Dancing Skeleton With Realistic Fabric Simulation In Blender
We're not done with Halloween just yet.
Let's keep the Halloween spirit alive just a little longer with this cheerful skeleton by Cesar Corzo. As he shared with us, the original idea was to create a dancing ghost covered in fabric. However, he eventually decided to revisit a skeleton he had used in a previous project and bring it back to life in a whole new way.
"I rigged the skeleton using AccuRIG and mixed different dance moves from Mixamo, ActorCore, and Action Forge using Blender's Action Mixer tool. Then, I baked the animation into keyframes, removed the bones, and left the mesh ready to use. I wanted the fabric to be thin enough to see the skeleton's silhouette through the light. I knew the simulation would be the most challenging part.
I used ZOZO's Contact Solver, a free, open-source solver. I created a highly subdivided circle made of triangles to achieve better accuracy, loaded a sheer fabric material physics preset (in .toml format) into the ZOZO Solver, and ran the simulation.
Due to the high mesh density, the simulation took a long time to solve (almost two hours), but the result was pretty good. I added a procedural sheer shader material from BlenderKit. Finally, I lit this dense scene using an HDRI and an area light to enhance the silhouette effect, then rendered it in Cycles at 100 samples."
Cesar Corzo
Cesar Corzo
Cesar Corzo
Cesar Corzo
Although baking the simulation took almost 2 hours, the render apparently took around 30-40 minutes. The setup used was an AMD 9950X, 64 GB of RAM, and an RTX 5070 Ti with 16 GB of VRAM.
ZOZO's Contact Solver is an open-source, GPU-accelerated physics engine designed to simulate complex interactions between cloth and solid objects. You can learn more about it in our article and one of the videos shared by Cesar:
For those who are still not ready to trade spooky vibes for Christmas just yet, the developer behind The Mortuary Assistant has released a playable version of a Paranormal Activity game he was working on before it was canceled. Called Playable Archive, the game is available for free.
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