Best way to rig small details such as buttons?

[LisaMarie McWinnie]

I use Blender 2.68, and I have some problems with rigging buttons for my dress. I notice in some shirts in world, that the buttons and pockets moves perfectly along with the mesh, but I can't get that effect.

I know this pose is extreme, but I think it protraits my worry. I've tried to join the meshes before rigging, but its worst because then I have to manually add weight to the buttons.

Thank you in advance!

[LisaMarie McWinnie]

I use Blender 2.68, and I have some problems with rigging buttons for my dress. I notice in some shirts in world, that the buttons and pockets moves perfectly along with the mesh, but I can't get that effect.

I know this pose is extreme, but I think it protraits my worry. I've tried to join the meshes before rigging, but its worst because then I have to manually add weight to the buttons.

Thank you in advance!

[Arcy Halfpint]

combine them  all together  with dress export  OBJ import obj and try rigging see if that works for you

[Sassy Romano]

What I do is find a vertex very close by and then assign that vertex weight to the whole of the button object.  It should be the same weight across the whole of the button as it's a hard object, it shouldn't stretch!  I've seen stretchy buttons which is just wrong.

Here's a video of it for a zip 

It takes no time to weight them manually, just hover the mouse over part of the button and press L and all related vertices are selected, i'd much rather this than end up with underlying weights which may not be uniform across the button/zip/buckle which then stretches in the wrong place.

[Masami Kuramoto]

The best way depends on whether you're making the clothing for a Pixar movie or for a game such as Second Life. If it's for a movie, you transfer the weight of the closest cloth vertex to the entire button. If it's for a game, you bake all the buttons and other small details (wrinkles, seams) into the texture of a low-poly version of the cloth and export that. Remember all the stuff about normal maps, specular maps etc. that was added to SL a few months ago? This is the time to use it.

[Sassy Romano]

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Masami Kuramoto wrote:

The best way depends on whether you're making the clothing for a Pixar movie or for a game such as Second Life. If it's for a movie, you transfer the weight of the closest cloth vertex to the entire button. If it's for a game, you bake all the buttons and other small details (wrinkles, seams) into the texture of a low-poly version of the cloth and export that. Remember all the stuff about normal maps, specular maps etc. that was added to SL a few months ago? This is the time to use it.

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Yes except most customers perceive that as a less detailed item and prefer the over detailed modelled mesh.  The technically better mesh item loses the sale.

Plus all the nice material stuff isn't in the most popular viewer yet and next, requires advanced lighting to be enabled thus those who don't have it enabled aren't going to see the item to it's best effect.