept it like that. Peach wouldn't be doing high flying kicks in NSMBW anyway.

Unless Nintendo had really ambitious vision of how the skirt behaves and would rather not have it instead of being half assed.