Modeling help: pile of hose??

breakneck

I was wondering if there are any tricks/tips on modeling a pile of coiled up hose, without looking boring and generic.
I plan to do a bake down, so whatever method gives me good results i'm willing to explore them.

-oh i'm using max 2009.

Here is what i'm trying to achieve:

Autocon

I would go with hexli. this will give you the ability to render in the view port, its already coiled and by moving the control verts you can make it less generic and boring

Drachis

Rough it out with splines and use the rope sim in max to place it a bit more naturally, I'll make a tut if you want.

MoP

Splines for sure, I haven't used the "rope sim" before, so I'd be interested in a mini-tutorial too, if you have the time, Drachis!

Drachis

Once you have the rough spline set up and a rough of the box it needs to come to rest on open go to modifiers and add a reactor rope to the spline.

Open the reactor panel by rt-clicking on a grey area of the interface, add the meshes that the rope is going to collide with to a rigid body collection [ first icon on left of the panel] set the objects that need to stay still as inactive from the properties panel in reactor [ 4th panel from the end/right].

with the rope/hose selected add a rope collection [4th icon from the start/ left]. Change any settings on the rope for more friction / radius .

Hit analyze world [3rd icon from the end/ right] to make sure reactor is all setup properly, some meshes may need their collision type changed.

use preview animation [2nd icon from the end of the reactor panel] to run the simulationand use the MAX>Update MAX menu to update the contents of the view port.

bam simulated rope!

Quick vid if you want it[ here ] no compression atm, I want sleep more than that.

SHEPEIRO

ive done it befor by:
-create a cylinder in roughly the right shape with as many edgeloops as you need coils,
-remove the top and bottom,
-join one set of cross sections so the edge loops helix rather than are contious around the cylinder
- roughly ffd into postion
- use cloth simulator to drop onto mesh
-select coil edgeloop and turn into spline

this should hang nicely now

Mark Dygert

I agree with shep, cloth is a bit easier to work with. Especially hanging wires, pin your points, sim, collapse.

mLichy

Huh.... awesome . I could have used this at work for hanging hoses/wires.

breakneck

alright, so i spent some time tonight trying to figure this out. ran into acouple of problems.

I really like the reactor way that drachis explained (one on the left), but I couldn't figure out how to add more edge loops to my spline to give me a smoother simulation.

So I tried cloth modifier (other one) and ended up with something that took 30 minutes to simulate only 17 frames. To say the least, i gave up on that shit. The mesh had double the support edge loops, around 17,000 tris.

if anyone could point me in the right direction to increase the quality of the spline that would be sweet.

heres some picture action!

Drachis

toss an edit spline on there and select everything and hit divide and then re simulate or just go through and chamfer the spline points or collapse down to an editable spline and edit the interpolation settings

Acumen

my ropes always slide around on the plane. i watched the video very closely and adjusted the options (friction, ...) according to that.
i tried with a helix, and with splines and the results weren't that close to the picture breakneck posted
maybe SHEPEIRO or vig could ellaborate on their way of doing things ?

and breakneck could you post your settings for the scene you posted ? rteactor and helix/spline-wise ?

Drachis

you might need to increase the friction on the plane as well as the rope if the rope slides too much on it.

I made the vid while half way to sleep so it may not be the magical do all for this process

Acumen

increase ?
umpf, sry, you were half way to sleep and i was half way to waking up. i decreased the friction to 0,0
the simulation works fine now
the result floats in the air though. i have to move it around a bit so it perfectly fits the box. kind of a weird problem, i guess

Drachis

I don't remember why it floats like that, I guess reactor is adding a shell around the mesh for collision, I'll tell ya if I figure it out.

edit; found it

in the utilities panel mess with the Col. Tolerance, seems to fix that right up

Acumen

yes, that works great !
thanks for all your help, Drachis

breakneck

sick, got it!! (after hours of tweeking/learning the settings)
still got a weird ghost collision around the box - you can still see the effect in the bottom right wrapping around the box - but I just hand edited the spline after the sim to get it to place right.
-many thanks

Acumen

just to make sure you didn't overread what Drachis posted:

in the utilities panel mess with the Col. Tolerance, seems to fix that right up

but i guess, since you worked on it so many hours, you already tried that solution
looks very nice, what you set up there
could be interesting to see the setup before simulation ^^

Mark Dygert

breakneck wrote: »

still got a weird ghost collision around the box.

Next time around you can adjust the depth and offset in the collision properties, specifically for that collision piece, not the cloth.

You might have been adjusting just the cloth? Which will stay on if you set a piece of cloth to a collision object then set it back to cloth. With it set back to cloth the properties are ignored but they are not grey'ed out and you can edit them. Kind of confusing, its a long standing bug.

You need to adjust the depth/offset with the collision object selected in the list.

To pin specific pieces to the world such as hanging wires on a wall.
- Select Group (sub-object of cloth modifier)
- Select the verts to be pinned, click Make Group.
- Select the group and click preserve.
- Simulate and the hanging bits giggle and dance.

After the group is created you can go back in and edit the group by clicking it. You can add soft select or change the selected verts. Just make sure to click "change group" when you're done otherwise the changes won't take effect.

Now that you're a cloth master you can drop all kinds of things, tarps and bed sheets over boxes or beds, skirts and shirts, all kinds of stuff. ProOptimize is great for reducing high poly objects. It makes a mess but in static environmental art it doesn't really matter much.

If you need cloth to follow an object:
You first skin the cloth object and then apply cloth and preserve the verts in a group the same way (preserve just means preserve the previous motion in the stack).

This works great on capes, dresses, skirts, scarves ect... So the cloth can follow an object and takes its motion into effect as its simulating.