Rigging New Clothes on to Model with Blender 2.78

To start off I gotta say I don't know if this is the best way to rig clothes. Most of the stuff I do is what I learned from friends and Youtube videos.  So here is some Youtube videos I saw when starting.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT5oZndzj68&list=PLjEaoINr3zgHs8uzT3yqe4iHGfkCmMJ0P 

by  Blender Guru
 

You'll learn the basics on how to use blender, very easy to follow along.

https://youtu.be/mhQY2_gVoVg

 by  Remington Graphics

In this video you'll learn the basics of rigging and weight painting. It's old but it still applies in Blender 2.78

Any issue you run into about weight painting, rigging or just blender in general you'll use what you learned to fix it. 

For anything else post a question and I'll get back to you.

As you can see the clothes is not in the armature folder so they are not rigged to the model. Before you start make sure the clothes properly fit the model.

First make sure the clothes are not clipping with the body. You can fix them in edit mode.

To make sure there is no clipping go inside model while the clothes is highlighted. 

Once you're done you can start parenting the clothes to the rig.

 We'll start with her coat. 

First select the coat and then shift select the rig. If selecting the rig takes you to Pose model undo it and go to Object mode.

Hit Ctrl P and select Object (Keep Transform). If you are still in pose mode you see less options so go back and to object mode.

Next hit Ctrl A and select location.

Once you do you'll see three boxes make sure they are all checked.

After that have the coat selected and go the the wrench tab.

From there click "Add Modifier" and select "Data Transfer"

That  Data Transfer Modifier will appear at the bottom of the other modifier. Click the up triangle to move it to the top.

Then click the Vertex Data box.

Next click on Vertex Groups and change "Nearest vertex" to " Nearest  Face Interpolated"

After that click on the blank space and then click on the main body. This is so the clothes will clip into the body as little as possible.  if you are still running into clipping issues you have to edit the clothes so there is more space between them.

Next you need to switch to the tab with the triangle. If you are taking the clothes from a different model the information from the previous rig will still be attach to the clothes. To get rid of this information click on the black triangle on the far right to open the option of "Delete All Groups".

Finally click apply to set it up.  Now to see the results. 

Click on the rig and switch to pose mode.

There you go. Hopefully it goes well.

As you can see in my example there is some parts I need to fix. This is can be done though weight painting. If you watched in rigging tutorial you should get an idea on how to do that.

This method use the main body as reference on how it rigs the clothes. So things like capes, dress and skirts should be done manually or else the body will effect the dress.

Before I learned this I weight painted the whole model myself which was time consuming. This method saved me a lot of time so hopefully it will help you too.