Caging Setup

Caging is the process of setting the clothing's interior and exterior surfaces, referred to as the inner and outer cages respectively. This enables your clothing to layer over existing clothing and bodies, and additional clothes to layer on top.

Since the shirt in this tutorial was created using the cage templates as a mannequin, there is no need to adjust the inner cage where your clothing asset already fits over. Only the outer cage needs to be adjusted to fit over the new clothing item.

Clothing and cage meshes before caging
Outer cage mesh after caging process

The caging process uses the following steps:

  1. Set up your project by isolating the outer cage and the clothing mesh in your project.
  2. Modify the outer cage to wrap over the clothing mesh using sculpting tools.

To set up your project:

  1. Switch to Object mode.

  2. In the Outliner:

    1. Hide the Armature.
    2. Unhide your LongSleeve_OuterCage object.
  3. In the Outliner, navigate to Armature > Long Sleeve and toggle the Disable Selection icon. This prevents accidental edits to the clothing mesh.

  4. Select the OuterCage object, and navigate to Object Properties and enable Wireframe. This helps easily visualize and access the mesh.