Cloth animation in Panda

So my character from Blender has a cloth (skirt). My model has bones and animation, but it is pretty much impossible for me to rig the cloth.
Is there any other way you could suggest me to get a moving character with a skirt to Panda3d?

I dont know if they even make sense but i see those solutions:
As far as i know physx can do cloth simulation - not sure if ode can do that too but propably panda’s particle-system cant.
You could also write the vertex-movement yourself or
use the nurbs-sheets which are a lot easier to animate but propably cant be exported or
‘someone’ :wink: could implement cloth simulation in panda3d and a blender exporter supporting cloth-modifier - then you could export from blender directly…

Late reply…
I dont get a thing. What does particle have in common with cloth animation?

cloth simulation is mostly done by a physics-system.
pandas particle system supports some basic physics-simulation but no advanced stuff - im not sure if cloth simulation is advanced suff in this sense.
if i would write a cloth-simulation id connect each vertex of the cloth to the nearest by joints and let each vertex be a physics-body of its own. then set up collisions and run the simulation.
Propably this is not quite the fastest way so i d only do it this way if there is no cloth sim included.
I dont know if there is a cloth-sim included in ode or physix but ive seen some physix-cloth-sim-demo somewhere…

Seriously, what does particle system have to do with this?

panda’s initial physics where used for particles afaik. so those are somewhat connected for historical reasons. that’s not related to modern physics engines. such as ode or anything.
btw. cloth simulatino is concidered advanced. you’d need ode, physx or bullet or anything compareable. (dunno if ode handles cloth)

I guess Praios just used the term “particle system” in regard to the Panda’s built physics engine - at least that’s how I read that.

Still, as far as I know, writing soft body simulation is extremely difficult and I personally don’t even imagine writing it in Python. It would be damn slow. C++ solves that issue, but it doesn’t change the fact that soft body is not a trivial subject, as far as I know. And I’m not sure if Panda’s built in physics engine could even handle that anyway…

As far as ODE goes, it doesn’t support soft body as well, so the best way to go for cloth with Panda is probably the PhysX wrapper. There are a few issues however. First of all, there’s the licence (and you should be concerned with that, even if you’re not an FOSS purist), and second, you will only get soft body on Windows with Nvidia hardware, so relying on it 100% would be a mistake, even if you only target Windows.

So the best thing you can do, unless you’re skilled enough to write soft body for ODE, is to go with good old animating by hand in your graphics editor. It worked in games in the past, and you sometimes just have to compromise.

Well, actually there’s one more option. That is writing a decent Python wrapper for Bullet (well, unless you use C++, but if that was the case, you’d probably already be using Bullet). There’s no such thing out there yet as far as I know (except for the one tightly integrated into Blender I guess…). Bullet not only has soft body everywhere, but it even has acceleration on any system, with any hardware, as far as I know. So I guess that’s the best choice if you really think you can’t live without soft body dynamics.