Clothilde Problem

[unseenthings]

Well, I played around with it for a while... I didn't come up with a perfect solution, but did come up with a few pointers that may be helpful.

One, since you have fixed points and the flag (plane) is a child of the cylinder, I don't think you need the belt tag -- don't think it's helping anything. (which means it's just slowing everything else down)

Two, default settings usually need to be tweaked. :) I think the plane has way too much geometry to start with -- I would do something more like 5 segments across by 10 segments up and down. That knocks your flag geometry down from 400 polys to 50. This will also help the problem you're having. The cylinder has a lot of geometry as well. The endcaps, for example, by default have 3 segments - there's a whole ton of geometry there that is completely unnoticeable/unused, but it's still being calculated in your cloth collisions. I would do something like 4 height segments (1 would probably be fine, really) and 24 rotation segments (and less would work fine, too, but 24 still looks pretty good unless you're right up on it) and change cap segments to 1. Those 3 changes reduce the cylinder's poly count from 504 to 144. That'll mean a significant speedup when your animation is calculating/running.

Three, add in a cloth nurbs object between the cylinder and the plane. Use a thickness of 1 or 2 to help give your flag a little more realism, and 1 or maybe 2 subdivisions. The cloth nurbs helps you use less geometry in your cloth object (again, good for calculations) but still look quite nice.

Four, even with all of your settings untweaked, the stiffness setting seems to be affecting your simulation the most. If you crank stiffness down to 0, the problem you show practically goes away. Of course, your flag also stretches everywhere and you don't want that. So, try my suggestions above and then try playing with the stiffness... too much can be a bad thing. That's not normally the case, but you want fluid motion here, so you don't want it too high.

Hope all this helps...

[chinnr]

Ascent,

Thanks for your input. I'll give your suggestions a shot tonight.
I cranked the stiffness pretty high because otherwise the cloth had lots of ripples in it. It sounds like reducing the polys may solve that problem though. I appreciate your help. I'll be sure to post what I come up with.

[Sammer]

Like ascent said the points are fixed and the plane is a child object which I don't think you actually want. I changed that to belted and a few other tweaks - by no means a final quality but that should help you out.

The cloth nurbs object isn't actually needed, just a habit. You can try lowering the plane geometry and putting it under a cloth nurbs.

Hope something in it is useful to you.

Sam

[chinnr]

Sammer - thanks for posting the file back. I'll take a look at it and dissect your work. :thumbsup:

I had to put aside the "winners flag" animation for a variation of the flag standing inside a logo. Ascent - I used the suggestions you made and they worked very well. It's a whole lot faster now too!

I was told I couldn't post the logo animation yet. When I get it done, and it the animation is used in public, I'll post it. It's not real fancy, and all I'm doing is the logo animation - they are taking it and using it in a variety of ways over other animation/video.

I will try out the suggestions and see if I can get the "winners flag" animation looking good.

Thanks again to both of you! You guys rock! :applause:

[unseenthings]

Glad I could help :)

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