Syflex Help ??

[bravmm]

Pete,

go to http://softimage.com/products/xsi/videos.aspx
there's some videos halfway down the page.

cheers,

rob

[comanche]

Hi,

in the Syflex help (xsi/doc/syflex) you'll find the zipper in the "Forces" section.

Regards,
Andreas

[pete]

Oops I must have missed that in the docs. Thanks guys, that's actually pretty straight forward.

I'm still having a few issues though, this has happened a few times actually but while i'm on the subject i might as well bring it up. But it seems that when my sim gets at all complicated the playback starts acting up in a really annoying way. I press play to check the sim but then xsi shuts me out and wont let me do anything (including stopping it) untill it reaches the end of the timeline :sad:

Has anyone else had this problem? I've had to force quit xsi quite a few times so far because of it...

[oktawu]

if ur using a wacom tablet, thats the most annoying "bug" in xsi for tablet users. (might happen with the mouse too, cant say cuz i havent used a mouse in years)
there are a couple of workarounds, one of which i discovered not so long ago.
when u press play and the sim starts being calculated, usually theres no way of stopping it.
what u have to do is either press on the play button again then immediatly take ur pen off the board (old trick).
the other way is to repeatedly press on the timeline at frame 1 or 2 until the sim stops. this has always worked for me and i find it alot more convenient than making weird moves with my hand on the tablet.

syflex in xsi works great, but u have to keep in mind its very picky with values. use only small increments and pay attention to the changes. it takes a while to get around with it, but once u do, ull see that its a very good plugin. also one very important thing is to never sim with high res geometry, like for the cloth. use as minimum resolution as possible in ur geometry, enough though to achieve ur goals, and then use this low res to drive ur highres modelled cloth (using cage deformers). u can actually hook up ur highres to ur lowres in realtime, and switch between the lowres and highres object to see ur results better, and if ur not fully satisfied with the results, after baking the sim, u can use the shape modeling mode on top of ur shape track to go in and model certain morph target states on the cloth and then blend between them to fully control the way ur sim looks. ull be amazed by what u can do and how fast u can achieve great looking results, without going through simming ordeals.
now the only thing that bugs me about syflex in xsi, is its integration compared to its maya counterpart. i know most studios using syflex have been (and for the most part still are) maya houses and most development went into the maya plugin, but its about time syflex start putting more work into the xsi side. hopefully now with stiff competition from autodesk itself (ncloth), theyll start puttin more work into it. syflex in xsi lacks some very useful functions that it has in maya, like the syhair module, the mimic constraints, maps of any kind (like wrinkle, density), a couple of forces and so on.

nevertheless its one hell of a product that can be used for a load of things, not just cloth

[pete]

Oh my God!!
Thanks oktawu, you saved my life man. That playback thing is a tablet bug. It was driving me nuts and i would have never have figured it out.
It's a bit of a pian but at least i don't have to wait while xsi chugs through frames of sim.
Thanks again. :)

As for the cloth stuff, I totally agree with you on the proxy mesh setup. I am having some trouble still however. I can't seem to get a collider working :( I have checked out the docs but it just doesn't seem to work.
I select the cloth object then the object i want to be the colision object then choose collide>collide mesh but when i run the sim the cloth falls straight through?

[oktawu]

here ya go. its a scene containing all the concepts that ive talked about above.
check out the settings, play around, and ull get the dos and donts of the collider settings.
also make sure ur geometry has the "center" operator on, so if u freeze transforms make sure u remake the op (use move pivot at center for that). also make sure ur geom is clean and the modeling ops frozen. dont know exactly what ur doing wrong, but u are doing something wrong. either way, i had this scene lying on my drive for some time, and im sure it'll help u and others.
njoy

http://rapidshare.com/files/58786342/syflex_example.zip.html

[pete]

awesome thanks again!

[yann22]

Well, this is for Maya, but I don't believe there will be that much of a difference:

http://www.digitaltutors.com/store/product.php?productid=1352&cat=69&page=1

Cheers,
Yann

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