Disney Princess Ballgown Dress

Hello! I'm a college student studying Game Art Design in Massachusetts.

This semester I took Visual Effects; a class I quickly took interest in and now love. For my final we had to work with nCloth by making some sort of clothing to a rig of our choosing, animate that, and add some effects like fire on top. I decided to make Belle's dress from Beauty and the Beast, but found it hard to find tutorials or any additional help online on how to make a big nCloth project like a ballgown dress so I decided to write this blog as I progress.

Before I get started, here's some notes:
I'm using Maya 2016
I'm using the Sam rig from CreativeCrash; the rig is good, but unlocking the mesh in annoying.
It's actually better to build the nCloth without the rig in the scene; I didn't know that when I started
To build the cloth without the rig in your scene first import it, shape the cloth to the rig's waistline, then remove the rig from your scene.
If you keep the rig in your scene, your view port will most likely chug
With that being said, SAVE OFTEN!! Maya crashes a lot... -_-
My animation settings are set to Play Every Frame and Real Time 24fps

Ok, so let's get started!


- Start the dress with a cylinder; it's much easier to work with rather than a sphere.
- Place the cylinder over the rig's waist where you want the top of the dress to sit. Make the subdivision caps 0 and shape the top face to closely fit the waistline. Leave some room between the edge of the cylinder and the waist.
- Next, select the bottom face, widen it to the width of the dress, then pull it down to the length of the dress (I dragged mine down just above her ankles; leave space for the dress to hit the floor).
- Ballgown dresses are big and heavy, but not every dress is like that. If aiming for a ballgown dress, yours should look something like this:

 

- Delete the top and bottom faces.

- In the modeling roll out Mesh > Smooth the object about 2 subdivisions and further adjust the edge loops to shape the dress you want.

- Name the object dress in the outliner (Windows > Outliner); leave the outliner up.

- Once shaped, make the dress an nCloth in the FX rollout > nCloth > Create nCloth
- A nucleus should now pop up in your outliner, click on that and open in the Attribute Editor (Ctrl + A)
- With nucleus1 open in the Attribute editor scroll to Ground Plane and check the Use Plane box:
- (Notice the nCloth Tshirt icon in the outliner; we'll come back to that soon)

- Make sure your render settings are set to Play Every frame and Real Time 24fps

- If you press play now the dress should fall, but it'll be very stiff. The reason it's stiff is because it doesn't have enough edge loops to read like a cloth.
- So make sure the dress is shaped to your liking
- Then in the Modeling rollout Mesh > Smooth your dress again 1 additional subdivision:
- The dress should fall better now, but if not don't worry; nCloth is finicky and I get different results every time. 

So if you decided to use the Sam rig like me, we have to unlock the mesh like I mentioned in the notes section earlier.So to do that:
- Go to the outliner and open sam_animateME_2013_v2_11:all_anim
- Next open sam_animateME_2013_v2_11:geo_grp
- Then open sam_animateME_2013_v2_11:skinning_geo_grp
- And finally select sam_animateME_2013_v2_11:body_geo
- In the Attribute Editor under sam_animateME_2013_v2_11:body_geo open Display > Drawing Overrides > and select Enable Overrides.
- Now you should be able to select Sam's body in the view port. (Do the same for head and hair if you want).

- Now that we can select the body mesh, I suggest placing that on a separate layer in the Channel Box/Layer Editor
- Select the body mesh, go to nCloth in the FX rollout, and Make it a Passive Collider; this prevents the cloth from passing through the mesh and instead reacting to it.
- I also suggest renaming the nCloth in the outliner to DressnCloth if you plan on doing multiple cloth objects and placing that on a layer as well.
- Now select the dress and highlight the top row of vertices; it's time to attach the dress to the body (or constrain it if you're not using a rig)
- With the top vertices selected, shift + click the body mesh and go to nConstraint > Point to Surface Constraint
- (WITHOUT RIG) With the top vertices selected go to nConstraint > Transform Constraint
- The top of the cloth should be constrained at the top now, and flowing down at the bottom for both options. Also notice there is now a Dynamic Constraint in the outliner; I also recommend renaming that. Mine is dynamicDressConstraint1:

 - To test the dynamic flow of the dress try animating the character or using an Interactive Playback.
- To use Interactive Playback select the desired control, then go to Fields & Solvers in the FX roll out, and select Interactive Playback under Solvers.
- The timeline will begin to play; move whatever control you would like to test the limits of the cloth
- When done testing stop the animation, rewind the timeline, and Ctrl + Z until the control is back in it's original position

So, that's the basics of making a big dress like this. However, this is far from perfect and while animating or moving the rig around you'll most likely see tension or breaking in the cloth. Making the dress perfect is something I'm still trying to master, but so far I can tell you it's a bit more advanced and requires a lot of tweaking in the Attribute Editor and testing via Playblasts. And everyone's dress will most likely be different in some way, so I can only tell you hat worked for me and some other techniques I picked up along the way. But, I'll save that for another post; hoped this helped!

Questions?
Comment below!