Duncan's Corner
Water Tank example
This file was made with an earlier version of the nClothWater.ma file. I had not added a dynamic attribute for editing selfCollisionSoftness, so I had to use setAttr calls, because this attribute is hidden on the nCloth node due to limited utility for cloth. It was very useful in this animation, however, and helped to help keep the water from locking up like slush.
Constraint weight and strength: What's the difference?
The weight is basically the relative mass of the constrained point. It determines how the component participates in the constraint. If the weight is zero then that point will get pulled but not pull back. In terms of the constraint it would be as if the other object was a passive object. (if the other object were in fact a passive object then the weight would always be as if it was zero)
Using nCloth as an influence object
NCloth is potentially very useful as an influence object applied to a skin. One could use this to affect actual cloth, or to provide secondary effects to a skinned mesh. There is currently a naming bug when one tries to apply an nCloth mesh as an influence object ("Skin: Edit Smooth Skin: Add Influence"). This problem is fortunately easy to workaround.
Improved cloth water setup file
It occured to me that one could use the cloth selfCollideWidthScale with my water example so that one does not need to fatten the width of objects to compensate for the blobbyScale.
Water using nCloth (part 1 of 2)
It is possible to use nCloth for water, taking advantage of its ability to accurately self collide thick vertices (spheres), in addition with the ability to collide with geometry and other cloth objects( including rigid cloth). Note that one problem with this method currently is that the water can be too damped (a bit like slush or pea soup), however it may work fine in many contexts. A hidden nCloth attribute "selfCollisionSoftness" can be used to help keep it from getting too viscous, and I will discuss the use of this later in the tutorial. Please keep in mind, however, that nCloth was designed for cloth and this tutorial is somewhat of a hack. In future nucleus will hopefully support a proper particle based water solution.
Falling leaves with nCloth and Paint Effects
With nCloth, Maya users finally have a simple method for handling falling leaves. One can also easily attach leaves to branches and have the attachments broken by windforces by using nCloth constraints with glue strength. The basic workflow is very simple. Make a paint effects tree, convert it to poly, select the leaves and make nCloth. What follows is a more detailed tutorial.
A ribbon with twist control
A Maya user was trying to create a curling ribbon with a paint effects brush. He wanted to know if it was possible to control the twist rate along the ribbon to make some areas flat while other parts were twisted. Unfortunately the paint effects brush only has a global "Twist Rate" attribute with no control along the stroke. However there is a simple trick for doing this that uses the curl ramp on a hair system, while also disabling the hair's dynamics evaluation.
A Bag of Marbles using nCloth
This tutorial uses a trick where one can have an nCloth behave like a particle system where the particles can self collide. This is vastly more efficient than trying to model all the marbles as little rigid ncloth spheres. The marbles are in the bag and thus do not need to render. I will show in a later tutorial how to render these nCloth "particles" using the standard Maya particle rendering.
Creating a sphere with very uniform triangles
After some experimentation I realized that my last tutorial on this topic creates a sphere that is not as uniform as one might wish. Here is a better solution to the problem of creating a sphere with a uniform triangle distribution.
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