Maya Cloth and Fur or Syflex and Joe Alter?

[dmcgrath]

Maya's cloth works really well, and it's fur shader isnt bad, but from what I've seen, Shave is the way to go, it renders loads faster, and is ultimatelly more controllable. As for the other Cloth sim, Im not familar with it. Have you used the other Cloth sim before and been able to compare it to Maya's?

[tomb]

I havn't had any experience with Maya Cloth or SyFlex so I can't really compare. I've heard that SyFlex is a great cloth sim but I don't know anyone who uses it.
http://www.syflex.biz/index.html
It was developed by Square USA and used on FF Spirits Within and Animatrix. The demos look pretty cool.

[ACFred]

I love both Maya Fur and Cloth. In the hands of the experienced, they can produce excellent results and Maya's tutorials for both really do a nice job of giving you the building blocks to quickly get up and running. I find Maya's Fur and Cloth both pretty intuitive with manageable interfaces. Add in that you can interface with Maya's API if you need to add features to Fur & Cloth or expedite repetetive tasks with MEL, and you've got yourself the winner.

Joe Alter's Shave & A Haircut has a neat interface and the overall results are good, but it renders SO SLOWWW, although my experience with Shave is just the betas so the final may be a touch faster. For anything but the simplest hair, the rendering took an amount of time that would be unacceptable in a production environment unless you can throw a LOT of CPUs at it.
I have no experience with Syflex, but I do remember that their demo movie had a moment of interpenetration between cloth and body geometry, which I thought was a bit weird for a company that exists to supply a cutting edge cloth simulator.

[Kabab]

If you go unlimited you get all the fluids stuff as well i don't know if you need it but it can be usefull.

[dmcgrath]

I guess as an overall package maybe you should stick with 4.5 latest release. And then spend the extra money on a third party renderer.
I was under the impression that Alter's Shave rendered much faster than Maya's fur plugin, I could be wrong though. I saw it working on a dual P3 and it seemed fast, but it was just simple hair.

[tomb]

At the moment I'm leaning towards the Plugins. With the extra cash I can get MayaMan and the Air renderer. Most people tend agree that Joe Alter is worth the cash. SyFlex I'm pretty certain will do the job. There were some good testimonials on the site but you can't be sure how bias they are coming from their own site. I can't find any reviews on the web.

[bjoern]

hey tomb

I've downloadet the shaveTrial yesterday, to compare
it with mayaFur.

Results:

Sorry Joe, but I had never seen a plugin that ist so
unusable for the guys without a renderfarm. :shame:

Shave:
símple sphere and the default Hair

Maya:
símple sphere and the default Mayafur

My adjustments for MayaFur

proper for rendertime:
Density 50000 (default is 1000)

adjustment for a simple Look:
Base Opacity 0.6
Tip Opacity 0.16
Base Width 0.05
Tip width 0.03
Scraggle 0.339
Roll 0.298

the rendertime for MayaFur is 5-10% of shave!!!!

hopes this help

bjoern

[bjoern]

my post aimt on animation.
For Stills, ok take shave :)

bye
bjoern

[womanonfire]

Syflex is a beautiful plug-in, the way it works is very logical. Maya Cloth will drive you inzaaaaaane !

[vizion]

either way , u will still drop a load of cash...hoepe it's worth it to u in the end...

[Boolieman]

Unlimited rocks and i got it for free

[alexx]

aha.. for free??

edit: and yes: androids dream of electric sheep...

now i lay me down to sleep
try to count electric sheep
sweet dream wishes you can keep
how i hate the night

(man.. i cant remember a single poem from school but i still know this one by heart ;)

[Boolieman]

What is the big differnece between the plugins and Maya Unlimited 4.5? Really since Maya comes with those plugins dont they?

[tomb]

alexx, you're a Blade Runner fan too, kewl :cool:

What is the big differnece between the plugins and Maya Unlimited 4.5? Really since Maya comes with those plugins dont they?

Syflex and Joe Alter plugins come with 4.5 Unlimited? Sounds good to me :curious:
You got Unlimited for free? :shame:

[Modulok]

Syflex and Joe Alter plugins come with 4.5 Unlimited? Sounds good to me


:surprised If they do I'm missing a few CD's then :curious:

-Modulok-

[onlooker]

QUESTION: Has anyone tried the syflex cloth on the Mac?

From what I've heard about syflex cloth (PC) is it works better than Unlimited cloth (report from 1 source) Much less hassle to get the desired effects your looking for in cloth simulation.

EDIT: Personally I would like to see Unlimited come to Mac.

[tomb]

I managed to get my hands on a demo of Syflex for PC. I think it's a quality piece of work. You can select any poligonal object and make it a cloth object. Then you can add collisions, forces and adjust the stiffness and damping. The simulation evaluates very quickly and the cloth rarely intersects. The movement is very realistic and it's calculated very quickly, realtime for low poly objects.

I don't know how it will run on OSX but I would guess fairly well judging by the quality of the plugin. Try contacting them for a demo: http://www.syflex.biz

[playmesumch00ns]

If syflex is fast, reliable and intuitive then go for it. I'm not denying that Maya cloth is a quality system, but in my experience it's given me headache after headache.

[Octagon]

Originally posted by tomb
[...]
The simulation evaluates very quickly and the cloth rarely intersects. The movement is very realistic and it's calculated very quickly, realtime for low poly objects.


yup, i saw a demo, too. the simulations are really fast.

but one thing i noticed is, cloth inter-collisions are disabled by default in syflex and _enabled_ in maya cloth.

this can lead to some big "aaaahhh" and "OOHH" (positive)effects when using syflex for the first time, i guess.
since i havent done anything serious with maya cloth until now
i wonder if it's at all possible to disable intercollisions with maya cloth (should be a toggle setting)

what i really liked about syflex is how easy and straigh-forward the whole process of setting up cloth seemed. no laying out panels or anything.

cheers,
matthias

[Kabab]

I think that entire panel laying out concept is actually taken from how people make cloths in real life..

So if you know how to make/design cloths in real life it should click for you :)

[rsalonen]

Hey tomb, I also want the demo of Syflex, is there a download page for it, or do you order a cd?
How did you do?

[tomb]

Originally posted by Octagon
yup, i saw a demo, too. the simulations are really fast.

but one thing i noticed is, cloth inter-collisions are disabled by default in syflex and _enabled_ in maya cloth.

this can lead to some big "aaaahhh" and "OOHH" (positive)effects when using syflex for the first time, i guess.

That's true and as I rember cloth inter-collisions were unavailable in the demo. On the other hand I can't think of many instances when you would need inter-collisions exept for things like capes, long skirts and draping cloth.

Veqtue: You will need to contact the guys at Syflex about getting the demo.

[Octagon]

Originally posted by tomb
[...] On the other hand I can't think of many instances when you would need inter-collisions exept for things like capes, long skirts and draping cloth.


I agree, but then again those kind of clothes might actually be the very reason why one might consider cloth _simulation _ instead of faking the cloth motion through whatever other means (skeletons, softbodies etc.)

so in the end those "exceptions" where one might need inter-collisions in the cloth could easily become the average case, i guess ;)

just my 2 cents,
matthias

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