Cape/Flag Animation

[SirRon]

I know it's not a flag, but it might give you some ideas on cloth against wind.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/Sirron/Animation%20Work/AnimExercise01.gif

Probably the best thing would be to find some videos of a flag flowing and rotoscope it. If it still doesn't move the way you like just study the video and pick up characteristics. A couple I've learned is that at the ends of the cloth it tends to whip so you see the other side. And there's a rolling motion where you see the same shape moves across the edges. (In the example I have notice when the cloth is almost to the ground there's an edge that just rolls across from right to left.)

BBC Motion gallery has some good examples too: LINK (http://www.bbcmotiongallery.com/Customer/SearchResults.aspx?searchText=flag+wind&type=Simple)

[mef]

You can use cloth or reactor in Max and then render with the toon shader.

Marc

[MajinPunisher]

Sirron- that BBC motion gallery is a great resource. Thanks for that!

Mef- also a good thought. I'm going to have to look into some tutorials on reactor as I'm not familiar with it whatsoever. Any that you know of that are good that you could link me to would be great.

I haven't decided which of your two suggestions I'll go with, but I may go with a hybrid if I can figure out reactor. In that, perhaps I'll render out a cape-shape in reactor, blowing in the wind, and then rotoscope THAT.

However, I'm not certain, I'm still in the bording phase for this, and my end result, I envision being fairly high contrast, and backlit, which makes me feel like I have to be extra cautious in how I animated the cape. Then there's the possibility I guess that I could do the cape in 3d, rendered toon shaded, with the 2d drawn animated character (that doesn't actually have to move that much).

I'll keep this thread posted.

[foxwolfen]

If I may pipe in here myself.

In my question a few posts below ("Newbie Question") I have a pic of a running man with his shirt billowing out behind him.

I was planning on tackling this in one of two ways.

1. Set up the shirt in Maya and then rig it to animate in MB. From MB i will "Rotoscope" the shirt animation by hand (not tracing but taking reference points).

2. just do a series of study sketches in Photoshop, because ultimately I want to be able to freehand this under any circumstance. (my pride prevents me from purely tracing).

With photoshop I can fire out a few series of hand drawn animation test frames in an hour and see how it looks when I play it back. I do not know about others here, but I replay my animations/clips dozens of times and refine it one bit at a time.

It takes longer in the beginning to do it this way, but with practice the hand becomes trained and soon I find I do not have to think about things as much, they just start to come naturaly and quickly.

[MajinPunisher]

foxwolfen - you make a good point. That's how I've been gearing up for this project - by studying similar phenomenon, like the BBC link that sirron sent. However, I've kind of gotten interested in getting Max's Cloth reactor to work.

That said, after trying a tutorial, i cannot get cloth reactor to work.

I followed the tutorial directions to a t. I even simplified my scene to this:

one plane, 30 segments by 30 segments. Vertical. I set the top two rows of verts to be fixed (so that it would hang in space). I applied a reactorCloth modifier to the plane. Then I set up a cloth collection (or whatever its called) and set the reactorcloth into it. Lastly, i set up a wind force, with some wind speed, etc. When I click "Preview Animation", max crashes, after a series of error messages preceded by one that says something like "Set Pixel Amount" and then an error/macro log that has a bunch of stuff that I don't understand.

I don't know if anyone out there is familiar with this problem in reactor, or familiar with reactor at all. I have no idea what's going wrong, and am willing to write it off as a bug in my max.

thoughts?

[mef]

I haven't had this problem at all with reactor and I have to say that it's pretty stable for me. But with that said, I find that using the cloth simulator in Max to be much better than using reactor cloth. Check it out and see if you get bettter results.

As for your problem with crashing, since I don't know which error messages you're getting, try doing the same thing on a different machine and see if you still get an error message. Sometimes these things could be a problem with the system and not the progam or the user.

Marc

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