silly cloth

[robcat2075]

I've been testing cloth settings. These flags have the same settings except for "Stretch Stiffness"

 

From left to right they are set to 0.1, 1, 10, 100

 

FlagTest.mov

[Rodney]

Nice test!

[Wildsided]

Question is though Robert, have you ever managed to get it to stop moving? In all the tests I've done with cloth I may get it to act like I want it to but the cloth will never fully settle. Even with no model movement, no external forces just gravity, it will cascade beautifully across the surface and then....wiggle constantly.

[robcat2075]

Question is though Robert, have you ever managed to get it to stop moving? In all the tests I've done with cloth I may get it to act like I want it to but the cloth will never fully settle. Even with no model movement, no external forces just gravity, it will cascade beautifully across the surface and then....wiggle constantly.

Yes, you can make cloth stop.

 

Higher damping settings will make the cloth settle. If it needs to be absolutely frozen an "attachment group" can be made to completely stop it.

[Rodney]

In all the tests I've done with cloth I may get it to act like I want it to but the cloth will never fully settle. Even with no model movement, no external forces just gravity, it will cascade beautifully across the surface and then....wiggle constantly.

 

Creating/simulating cloth is just he first step of the process.

It can help to think of Simcloth in a similar way as Mocap. With mocap not every keyframe generated is going to be ideal.

Identifying the 'golden poses', keeping those and generating a story with those key frames will have the cloth following your direction.

A problem with simulation is that it is an automated process that also must be directed.

 

It would be nice to be able to label/tag keyframes for more easy identification but when looking through a cloth simulation it is fairly easy to see which frames 'look right' and which don't have the right performance/appeal. Care should be taken in not deleting too many keyframes too soon and at a very minimum you'll want to keep at least three sets of keyframes (as opposed to one keyframe for every frame. With those 'poses' in position then you can go in and breakdown the action that will allow the cloth to perform it's role as expected.

 

Note that we can re-simulate over and over again using our preferred keyframes but when doing that we'll want to reset the active area of the timeline (the playrange) so the simulation only effects those areas we want to change. We don't want to overwrite what is working correctly already.

ClothKeys.mp4

[zandoriastudios]

On TAR's cloak, I remember tweaking as massaging the simulation, tweaking the mesh by hand, re simulating from a fixed frame, over and over again...by the end I was getting pretty comfortable with cloth (and vowing to lose the cape--LOL)

[Rodney]

It's been awhile since playing with Cloth and I might be remembering some things wrong.

I do recall having to reset the Chor length to a shorter duration because the simulation was overwriting my key poses at the end of the sequence.

I think Bob Croucher's Tech Talk goes into some detail on that aspect.

 

An additional thing that can be done is setup two Chors exactly the same and simulate the one... then copy and paste the desired keyframes into the other.

[robcat2075]

Here's some cloth that pretty darn near settles as much as you'd need. If you needed absolute motionlessness an attach group could be turned on after it mostly stopped moving.

 

Settles000.mov

 

 

Here's the PRJ you can look at and run the simulation on. Note that the special cloth settings are made in the Group in the Chor and not in the materials folder.

 

ClothSettles.prj

 

 

Also, Shaggy's Bus Stop Rope Trick uses cloth that spend a lot of time on the ground needing to be motionless.

 

 

 

It can be done!