Maya jellyfish with nCloth and Dynamic Hair - help!

starogre

Hey so I've been doing a lot of research on these topics but the little things are stumping me. I created a jellyfish head out of an nCloth mesh, assigned a couple locators to the top and bottom ring of verticies, and applied a squash deformer to the mesh. I then animated a bounce upwards using that system. However, the only way to get the mesh to stay stable is to turn the pressure and fabric thickness way up. Then the cloth doesn't flow around like a Jelly like it's underwater.
So I have this, you can see a bit of a stretch on top from the nConstraint Transform on the locator. http://imgur.com/16Fea
Now, aside from getting the head to animate correctly, I have some tentacles made of hair curves, and ik spline bones.
http://i.imgur.com/b6l6T.jpg
I really have no idea how to attach them to the nCloth head mesh. When I do that, the cloth is driven dynamically and seems that the tentacles do not want to follow it. I'm assuming getting the normals of the faces of the ends of the tentacles and the head of the jelly to constrain to each other is weird and difficult.
I tried parenting the hair system as well as the outside tentacles, and it doesn't really work. And when I parent the middle tentacles and bones to the head, they move way off to the side and I can't move them around. Weird.
http://imgur.com/CHyOn this to this http://imgur.com/G29xc
Yeah, so basically I'm trying my best and have done a lot of research on both nCloth and dynamic hair curves, but getting it all to work together is giving me trouble, especially with the goal of getting it to look like it's all underwater, being able to rotate and flow every which way with no real gravity.
TLDR; I'm making a jellyfish with nCloth and dynamic hair curves, I've done a lot of research so far, but don't know how to make these things work together to animate one big awesome jelly.
PS. any resources would be nice. I've already done a lot of cloth and hair tutorials, but can't seem to find anything about how to connect things together, etc.
Thanks!

King Mango

My first instinct would have been to use softbodies and springs etc... Is there any particular reason you went with cloth?

starogre

yeah, so that I could have some sort of turbulence to have the cloth kind of slowly deform into odd shapes and ripple in the water when it's moving slowly. i see a lot on youtube who use nCloth supposedly, and it looked good, so I wanted to try. Didn't know I could get the same effect with soft bodies/springs

starogre

by the way your idea is great, do you have any suggestions for how i would turn the head into that type of system and somehow attach the tentacles to specific spots on it? (kind of like having the tentacles follow the normals of the faces they are attached to so they rotate when the head flares out and squashes, etc.)

King Mango

Yeah you can paint the wieghts for the springs on a per particle basis in the component editor.

I don't have that much experience with it to be honest. I've used them before for flags, ropes and even instead of cloth for table cloths etc...

The thing you'll be wanting to look at is the component editor where you can adjust the per particle attributes for specific particles. So each particle can have its own indiviudual values.

I'm not sure where a tutorial would be found online as I got my info from Gnomon DVDs (the old dynamics set, and the newer Space Enviro DVD) and also the 3dBuzz Maya Fundamentals DVDs. I would highly recommend the Buzz DVDs if you have the cash. Calling it a fundamentals DVD is probably misleading lol

The way I would try it would be to make the jellyfish all one object. Figure out my spring layout, then use one of the springs as a master and animate its attributes. Like have everything start at the dome of the jellyfish and radiate out and down from there.

The rest of the springs will pull the jellyfish along.

starogre

i think i can visualize what you mean. Do you think the tentacles will be kind of symmetrical in this way? I'm trying not to make the tentacles constantly flow together in a way and I'd like them to float around differently from eachother at some points.

King Mango

You can use fields to affect the movement as well. I would use a couple of turbulence fields, one very light and one a little bit stronger. You can get nice variations in turbulence from simple expressions in different attributes.

There's quite a bit you can do with fields. Check out what each one does and you can find nice effects. You could even think about using a newton at the dome to add some movement.

Fields are really neat to play with. When I'm experimenting with fields the first thing I do is set attenuation to zero and then go through one by and double values to find out what they do. Like double turbulence strength, observe, set it back to default. Double the next value you want to check, observe set it back to default. I use the artillery method whereby I double until I see a change. Like 5,10,20 ok finally see the effect reset to five.