How will he look in his coat on a horse?
This is a follow on from my previous post about making a long coat.
I noticed that strangely, although there is a slit in the back of the original CloneCloth long coat when Chuck is wearing it, the slit does not appear in the CloneCloth template for the back panel of the long coat. Because of me shortening the coat, the slit at the back has almost disappeared. I first wondered how Chuck would look on a horse with no slit in his coat?
The first step was to get him to sit astride. I selected Motion / Horse / Arabian / Idle 01 (I have the iClone Horse & Tack pack). Although there is no horse in the scene yet, as you can see above, Chuck inherited the astride horse stance. You will also note that the back of his coat lacks a slit. How would this look once a horse was beneath him?
I started with the Arabian horse, but the saddle was rather chunky and somewhat obscured the view of the coat. I swapped the Arab for a thoroughbred. As you can see above the view from the front and the side is not too bad.
The view from the back and the side is not too bad either, even though we know the back of the coat is embedded well into the horse’s body. Time will tell how this will look once he starts to gallop. I did try a short sequence and still it did not look too bad, because the rider remained relatively the same distance from the horse. If we start adding a bit of bounce to the rider at a later stage, we might see the coat tails entering, exiting, entering, exiting the horse’s flesh.
I decided to try and introduce a longer slit into my Opacity map .jpg image. See the new black shape, I have introduced into the coat’s back panel in the picture above. This was totally an exercise in trail and error.
By applying the new Opacity map in exactly the same way as we did when we made the coat in the first place (described in the preceding post), a new slit does indeed appear in the back of the coat.
However this does not really pull apart when we make Chuck sit in the astride position. Therefore we still run the risk that the coat will be penetrating the horse’s flesh once he starts to gallop and the rider moves slightly independently of the horse. I will need to give that some more thought. In the meantime, any other iClone users who read this, please feel free to make some suggestions in the comments area.
Thanks!