Maya Cloth
Animation and Modeling
Demonstrations
Maya Cloth Tutorial
There is a new simulated cloth solution called Maya® nCloth? in Maya 8.5. nCloth is a fast and stable dynamic cloth solution that uses a network of linked particles to simulate a wide variety of dynamic polygon surfaces. For example, nCloth is flexible enough to simulate objects such as fabric clothing, inflating balloons, shattering surfaces, and deformable objects.
nCloth is built on the new dynamic simulation framework called Maya® Nucleus?. A Maya Nucleus system is composed of a series of nCloth objects, passive collision objects, dynamic constraints, and a Maya Nucleus solver. The Maya Nucleus solver calculates an nCloth's simulation in an iterative manner, improving the simulation after each iteration, to produce accurate cloth behavior.
The attached movie is a simple example of the dynamic capabilities. Following is a brief tutorial on the construction of the movie.
1. From the Main menu, go to Create>Polygon>Plane and draw desired size and location. This will become our nCloth object. The higher the poly count, the more effective the cloth looks (and the longer it takes to calculate the dynamics).
2. Now go to Create>Polygons>Cylinder to create two "poles" to attach our cloth. These become nCloth Passive objects. Something like this:
3. Now select the Plane and go to the nCloth menu nCloth>Create nCloth. Use the default settings for now. Bring up the Attributes window. Notice there is nClothShape and nucleus. This is where you can affect the different dynamic controls. For this simple demonstration, we will keep everything with default settings. You can also import nCloth Presets in the Bonus Tools download.
4. Select the cylinders and go to nCloth>Create Passive. This makes rigidShapes from the cylinders. Now we can attach the cloth to the poles.
5. Select the cloth, right-click to choose Vertex and select the vertices along the edge, then select the cylinder and go to nConstrain>Points to Surface. Do the same for the other edge.
6. Select the cloth and go to the nucleus tab in the Attribute window. Hit Play on the Timeline and you will see the dynamic effects. Adjust the Air Density and Wind Speed to see their effect. You can also change any of the attributes of the nClothShape, like Lift, and see what happens.
7. Create a Polygon sphere behind the cloth and animate it's movement to go through the cloth. Before setting keyframes, go to the nucleus tab and uncheck the Enable box.
8. Check the Enable Box again, play the animation and see how the cloth stretches. Stop the animation, return to the beginning frame, select the nCloth object, right-click for Vertex and select the center vertices and go to nConstrain>Tearable Surface using the default setting.
9. Adjust the Glue Strength in the dynamicContraintShape attribute and begin to experiment!
10. There are many good tutorials for cloth that cover it much more in depth. here are just a couple.
http://www.xeav.net/
http://en.9jcg.com/comm_pages/blog_content-art-19.htm
and, of course, the Maya Help, especially the page on General nCloth limitations can save some headaches.