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lasaire
02-17-2004, 05:04 AM
Hi! I am in currently adding cloth to an animation involving two very detailed characters which will be poly-smoothed before I render. I also will be cranking up the base resolution of the cloth solver to make my cloth drape more smoothly (thus adding more triangles to the cloth surface). My question is, while I know that upping the poly size and resolution will certainly up the calculation time when I run the cloth simulation, will it also significantly up my render time?? And also, do I, or do I not, need to bake my cloth sim before I render?
WhiteRabbitObj
02-17-2004, 01:56 PM
Every time you run a cloth sim it automatically creates a cache and to resimulate you have to disable or delete that cache anyhow, so baking it is not necessary. You can even add a poly extrude on the cloth object after running the sim and it will update the extrude so it has some depth! Just don't delete history obviously. Upping the base resolution is going to add significantly to your calculation time, exponentially it seems. I ran a sim on some large curtains hanging from a railing (it was a throne room sort of env) and they each had a resolution of about 250 for a total face count of around 45,000 and that took about 12 hours of calculation per curtain for around 60 frames. So be careful on how detailed you decide to get, the more collision objects you have the more costly it's going to get.

As far as render time, it will not add "significantly" more render time, it will simply add more render time the same as having more faces in any other object you have. Cloth is basically just polygon faces so having more means more render time but nothing special because it's a cloth object.
lasaire
02-17-2004, 02:15 PM
Thank you!
Pete2003
02-18-2004, 12:43 PM
Hi,

Just thought Id mention that on highend3d there's a scipt called bakeCloth that basically saves you all the hassle of loading up the cache that the cloth creates (never seemed to be able to get that working properly).

Anyway, having done some work with cloth recently, I found that I could let the cloth calculate on a low-med res, then bake it, then just apply a polysmooth to the baked version. Might save you some render time if you look into doing this.

Worked for me although I was just using it with a draped cloth object, dunno if this method would work for something more complex like clothing, worth a try tho! :)

EDIT: Oh, and the final render times will be similar, this method would just save some time in the cloth calculation if it seems to be taking ages.
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