Cloth - Sliding through anatomy/Exploding.
polycounter lvl 17
Hello there. I am currently working with 3ds Max 8 and the Cloth modifier trying to finish up the model I will be using for my final in Animation I at ITT-Tech. Under Object Properties I have set the cloth to run off of a preset for Satin (I've tried other presets but the results are generally the same.) and added my characters mesh as a collision Object. I've tried setting the Depth and Offset to various numbers... from 0-100, with seemingly random occurences. Am I missing another setting somewhere? Regardless, I believe my spine is shaping itself into an S, so I'm going to step away from this for a while. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Ciao,
Michael
Ciao,
Michael
Replies
If you can get access to Max 9, the cloth solver is very slightly imporved over 8, but still awful.
If I were you I would ditch the idea of using cloth, or hand animate it somehow (which sounds bad, until you try to get a cloth sim to work). Good luck!
Thanks for all of your help.
1. make sure everything is to scale and xforms have been reset. this is major everything has to be the actual size.
2. never use your your animation mesh as a collision object, make a lower res proxy mesh that is rigged and a turbo smooth over that. use proxy meshes when ever possible, also you can just skin wrap your proxy to the animation mesh and you dont have to rig it.
3. make sure your proxy mesh is water tight.. meaning no holes, use the border select and drag select over the entire proxy to see if it has any holes in it.
thats a start, but yeah it can take a little tweaking, but its a fairly robust cloth sim, only other plugin i have used that tops it is syflex but its only for every other 3d package except max. also refer to the tutorials that come with max for the cloth mod they are pretty good to start. and there are also some good tips here.
http://www.time-in-motion.com/Hyp-Tutorial-Cloth-Main.php
http://download.autodesk.com/3dportal/movies/max_videos/max9_cloth_medium.mov
http://www.losart3d.com/Main/main.htm
Go to the "Download" section. You'd think the tutorials would be in the "Tutorials" section, but whatever.
Don't be afraid to crank up the poly count on your cloth and collision objects, it might take longer to sim but it will be more accurate and give you fewer headaches in the long run.
Don't try to get perfect results from the sim itself. There's always going to be penetration issues. Just add an edit mesh or poly modifier on top and fix problem areas by hand. Also, the relax modifier combined with a mesh select underneath it can do wonders. This is all in Carlos' tutorial.
And check out the site of the cloth master, Paul Hormis:
http://www.hyperent.com/
There are some tuts there and, his turbosquid DVD is definitely worth getting.
remember to work inside out, so pants first then shirt.. ect..
also you can amp up the collision offset to keep it out of the mesh and always do a negative push modifier to bring it back as close as you can get it to the surface, also adding a shell modifier to the cloth after you bake the animation data adds depth and can really help it look like its not just floating off the surface. unless you modeled depth in your cloth before you did the sim which is a no no..
And I'd like to add that using splines with the Garment Maker modified applied to them results in clothing that is usually better for simulating than if you had modeled clothing using normal techniques.
As an after thought here is a cloth test that I did a while ago.
The lighting sucks and the animation is crude not to mention the simulation explodes at the end but I wanted to see how well the cloth sim would work if push hard to extremes using a low sub-sampling setting and the default cloth settings.
Though it would give ya all a haha and show that the cloth simulation does indeed work as advertised.
http://www.3d-frankiev.com/OutBox/dance3.avi