Help Obi Cloth- Character

[josemendez]

I had a question about obi cloth. Is it possible to use it on a character and mask out parts of the character like the head/stomach and have the physics applied to that only?

Yes, just set skin radius to zero for the parts you want masked out. This will force the cloth simulation to follow the animated vertices with no room for extra movement.

I briefly saw an example of character meshes with cloth applied to them in the demo vid, but did not see anything like that in the tutorials. I saw the ogre vid for obi softbody but I didn't quite see the effect I was looking for.

which is why I chose the obi cloth instead. 
Correct me if I'm wrong- but it looks like obi softbody is more of a wiggle/jiggle with a "return to original shape". Some kind of radial vertex offset from what I can see.

The main difference between cloth and softbodies is that cloth is a surface, while softbodies are a volume. They have different use cases. For instance, cloth is unable to hold its rest shape unless artificially constrained to a reference shape (which is what skin constraints do) while a softbody can.

In layman terms you could think of cloth as a balloon (just a membrane), and of softbody as a solid rubber ball.

I considered obi softbody, but I read it can't do certain physics things like self-collision/double-sided that obi-cloth can do.

Softbodies can do self-collision and double-sided just fine, they're based on the same particle physics framework as cloth.

It seemed like obi-cloth achieved that more closely, since cloth tends to have that ripple effect (from all the physics simulations I've seen involving cloth). Softbody in general seems to be more "firm/bouncy" and almost like a "spring" rather than some kind of "jelly".

You could use either cloth or softbodies. However in this case, cloth will give a you a bit more explicit control, since most of the "ripple-like" behavior emerges from skin constraints causing the cloth to spring back to the object's reference rest shape. Tweaking the radius and compliance of the constraints will allow you to control the amplitude and frequency of ripples respectively.

kind regards,