CGTalk - baking soft bodies

Tylak

10-01-2003, 06:09 AM

[NOTE: just realized there is a maya dynamics forum.... my bad, I'm sure some kind moderator will put me in my place soon enough. sorry :/ ]

good morning maya junkies,

I'm using softbodies to drive my lava pit. I want it to flow around a little bit so I set up a simulation with a softbody poly plane (the lava) divided around 20 or 30 width/length. I used a -1 dist turbulence field and a goal weight from the original plane topology. The simulation worked great after a little tweaking.

Problem is that I'm trying to render out a 400 frame fly-thru with all sorts of finely tuned lights and shaders workin their butts off and I really need to distribute the render onto multiple machines.

I have never had much luck baking/caching softbodies. How do I go about it? I ran thru the maya docs and did not find what I was looking for. The only clue I have is the [ ] cach data check box under my particle attributes. But that doesn't seem to do that trick as when I scrub thru the siulation I got weird and varied results.

Anyone have a clue? Or some Full Sailors going thru CSE right now?

Thanks

verbal007

10-01-2003, 06:25 AM

If you go under the 'Solvers' menu (Dynamics menuset) there's a 'create particle disk cache'. It's pretty self-explanitory, or there's info in the helpfile about it.

Can't wait to see how everything turns out.

- Jeremy

Tylak

10-01-2003, 07:09 AM

very good my friend, precisely what I was looking for. I just chached all 400 frames (about 35mb of data) and it works perfecty. I'm gonna kick off a render on 3 machines before I leave for class and it should be done when I get back.

minos365

10-13-2003, 05:38 PM

I HAVE A QUESTION

HOW CAN I BAKE SOFTBODY TO BLENDSHAPE

daddyo

09-23-2005, 02:57 AM

I am experiencing a somewhat similar issue. I turned lattices into softbodies, so that I could use fields to animate underlying poly kelp and give it a flowing motion.

It works ok, but the whole setup multiplied my scene size by 4... I was wondering whether

1) I could bake the animation on the lattices into keys, remove the dynamic simulation

or

2) cache the particle animation (I will have to render this pass on several machines)

I have 2 goals, 1) making sure the animation will render smoothly over several machines and 2) trying to reduce the size and complexity of my scene...

Any help would be much appreciated.

azshall

09-23-2005, 03:26 AM

I HAVE A QUESTION

HOW CAN I BAKE SOFTBODY TO BLENDSHAPE

you essentially have to duplicate every single frame of animation .. and make a blend shape between all the duplicates.

it then helps to create a locator with a custom driver attribute with a float value say .... 0-100 ... and then do a set driven key on the blend shape blender node from 0 being 0 on the custom attribute and 1 being 100 on the custom attribute.. this way you can get an extremely smooth blend .. whereas 0-1 .. especially with a lot of surfaces.. can be difficult to get precise numbers.

az

minos365

09-23-2005, 03:38 AM

azshall thank for your help,I will try

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