CGTalk - ear bud with sim wire

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gauranga108

01-26-2011, 06:23 PM

I have to create an animation of an ear bud with a wire going to an mp3 player. The ear bud will be constrained to a hand then ear. I was wondering if anyone could point me in the right direction. I can think of a few different ways to approach this but I don't have much experience with simulations and I was hoping someone could add some input.

Idea 1
-create a long skinning poly plane then length of my wire.
-use nCloth to constrain the two ends, one to the ear bud one to the mp3 player
-add some collision objects to prevent it from going through the person model
-run the sim and cache it out
-duplicate the poly plane that was simulated
-create a blend shape to add in the cache and add in some controls via a spline rig
-cache out again the poly plane
-create a wrap to deform my wire

How does this sound?
Overal kill?

Thanks

quirkalfeeg

01-26-2011, 09:29 PM

Sounds like a sound idea - you should have just gone ahead and tried a test scene though as you have it. I used the same technique to rig up some robot machinery tubing and it worked well...Previous to nCloth, I would have used hair but with nCloth, it's just so simple and robust. I think nCloth is almost worth the price of Maya on it's own...almost :)

gauranga108

01-27-2011, 06:07 PM

That's nice to hear that nCloth is such a nice tool. I haven't used it much.

I find in Maya that not all tools work equally. By equally I mean in the stability department.

quirkalfeeg

01-27-2011, 09:11 PM

Heh heh - I was quite evangelical about nCloth when I first started using it. In the good `ol days of standard maya cloth it was a very different story. It would have been a case of "Oh no, a cloth job"!

It really is that good and you find that you can do some pretty funky stuff with it, especially things that wouldn't ordinarily spring to mind :)

Anyways, good luck with your job...

gauranga108

01-27-2011, 10:29 PM

thanks

I'll let you know how it goes.

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