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| Nucleus and nCloth in Maya8.5 |
Posted: Jan 25, 2007
Category: nCloth
Category: nCloth
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Now that Maya 8.5 is out I finally have an opportunity to update this blog. I have been working on the nCloth feature and now that it is in user hands I hope people will have fun with it. NCloth is the first thing in Maya to use our new Nucleus solver framework. Over the next few weeks I hope to populate this blog with several tutorials on nCloth. To start the ball rolling we've put some some attribute presets for the nCloth node on the bonus tools page:
bonus tools
To use first unzip this file and place the folder "nCloth" inside the folder "presets" in your maya install location.
In Maya select a mesh and do "nCloth: Create nCloth". In attribute editor for the nClothShape when you click on the button "Presets" the new presets should appear. Simply select a preset to apply it to that cloth. Note that these preset files do not set all attributes on the cloth node, but just a relevant subset. Thickness and self collide settings are generally not affected, for example. Also all these presets set the scalingRelation attribute to "object space". This allows the stretch to be more or less constant when applied to meshes of different resolutions.
Note that it is usually important to get the sense of gravity right for the scale of your objects. By default things are set up with the assumption that units are meters ( the actual Maya unit setting, which defaults to centimeters, is ignored by Maya dynamics). If your object is modeled with the sense of units being centimeters then the gravity will be off by a factor of 100. To compensate set the spaceScale to 0.01 on the nucleus node. This will make the gravity much stronger, and one may need both higher stretchResistance, constraint strength levels and subSteps as a result. In general high gravity is harder to simulate with, especially with detailed cloth meshes. Also note that if one is putting clothing on a mouse then the effective gravity is even higher due to the small scale( a piece of cloth will fall from head to foot of a mouse in the blink of an eye ). In such situations it might make more sense to work with lower gravity, simulating more of a human scale and making solving easier. Also note that lowering gravity is also roughly equivalent to slow motion. In some cases low gravity can provide more interesting, flowing results.
bonus tools
To use first unzip this file and place the folder "nCloth" inside the folder "presets" in your maya install location.
In Maya select a mesh and do "nCloth: Create nCloth". In attribute editor for the nClothShape when you click on the button "Presets" the new presets should appear. Simply select a preset to apply it to that cloth. Note that these preset files do not set all attributes on the cloth node, but just a relevant subset. Thickness and self collide settings are generally not affected, for example. Also all these presets set the scalingRelation attribute to "object space". This allows the stretch to be more or less constant when applied to meshes of different resolutions.
Note that it is usually important to get the sense of gravity right for the scale of your objects. By default things are set up with the assumption that units are meters ( the actual Maya unit setting, which defaults to centimeters, is ignored by Maya dynamics). If your object is modeled with the sense of units being centimeters then the gravity will be off by a factor of 100. To compensate set the spaceScale to 0.01 on the nucleus node. This will make the gravity much stronger, and one may need both higher stretchResistance, constraint strength levels and subSteps as a result. In general high gravity is harder to simulate with, especially with detailed cloth meshes. Also note that if one is putting clothing on a mouse then the effective gravity is even higher due to the small scale( a piece of cloth will fall from head to foot of a mouse in the blink of an eye ). In such situations it might make more sense to work with lower gravity, simulating more of a human scale and making solving easier. Also note that lowering gravity is also roughly equivalent to slow motion. In some cases low gravity can provide more interesting, flowing results.
