modeling: help with simcloth

[Dave Black]

I've been using simcloth for years. Post a pic of what you have now, and I can help you work this all out.

I've actually released a scene file with some good cloth:
Here's a pic.

http://www.cgtalk.com/attachment.php?s=&postid=343285

If your interested, I can dig up that scene for you.

-3DZ

:D

[schmoron13]

ok first off, all I have to say is that those pics are RIDICULOUS!!!!:buttrock: That's well beyond what I am trying to do, and man, they are fantastic!!


ok, so here's a couple of takes, one done with scanline (and the corresponding wireframe overlay, and the other done with vray free. In order to get overlaps in the cloth, I upped the plane (cloths) to 15x15 segments, and had to use NO smoothing (thus no iterations).

I set it to springs under the stretch forces, due to whenever I used stretch, it came out funky,

I enabled bend forces and exclude selected edges, and use face angle with stifness @10 and Damping @01.

Air Drag was 0.001

let me know if you need more info...

and thanks for the SUPERQUICK response


doron

:beer:

[schmoron13]

I spent so much time trying to shrink the file so i'd upload that it looks like ass now....here's a rendering of the file using vray Free

[Dave Black]

You're almost there.

Try a few things for me right off the bat to eliminate the easy stuff:

Turn off bend forces.

Double the plane's poly count. Apply a meshmooth or something under simcloth3.

Decrease your collision tollerance to something like .1

Run the sim and see how it looks.

Obvously, it will not be perfect at this point as we are not using the new "fiber" effects of stretch/sheer and bend forces, but this will help a bit. Oh, and of course it will also increase your sim time...

Give that a try and get back to me.

-3DZ

:D

[schmoron13]

so I just tried it, and it's looking 10 times better, but I have another question. In terms of poly count, 15x15 segs gave me 450 faces so did you want me to double the segments (30x30) or the faces (900)?

The other thing, I went with about 1000 faces total, and with the other changes, at frame 9 , it starts to lag hard. It's finding about 280 collisions, so it's up to 10240 substeps (set to 10) trying to figure it out...what should I do?

-dron

[schmoron13]

here's a pic of what's happening:

[Dave Black]

Before running a sim with high substeps, try running it with lower ones first.

Set the substeps to like 10, and then set the adaptive subdivisions to 1. Run it, and if there is any clipping, up the substeps first.

You see, the adaptive sub-divisions takes your substeps, and multiplies it by 2 for every iteration. It's great because it's local refinement, but if you let it, it can kill your sim due to just upping it too high.

Like I said, it's better to start lower first, than to set it high and wait forever.

Give that a try, and let me know.

I meant just apply a meshsmooth under simcloth.

Remember, that when you are done calculating, you can always apply a meshsmooth mod on top of everything for a super smooth look....mmmm good.

-3DZ

:D

[schmoron13]

well it's starting to work out, and I have to once again thank you for being so diligent with me...so are you gonna show me how to model a head after this?:p

In any case, I applied the meshsmooth on top of simcloth and it appears that as I hit 2 iterations and above, a black banding starts to pop up, and I can only assume that it's the box underneath the cloth popping through....

here's a rendering of both (0 iterations, and 2)


sorry it took so long, but 3ds max crashed when I tried to load up iterations and see how far it could go.


-doron

[Dave Black]

There is a fairly simple solution to slight clipping like that. Just turn up the collision tolerance to like 1.0 or something. That's the standoff distance for the bounding boxs around the springs on the verts you can't see. :D

Tricky, I know.

There is also another trick that will probably work in this case. Go here:

www.maxplugins.de

and download "Solidify" and install it.

It's an amazingly usefull plugin. See, right now, you're cloth is considered "co-planer" meaning that it's only 2D, even though it spans 3 demesions when deformed. What solidify will do, is give your plane thickness. You can use this to increase the standoff by the thickness of the cloth, and since the interpenetrations are slight, they will be below the top face, but inside the bottom one...

Ok, that was probably the most unclear thing I've ever wrote, but if you could see my hand gestures, you'd understand. :D

Anyway, give the tolerance a try. Also, turn on the "check for intersections" box to make simcloth look at each frame when it's done with the samples to see if it needs to go back and run the sim for that frame again with higher samples.

Whew.

:EDIT: Just to make clear, the solidify mod goes AFTER the simcloth3 mod. So it would be after simcloth, and before meshsmooth.

-3DZ

:D

[schmoron13]

I feel totally retarded. I tried downloading Solidify but couldn't find it on the site.

In any case, I'm off work for the rest of the day (my twin asked me to serve his ex-roomate with a summons for a lawsuit) so I'll try it as soon as I get in tomorrow morning....

thanks again for the TON OF HELP!!!:beer:

-doron

[Dave Black]

Hey, bro, I'll be here.

BTW, the reason you could'nt find the plungin is because it's in the max4 section, not the max 5 section. Since all(99.99%) of max4 plugins work with 5, you can just use that one.

Er...best of luck serving that summons...wear kevlar...or rather spectrashield nowadays. :D

-3DZ

:D

[cold_as_eyes]

hello..i had been reading about your topic guys..and frankly im new to that simcloth thing...so..may i know the settings and how you achieved the effects? HOw you did it? Cause it's really cool..i already downloaded the simcloth3 program for 3dsmax5..all i need is some guides and some tweaks...please tell me...:blush:

[schmoron13]

cold_as_eyes, just follow this thread. 3dzealot pretty much showed me step by step how to do (still working on it though)...

3DZ, no luck with the summons and complaint. No one opened the door (knew I was coming....long story) so I don't know what my twin wants to do now.


As for the project, I downloaded it and it's awesome...I left the collision tolerance @ 1.0, did the simulation/calculation, then applied a solidify modifier @ 0.51", and then applied a meshsmooth modifier @ 1 Iterations (set to nurms)

here's what it looks like now...

you mentioned before (as did the help file) how stetch/shear settings in teh stretch Integrity settings in simcloth are better for simulating cloth. Am I ready to tackle that or do you have more aces under you sleave using the current settings?

Also, how do I create those cool folds on the edges? is that within simcloth or should I model those with mesh edit?

-d

[Dave Black]

Hey, sorry to post so late, I was real busy at work. I did, however take a moment to upload a couple of examples.

You'l need to have installed divx to view 'em.

A test showing springs in action (http://www.3dzealot.com/cgtalk_helpdesk/Clothtest_Springs.avi)

A test showing Stretch/Sheer in action (http://www.3dzealot.com/cgtalk_helpdesk/Clothtest_Stretch_Shear.avi)

An animation showing some advanced effects using Stretch/Sheer (http://www.3dzealot.com/cgtalk_helpdesk/Clothtest6.avi)

You can also download the scene I posted images of back in my first post here:

http://www.3dzealot.com/cgtalk_helpdesk/Soft_Cloth_DYN.zip

Maybe that will give you something to chew on for a bit.

Should also answer your question about the "folded" edges.

-3DZ

:D

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