The Mad Kilt

[DCLeadboot]

This is certainly a case of a guy who left Animation:Master for years and came back...

For the record, I'm still running with Animation 2006 here - that was the version I'd upgraded to before I gave it up in despair because my old computer used to crash it.

I've now upgraded to a brand new "Windows 7 Home" machine, which runs it very nicely.

 

Anyway, to the subject of my problem.

My hare Danbuster's kilt is an essential part of his quirky personality, but not to the point of absurdity I wouldn't have thought.

I just tried attaching a SimCloth material to the ring-splines that make up his kilt below the belt, using the defaults from the "Waving the Flag" tutorial in the book - and this attached three-second movie is the result.

 

Now... I rather think this is ever so slightly wrong... ^^;

I mean, the kilt should hang normally and only react to movement or collision with the legs.

How do I set this up right, please?

Danbuster_TheMadKilt.mov

[John Bigboote]

Hey Dan-

 

You've upgraded your PC- now you may need to upgrade your A:M...as the cloth feature has had a major overhaul since 2006. You may find that the character's kilt does not even need cloth- instead you can weight and smartskin it...maybe even add a dynamic constraint to give it bounce...but you should know that cloth is not an 'easy-breezy' feature to integrate (in any app) SO- if you REALLY need it...do yourself a BIG favor and use the latest V of the software, as many enhancements have been made not just to cloth- but to the overall program.

 

GOOD LUCK! hey- I enjoyed your website!

[robcat2075]

If your AM2006 is V13 that cloth is essentially the cloth we have today

 

First rule of cloth is that it musn't touch anything at the beginning of the simulation.

 

Make a pose that shrinks the body (which of course has a cloth "deflector" material on it) inside the kilt down to a pencil width and expand it back over the first second, then get on with your animation.

 

You can see an example of doing that on my Punch Doll here

 

 

If your kilt is built with pleats that may be an extra complication to be R&D'd.

[DCLeadboot]

Hmmm, may be a case of re-rigging the kilt a little to move with the legs, I guess... SmartSkin does seem to be less... unpredictable.

Especially as Danbuster is the sort of guy liable to use the kilt as a parachute or hoik it up to cross rivers - the comic-effect being the Union Jack undershorts showing at such moments!

 

What had you in mind in terms of a Dynamic Constraint, though?

[robcat2075]

What does the test look like after you did the shrink pose?

[DCLeadboot]

I'm not even sure what you mean by "shrink pose" - but I tried taking your advice, and this was the result.

While the legs shrank in from nothing, the lower-part of the kilt (which is the SimCloth - the upper-part is the "attached" group) was just as crazy as ever.

It got as nearly to frame 20, by which time the legs were back to normal size, and then an error came up declaring the algorithm as unsolvable and giving up the simulation.

This isn't going to work - I know it!

 

Also, I had a corruption-problem with my model earlier on, causing me to lose nearly everything - fortunately, I had an old backup model saved from long before I started refining it. ^^;

I was forced to practically rig this model from the ground up - and while I managed to get the body, legs, head and such back where it was (minus the extra bones for things like the scarf-tail, fingers, tongue, ears, etc) now the arms are thrown too high, too. I never had that sort of issue with the BonelessThom.

Danbuster_MadKilt2.mov

[robcat2075]

But you shrunk the kilt too. If you shrink kilt AND body then they are still in contact with each other. Remember what I said was the first rule of cloth? You absolutely cannot start cloth touching anything.

 

Watch the vid at the link i posted. The body is shrunken away from the cloth. I do that so they are not touching each other at all when the simulation starts rolling.

 

Shrink pose? Watch that video. See how the body is shrunken down to paper thin at the very start. That's my shrink pose in use. I made a Pose, with a slider, to make it do that. in the model window>new>pose>percentage

 

Cloth is complicated, I agree. It's OK to choose anther solution for the kilt. But starting it out wrong guarantees it will not work.

 

 

 

Corrupted file? There is some egregious gaffe happening if a file that is saved and not loaded into A:M and sitting all by itself on your HD is somehow getting corrupted because another file was loaded in to A:M. I can't imagine it. Something is being done wrong.

 

And the only other saved version of the model is from long ago? Don't do that to yourself. When i do a model I get a couple hundred saved versions. I save everytime I try something new. If it turns out to be a bad idea it's easy to go back to before I went down the wrong path. Don't save over your models. Save new versions.

[DCLeadboot]

Well, in terms of the corruption, it might have been a save within the model file that went wrong. The model file, when I looked at it in Explorer and Notepad, was completely blank (0 Kb and no programming text to be seen) - that's why I had no choice but to recover the old one.

In future, I plan on keeping things backed up a little more regularly in a ZIP file.

 

Quick Edit: BTW, I found out why the arms were raised way above the head. It's because they were trying to find an old default pose with the relationship "Dynamic Pose" at 0% - of course, the scale was off, since I'd put in a new skeleton. Deleting the actions from that relationship has fixed the model back into it's standard T-pose, at least.

[HomeSlice]

Cloth takes a lot of experimentation. First you should work through this tutorial to make sure you have the basics down.

http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=248996

[DCLeadboot]

Well, after some experimenting, I may have figured out a method I tried before where the kilt is controlled by a hierarchy of bones.

The LeftKilt bones are under the LeftThigh bone, and the RightKilt bones answer to the movement of the RightThigh.

Each one controls a half-ring of splines on their side, so that each piece can be animated with the legs and then rotated, translated or scaled where appropriate.

The render snapshot shows Danbuster in a wild pose (though, at this stage, I haven't completed the SmartSkin for the upper torso, arms, head, etc - I'm still working on this model)

Hopefully, this may work for me.

[robcat2075]

Well, after some experimenting, I may have figured out a method I tried before where the kilt is controlled by a hierarchy of bones.

 

Yay! Congratualtions on solving the problem.