CGTalk - nCloth Footprints

RhythmOfLine

11-17-2009, 01:02 AM

Hello Everyone,

I am trying to make footprints with nCloth. Tehre are no collisions, just active foot objects and a passive ground(snow). I am using the 'push out' attribute to make depressions int he snow.

My problem is that there are two sets of footprints at different intervals and everytime the first footprint makes contact witht he ground and depresses it, the depressed polys in the deformed ground tries to come back up and move. I want it to stay in place and be rigid like snow and not move or change shape.

Deform resistance helps with this but I will have to key it on and off and it works except when the second foot goes to make a print, the first print starts coming back up if I key deform resistance back to 0. If I don't set it back to 0 then, there cannot be any footprint since it won't deform at all. Hope you get my drift.

Any ideas? The only thing I can think of is to make two separate renders for the two different prints but thats lame.

Would appreciate any creative solutions/suggestions!

Thanks!

Warm Regards,
SD

aghill

11-17-2009, 10:55 AM

I dont know if your setup could be done differently, but in any case, you could allways freeze your footprints with blendshapes - its obviously very tedious, but it would work...

Skoczylas

11-17-2009, 01:08 PM

Thats one thing I also want to know. I understand your problem but dont know how to solve it. Hope some nCloth expert got a solution!

HowardM

11-17-2009, 01:30 PM

This kind of works, but not perfect.
You need to use Input Mesh Attract to keep the whole thing from moving around. You also need to lower Restitution as far as you can before it explodes, shame it explodes when set to 0 which would stop any of the mesh trying to return to its shape. Also jack up your Dampening.

Maybe this will work or at least set you in the right direction.

Havent played with Soft Bodies lately, but perhaps you can do it faster with them?

As suggested, perhaps do this sim, go to last frame, save a blendshape, and then paint on/off each footprint...

arkangel-fx

11-17-2009, 02:19 PM

Soft bodys would be the right way to go. The way SBs work make achieving 0 restitution much easier than ncloth.

HowardM

11-17-2009, 03:14 PM

yeah, just remade my scene as soft body and damn thats much faster :)
my initial test literally punches the polys down, where ncloth makes nice smooth humps...
im sure you can make soft bodies do same... youd hope ;)

at least its good to know same method works for ncloth.

Wick3dParticle

11-17-2009, 07:17 PM

Hey Everyone,

We discussed this topic not too long ago in this thread:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=86&t=798791&highlight=ice+age

I used Ncloth to do the footprint. What I did to get those results was to lower the bend and stretch resistance to '0'. Then I set the Drag to '2' and the tangential Drag to '1'.
I also set the gravity to '0' in the nucleus node.

Here is the demo I showed:

http://ilanimations.com/r&d/footprint.mov

That demo is a bit older, so if you use the settings I mentioned here, it should work pretty good.

Hope this helps,

~Ilan

Wick3dParticle

11-17-2009, 07:21 PM

here is a demo file:

~Ilan

HowardM

11-17-2009, 08:00 PM

nice one, you found the magic numbers - screw my scene ;)

softbodys are realtime though, nice!

arkangel-fx

11-17-2009, 09:05 PM

softbodys are realtime though, nice!

well, it much depends on the mesh density, but yes, pretty fast for some things.

Wick3dParticle

11-17-2009, 09:40 PM

They both have their benefits. I think Ncloth is pretty stable, and having the ncache is great. But sometimes using something like softbodies is simple, and fast to sim.

So it depends on your needs.

~Ilan

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