Paul Forwood

Nothing particularly good to report on that one yet, Matt. I did spend quite some time trying to get cloth to work well as a shirt or jacket material but my best results came from using dynamic bones with a very reduced angle. I do intend to revisit this problem again though so maybe I will have better luck next time around.

Thanks, Nancy and Holmes. Holmes, I'm not using the "attached" setting and sub groups and all that. I couldn't get my head around it. I don't know if I'm doing things the right way, just testing stuff, but here's how I did it anyway: ------------------------------------------------- The skirt in these examples is actually part of the character model, though not attached. All the CPs that make up the skirt are assigned to the pelvis bone. Ensure that all of the "cloth" CPs are moved away from the pelvic area and away from the legs. Try to imagine where the CPs will fall and arrange them so that they will collide close to a CP on the underlying body. This is just to reduce the chance of a CP colliding in the middle of a patch and being missed by the collision detection. I haven't tested this enough but I think it does help. 1) Create two simcloth materials and change one to "deflector". Set deflector to 16 subdivisions. (This may not be neccesary but my thinking is that more subdivisions means more testing for collisions across a surface and therefore less chance of cloth penetration). Set the other material to "cloth" and set up it's properties. 2) In the model window of your character, create a group for all the patches that will use this cloth material and call it something obvious like,... "MyCloth". I included all the points in the skirt except for those that form the waistband. 3) Create groups of all the patches that will act as deflectors. Call it "MyDeflector" or whatever you like. 4) Drag-drop the cloth material onto the MyCloth group and drag-drop the deflector material onto the MyDeflector group. 5) Start a new choreography and edit the ground object so that it is made from a grid of smaller squares instead of one large patch. (I went for 1 metre spacing). Make a group for the ground and drag the deflector material into this also. 6) Drop your character into the choreography, add some actions and slide them along the timeline so that you have at least a second of lead-in time before the first action starts. (This is just to allow the cloth to settle. The demands of each shot will dictate how much time you will need for this "pre-roll". You may not need any. 7) Mumbo-Jumbo and superstition: When you have your animation set up click in the choreography window and then tap the space key a couple of times. This is something that I do every time before running the cloth simulator, and other stuff, just to make sure that the choreography updates and includes any changes that you just made to your settings. (One day all the update issues will have been fixed and I will be stuck with this habit). 8) Right click in a clear space in the choreography window, or on the choreography icon in the PWS, and click on Plug-ins\SimCloth Simulate. The plug-in will start calculating all the motion of the cloth and may take a few seconds or a few minutes depending on your settings and the complexity of the interactions. If you see a problem while it is constructing the simulation you can stop it by pressing "escape". When the simulation has finished play the animation to see if there are any problems. If all is good then render your choreography else go back and find what caused the problem. -------------------------------------------------- Sorry. This is not very clear, is it? I will try to write up a complete tutorial sometime but I must get on with the testing and then back to my project as quickly as possible.

You're very welcome, Jim. Remember to allow some pre-roll time in your choreographies to let the cloth settle befor the action starts.

Well, it is actually harder to see the cloth penetrations when the dress is made of grass. Actually, Steve, if you look carefully, the legs do pass through the skirt in example E as she walks away from the camera. This seems to be the result of increasing the mass value and the air drag value. On a denser mesh this might not cause problems. I hope to find that out soon.

Here are some more examples and the settings used: These are quite subtle variations. Next step will be to increase the density of the skirt which will probably lead to increasing the density of the legs too.

Hmmm. That is something that I haven't tried but I'm still hoping that I can avoid that extra step. Good suggestion, Glenn. I will keep it in mind if everything goes pear shaped.

Sure. I'll do that when I have some good examples that have been put to the test. I tried the settings that Holmes recently posted in his tutorial and they worked though the cloth was much stiffer than the example that he showed. I have got this slightly more flexible setup without any penetrating sufaces. I will post the settings later. This simcloth would just about do for what I have in mind but now I need to get a cape to rest on top of the skirt and under the hair.

I would animate the wings with short actions that you can set to repeat for as long as is required. When using copy/paste you will need to pay attention to the filters at the bottom left of your screen. If you have the "Key Model" filter selected you will copy all the channels.

