And feel free to name your weight map. Give a name that you’ll remember later on like “Tension Map”. Create two more weight maps and name them “Bend Stress Map” and “Shear Stress Map”...they will appear in your clusters in the explorer.

With that out of the way, let’s see the cloth sim without the weight maps applied. Click play on the animation panel and watch a few frames and see the cloth go into place. (It may take some time depending on your system resources) Ehh, my mom would not like that my model’s dress is too high…it sure makes a nice tanktop though. But I want to make it look like a dress (wahhhh!!). Let’s do a little painting to get the effect we want.

So, with the weight maps created, let’s begin painting each map the way we want it… take your time on this, it will take a few paintings to get your maps the way you like. (and more polygons=more control). To start painting, just press “w” on your keyboard (XSI shortcut to paint weight) with the weight map you made such as the tension map. If you have a tablet, it will make it easier to paint and paint the cloth object. If you want to see the weight map when you are done and keep it displaying, in your viewport, click on the little eyeball and highlight “Weight Maps”. Now you’ll see them.

You’ll notice that there is some red on the dress (don’t worry, I did not spill wine on her). What I did, on the weight map pop up, I set the minimum weight to -1 which allows some negative weight to offset your parameters.