Maya Rigging Skirt for Hips Trouble With Knees

[Leviathan Flux]

I feel confident rigging pretty much any part of the body with good results except for working with a knee-length skirt, kilt, or long coat.  I have tried a combination of different methods for painting the weights for the area.  It seems to have the least stretching of the texture, and the smoothest overall movement, there needs to be some overlap, meaning the weights for one hip cross over to the other.  However, as you can see from the pictures, I am having trouble with finding  way to not have the fabric get sucked into the knees.  I am thinking the only solution may to have an alpha layer to cover everything right above the bottom of the skirt.  Does anyone have any tips for working with this area?  Thanks!

[Cathy Foil]

Two things come to mind that you might want to try. One increase the number of vertices in the area around the knees and in between the knees.  You can then more finely tune the weights of them.

Or two you could duplicate the mesh then delete everything except the front from mid thy down.  Then place the duplicate just a little behind the original mesh and combine it with the original mesh.  The new second layer weight more heavily to the knee closest.  That way as the original gets stretched the second layer will poke through keeping the knee covered.

I never tried this approach.  I am new to skinning mesh in SL but I had a fair bit of experience in skinning mesh for avatars in IMVU.

Hope that helps.

P.S. Just for the record I don't like IMVU it stinks compared to SL but they do have some great things I wish LL would implement.

[Leviathan Flux]

Cool thanks, Cathy.  I'll start with trying more vertices and then try your second idea, wouldnt have thought of that.