Okay, so it's not a displacement thing. (Displacement maps can be applied to your models through decals. Just apply a grey-scale image as a decal and then change it's type from "colour" to "displacement"). Not sure what the problem is. It could be a number of things. Are you using hair? If you can setup your screen so that the Project Workspace, (PWS), displays the contents of the Enterprises Groups folder and the choreography window displays the camera view in wireframe mode, and post a screen capture here, that might help us to spot the problem. Cheers.

Does the rendering actually finish early or is it still chugging away very slowly? I'm just wondering if you have used alot of displacement on the surface of the Enterprise. As a displaced surface gets closer to the camera it does seem to cause A:M to increase the level of detail in the displacement in all areas. If each frame is just taking progressively longer to render until it gets to the point where A:M seems to have stopped check the projected render time, it is probably estimating many days or weeks to complete. If on the other hand you are not using alot of displacement then check the choreography range in your camera settings and in your render settings. That is all that comes to mind at the moment. 1.5 GB of RAM should be okay unless you are running Vista. I only have 1 GB myself.

Thanks, Steve. It's The Setup Machine 2. I badly need to add some shoulder controls to this rig though. Thanks, Glenn. Yes, denser meshes are in the next revision but I am determined to keep these models as low-patch as possible and find workable cloth properties for each level. It will hopefully all get better as the density of the surface meshes increase.

Yes. That is possible, as a last measure, but I would prefer to see what I am doing at the moment. It is preferable to keep the legs from penetrating or the cloth can get snagged inside them which can end up pulling more and more CPs in, as you can see here: Making troublesome parts transparent could be a very useful workaround though, so long as that part would never be seen anyway.

Here you go: The cloth is still too stiff at these settings but it is the loosest that I have been able to achieve so far without having a leg penetrate the cloth.

Here is the result of my most recent test of cloth: The animation is just some rough movements to shake the cloth and hair about and put it through some of the challenges that would be required in a production. I think I will build a little obstacle course to put the characters through so that the dynamics can be better tested. The choreography consists of three actions which follow each other with no overlap. (They should actually overlap by one frame). Action 1 is just a rough twist and bend to test the reaction of cloth when it touches the ground plane and to test for penetration of knees through the cloth. Action 3 is a rough walk cycle. Action 3 is a new action which acts as a transition between the other two actions. The last frame of action 1 is copied to the first frame of this new action and the first frame of action 3 is copied to the last frame of this new action. The character is constrained to a path at frame 0 but the enforcement and ease values are not active until the start of the walk cycle. It worked well but I can see that I missed matching the keys for a few bones. I didn't know that action to action copying was working at all until now. This is major! (Note: It didn't work flawlessly. I had to keep trying, doing a copy on the hip controller with filters set to "Key Model" and selecting that bone in the new action before pasting gave me some mixed results but maybe I should have been copy/pasting a root bone. I did end up copying some keys individually. Not sure but I guess it depends on the rig. The rig in this model is TSM2). I also notice that my model has a problem in her right shoulder. Oh, by the way, I should mention that this was done in A:M 14 Beta 5.

Very good, Jesse! Good luck with the vote.

Thanks! That is a nice little collection. Very atmospheric image, Robert! Cool.

Do a search, (top right). Someone posted on this subject very recently.

Personally, I think that by showing the whole story in your animatic you are giving far too much away.

This is really coming along now, Gaz! I like it, it made me chuckle too, but there are quite alot of anomalies creeping in. Shadows missing, unexplained shadows and reflections flickering. I don't know what is causing that. The shot where the spacecraft lands I feel could be improved if you just let the ship decend until it fills the view and then cut to the next shot rather that moving the camera within the shot. The way that the entrance chamber compresses looks kind of strange to me. I would prefer to see it telescoping rather than distorting like that. Also giving it a floor would make it more believable. Perhaps these are things that you already intend to revisit so excuse me if that is the case. There are some very amusing things going on in this short and I look forward to seeing more of your progress.

Nice work, Will! I bet this guy shows up at your feast tomorrow.

I knew what you meant, Rusty... (Apologies to Tanassi)

Nicely done!

Just reinstall. What version were you running?

Ha! He looks fun. Now you've got me thinking about digging out some of my old stuff to see what could be animated. That would involve too much shifting of boxes and bags up in the loft for me to get into it today but definitely would be a good time to resurrect some of those home brewed comic strips from the late sixties. I hope you are going to take this guy to the finish line.

Very cool, Mr. Bendy!