3ds Max cloth over-stretching issue

wannabeartist

Hi,

Can someone give me some hints on what typically causes a cloth simulation to fail with the over-stretching error?

I have already reduced the polygons quite a bit - could it be the number of collision objects? Something else to consider?

Mark Dygert

It's normally being pinched some place, folding in on itself and unable to straighten it back out, or your settings are really loose and springy with the gravity cranked too high. It might sound weird but typically you want a lot more verts to have smooth cloth simulations. I'll typically have a piece of cloth that is twice as dense as what I need just so it sims well, I then skinwrap my lower poly mesh to the higher poly cloth sim.

Also if your collision object isn't as dense as your cloth you can run into trouble where a pointy collision mesh will snag the cloth.

Also if you're using a few collision objects like say one for the thigh and one for the calf, the knee is going to work more like a wood chipper than a knee. It will pinch and snag the cloth causing issues. You want a nice smooth dense collision mesh.

Also if the sim starts right when the motion does you can get yourself into trouble, typically you want the cloth to settle in, then start the motion. I've run the simulate local and used that as my sim start position which reduces the amount of settle in time.

wannabeartist

Thanks for the tips!

It was probably the folding on itself -issue: I was trying to do some shoe laces with cloth. Banged my head against the wall for a few hours, gave up and decided to sculpt them. Sucks to back down, but I just need to get this done.

Have you ever tried shoe laces with cloth, or something similar?

I think I tried everything I could think of - dense mesh, simple mesh, separate collision objects (loops and shoe body), combined collision objects, low friction etc.

I was getting pretty close after hours and hours of experiment, but still my laces seemed to "stick" to the collision objects (the loops) after a few dozen frames, making the whole "tightening" animation dysfunctional.

Mark Dygert

I haven't tried to use cloth on something like that, I think it would mostly make a mess. Cloth works best on hanging planes like capes, coats, curtains, dresses, flags things that hang well. Tubes would mostly fold in on themselves, also any mesh that intersects itself or even comes close is going to cause problems. Cloth loves its space...

I think I would place the laces using splines then just the push/pull tools in graphite modeling tools to fake a little gravity. A sculpting app probably works just as well too.

wannabeartist

Right,

I had a spline in place for the laces and I lofted that. With the resulting mesh I tried using Cloth, but since that idea failed, now I took the mesh to ZBrush and try to make it look nice there