Falling Money Piles ...

[Wick3dParticle]

Hey Ryan,

I think that Ncloth is definitely the way to go. What seems to usually work for me is combining a bunch of separate objects using poly/combine... and then converting that to ncloth. That way you are dealing with 1 cloth node. As for speed....Ncloth is newer technology and much more efficient. You also have all the advantages of Ncache.

Good Luck,

~Ilan

[blazelet]

I found a good conversation between Duncan and Als on a thread here :

http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php/t-478177.html

I have looked for something like this over and over for the past 3 days, I found it 4 min after posting this thread. Sorry guys!

I'll try what you say Wick3d. It seems like nCloth might hold the promise I (and my poor computer) definitely need.

Ryan

[YourDaftPunk]

Blazelet- I'm not sure what you mean by bundles of money- the bundles that form bricks of bills or the pallets of money made of bricks? I went with the former as an example, and I did it just as Wick3dParticle suggested and it sims fast- 40 bundles is going at over 5fps on my machine with substeps at 20 (you might be able to lower this).


http://shawnlipowski.com/forumFiles/money_pile_01.0022.jpg (http://vimeo.com/6598595)
animation (http://vimeo.com/6598595)
scene file (http://shawnlipowski.com/forumFiles/money_pile_01.zip)

Notice the nice bending in the bundles. You might try dampening them a bit, making them a bit less bouncy, because they are currently too rubbery, but you get the idea.

-shawn

[Wick3dParticle]

Looking cool! I like the way the wireframe render looks, is that a built in option?
Thanks for taking the time to prove the concept Shawn.

~Ilan

[blazelet]

Fantastic Shawn. Very nice work :) The most helpful part is being able to look at your nCloth settings. You generally use much smaller values than I was ... I think out of frustration of wanted to cease the bounciness, my settings went all over the place.

That leads me to a question. I increased Damping to .9 and still have quite a bit of jiggle. What are reasonable values? Last night I increased damping to something like 1000, just wanting to see what would happen, and I still got a tremendous amount of jiggle on the landing. If I could get rid of the jiggle, I think I'd be there.

Thanks again, awesome work

[blazelet]

I've uploaded a quicktime example of the springiness here (http://www.inspiralmedia.com/Transfer/CGTalk/AnimatedPile5.mp4)

In this particular example, damp is at 15.

[Wick3dParticle]

Hey Blazelet,

You can start increasing the stretch bend and shear resistance, those setting should help slowly build up rigidity to your cash money money.


***Note: Dont use the rigidity attribute, because your mesh is combined, it will make all of the combined geo act as one rigid object.


~Ilan

[YourDaftPunk]

Here's an improved version: scene (http://shawnlipowski.com/forumFiles/money_pile_04.zip)

For some reason I had pressure on, so I turned that off. I tweaked compression resistance, bend, damp, mass and a few other settings. Also, I keyed deform resistance and damp so they increase from frame 50 on and it settles faster.

-shawn

[e3iii]

hey Shawn,

Good stuff on the bundles, but i was wondering, what if i needed to create something like a money pile - link (http://www.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/581154/2/istockphoto_581154-pile-of-money.jpg)

Ive tried making a poly plane - 2-3 subdivisions, made around 10 copies of it, randomized it a little...even added a little wave deformer, combined them, duplicated it, rotated it, duplicated and well...you get the idea...but all and all a whole bunch of em :D

but the issue is the part where you've goto simulate it...it takes alot of time and i end up gettin errors like 'Warning: Nucleus evaluation skipped, frame change too large'

How would i go about creating a pile of money in the image ive attached? (btw i do not need it to be animated...just need that pile so that i could compose it with still photography - manually making a pile would take ages and i would always intersect one of them)

[Cheesestraws]

but the issue is the part where you've goto simulate it...it takes alot of time and i end up gettin errors like 'Warning: Nucleus evaluation skipped, frame change too large'

Change the playback rate to play every frame.

[e3iii]

Hey John,

thanks for the quick reply, but i went ahead and created a new cache and the error went away...apart from that..is there any other way i could simulate this quickly, coz if each note is around 6 faces x 100 notes...it takes quite some time....

any tips on how i could speed up this process?

[Wick3dParticle]

Hey E3iii,

You can try emitting particles with '0' conserve off of a surface modeled in the shape of a pile and instance your bills to that. Then just create a custom rotation attribute to randomize their rotations. You may get some penetrating bills, but you can cover them up with some hand placed bills over that. Since you say its for a still, it makes things even easier because your really only need the rotation on Y (360 degrees) and a tilt on either X or Z - depending on how your camera is facing, you can give it a value of rand(-30,-15).



Good luck,

~Ilan

[Aikiman]

Maybe this could be a job for paintFX?! Design a brush where the bills are the leaves as they branch off the main branch. There is a bit of control as to how you can influence the angles using sliders and ramp widgets. May be easier than using instancing depending on your skills.

Attached is a rough concept, once you got the look you could convert to polys and hand place the wierd ones.

[Wick3dParticle]

This is a quick test of the technique I just mentioned. It took about 1.5 minutes to setup. And I didn't use any hand placed bills here.

~Ilan

[e3iii]

You know Ilan, I had actually considered the smiliar idea but did'nt think it would come out the way i wanted it to...but seeing that it was possible with your render...i went ahead and did exactly what you said and well, i am pretty pleased with the results, except for the small intersections that can be seen between the notes(which you did warn me about :) )...i mean nothing to hard that photoshop cant fix - i could probably figure out the particle collision feature a little more to have my render come out perfect straight from maya and just leave photoshop for color correction.

Jeremy, your technique would have sufficed if i was really in a soup...but something that i should have not over looked as well - the power of paintfx...never actually considered it..mmmm :)

thanks alot guys!

hope the render looks decent, atleast for a quick test...

cheers!

(on a lighter 'note' - all this money and not worth a single penny)

[e3iii]

ok, ive been thinking about it and to really make it believable, would it be possible to hook this state up with the ncloth and then in some way try and relax the edges a bit so it would then look like each note is resting on another...?

[Aikiman]

I would use a deformer on the instanced object first and bend it towards gravity , see if that works.

[Wick3dParticle]

you can try using this script to un-instance the particles in to geometry:

http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/dynamics/c/uninstancer

and then continue on from there.

~Ilan

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