Looping cloth animation in 3Ds Max?

AnnaHollinrake · Mar 2015

Hey guys! I'm having loads of trouble getting my cloth animation to loop - I've followed the two main tutorials I could find online and I'm either missing something totally obvious or Max isn't having any of it.

The first is [ame="

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZBZtxyjWJQ"]this one[/ame], in which it all goes to plan up until 3:55 where the snippet of animation in the Motion Mixer suddenly stops working. The other is Vitsly's flag tutorial in which the curves of the animation don't appear on the Curve Editor whatsoever, and when I select all the verts they don't seem to copy or move?

If there are solutions to the above problems or another method I could employ to get a simple looping cloth animation, that'd be amazing. Thanks so much!

monster · Mar 2015

Hi Anna, maybe you could post your max file and xaf file. I tried the video and everything works on my end.

AnnaHollinrake · Mar 2015

Max file - http://sta.sh/01ppy7tipczt

Animation - http://sta.sh/01711ajn1kgr

Thanks so much!

monster · Mar 2015

So when I try to load your XAF file, it says it wants to use "Plane002" and your scene has "Plane003". So if I map 002 to 003 the file loads, but there is no animation. I guess your object was modified after you saved the animation. If I simply save the baked animation right after I open the file, then everything works like it does in the video.

Couple of things though:

1. This method seems really complex for a simple task. Here's a simple way. Open the file you sent me. Select Plane003. Delete all the keys after 195 (including the few past the end of the time range.) Then Shift + Drag keyframe 0 to frame 200 to clone it. Done. If your animation was more dynamic it probably wouldn't work well, but it looks good to me.

2. All that said, if we take a step back, using the cloth modifier seems like a complex way to do this simple task as well. Here is the max file again with a simple Ripple and Bend modifier animated on top of the same plane:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2904948/Tutorials/RippleFlag.max

The ripple flag is on the right, and the cloth one the left.

Hope this helps! Please let me know if you have anymore questions.

AnnaHollinrake · Mar 2015

Oh wow, thank you so much! I'm glad it was just a simple mistake on my part, I have a lingering distrust of 3Ds Max 2014 over its collapse verts issue.

I'm relieved there's a more straight forward solution too, it seemed like such a convoluted work around for something that's so often required. Thanks again

Looping cloth animation in 3Ds Max?

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