Grab and release nCloth

For a magic carpet, first animate a plane mesh with the general desired motion. Then make it nCloth and use the input mesh attract to have the cloth follow your animated motion... the input attract can be animated depending on the desired motion. You can use the wind and lift/drag features on the cloth to get it ripple and flap as it moves through the air. You may wish to paint the input mesh black in some areas to allow them to flap freely.

Duncan

Hello sir,

With ncloth is it possible to create a magic carpet ?
What would be the best way

Many thanks :)

Hello sir,

With ncloth is it possible to create a magic carpet ?
What would be the best way

Many thanks :)

Hello sir,

With ncloth is it possible to create a magic carpet ?
What would be the best way

Many thanks :)

Hi Duncan,

Now that Maya 2009 is out, just imagine this...

There's a huge crowd of, well let's face it, geeks, chanting DUNCAN! DUNCAN DUNCAN...

And what do they want? Oh, you know what they want.

Say you've constrained four vertices with one constraint node- is there a way to enable the effect one vertex at a time or are the all either on or off? I don't mind heavy scripting and I think it would be useful for an effect I need to produce in an upcoming show.

Thanks!!

What I'm trying do is create an expression node that makes any select channel "springy" (with the same, or similar, parameters you defined in the brush spring script). I often need secondary motion on things so I build a lead/follow particle, connect the lead Y value to a controller null, then connect the value I want to be "springy" to the trailing particle Y value. It's kinda cumbersome.

I noticed that BonusTools has a "secondary animation" function - perhaps that does what I need?

UPDATE: I think I can re-work the expression made by MakeBrushSpring!! Thank you sooo much (I haven't used PFX enough!!) Also... I looked into "DynamicSecondaryMotion" in BonusTools - it looks specific to bones.

This script is now included in Maya and is called off the menu "Paint Effects:Brush Animation: Make Brush Spring"(there should be a little on this in the doc). Paint a simple fern onto a sphere. Key the sphere moving back and forth. Now select the fern and do "make brush spring". It should wiggle as the sphere moves. Under "extra attributes" in the attribute editor for the brush (fern1?) you will find "stiffness", "damp" and "travel", which can be used to control the character of the animation. If you open the expression editor and do "selectFilter:expressionName" then you can view and play with the expression it created.

Wow!! Great stuff!!

Hi Duncan... I came across a script you wrote about 10 years ago that applied springs to brushes/strokes. The proc is called "makeBrushSpring". Do you recall this script? Can you point me to any documentation that may exist? I'm hoping to leverage it to do something simple.

If you look on the hypershade create menu under "Create Options" there is an option "include placement with textures". Make sure this is checked. If you need to add a placement to already created textures then create the placement (under general utilities) then Cntr-middlemouse drag the placement onto the texture to connect.

i just recently packed up my life and moved to another state and have just begun 3d modelling. right now i live in a podunk town with no really to troubleshoot maya with me and happened across your site. i hope you can help. currently i am still running on alias maya 7. while i was at my former dwelling everything worked great. upon moving and reconnecting my computer i noticed that in hypershade all the materials were appearing in the work area without the connecting 2Dplacemant or 3Dplacement attribute icon. i sort of need this since i am stiil waiting on photoshop and even then i will need it. is there some reason the icon is not showing up connected to any of the materials?? or how can i reconnect the tab manually?? please advise and thanks.

Hi, Duncan.

Thanks again for sharing. This is really helpfull.
I would like to ask you something though. I tried to find out a way to cycle ncloth sims seamlessly (for exemple a flag animation, or for my particular case, a fully dressed character walk-cycle ). I tried to deal with the caches and the trax-editor (even blendshapes !) but I never get any good result.
Anyway, I really thank you again for all your great tutorials, keep going !

Hey, Duncan.
This is brilliant! You made another cool tutorial for us.