I decided to go for a rig, because I found the weight painting to be an easier approach at controlling how much his body would fold and to be able to freely play around with his pose.

Problem solving:

• It went well for the body itself, but the fibres, I’m not sure if there was a better way to go about this, but this worked for me. I weight painted them and assigned them to the closest bone they could follow, I had some issues with the fibres stretching and remembered a similar issue I had last year, it was assigned to several other bones, I found it easy  to solve this by selection the vertices in the weight painting and applying the value zero to the fibres in relation to the bone I didn’t want them to interact with.

• When it comes to the cloth, the threads of fabric I had done, like I mentioned previously, were slowing down my program to a non-functioning stage, so I opted to remove them and simulate my cloth on its own and left those details to the texturing stage.

I relied on my previous knowledge using the cloth simulation last year on the curtains of our project, and this YouTube video for the hiccups I was having, such as part of the cloth that wasn’t attached slipping off. I used his method of pinning vertices to stop the bottom of the cloth from slipping away.

screenshot from the part of the video I used:

• For the body it was a matter of what felt natural, and what didn’t hide all the work I had done. That pose made him look a lot like a cow-boy. And it just felt natural to build his environment using references from red dead redemption 2.