Hi all,
I have tried the flag plug-in many times and I have read the read me, but does anyone else have experience of the flag “tearing” and artifacting about ten frames into the simulation. I find it quite frustrating but I appreciate its a port from an old sigraph project. Any ideas would be great! thanks!
Anthony
I’d simply say to put the flag plugin to bed and give SimCloth a whirl. You’ll have considerably more capabilities. You can find Simcloth at the Paralumino store. Its free.
I don’t see how you could have a flag blowing in the wind using simcloth?
That is, until we have some kind of forces brought into EIAS.
Hi,
This video in the EI gallery, was created by Richard Joly
http://www.eitechnologygroup.com/gallery/image_full/1148/
Best Regards,
Phil
Perhaps one could parent all the scene’s elements (including the camera and lights) to that pole, so that the results are more or less the same.
Yes… its true that Rodeo and Simcloth do not have dynamic wind forces yet. Definitely needs to be added in the near future I hope.
Flags can be done in Simcloth, provided they’re attached to a moving pole as seen here:
http://www.paralumino.com/movies/Flag_WM_3c.mov
However, creating “fake” flags can be accomplished a number of ways. Animated deformations is one way or you could try a technique with Scrim by deforming construction curves that in turn variate the lofted geometry. You can see the technique in the PVT for Scrim (about half way through). It’s then very easy to pin one construction curve in place and then deform the rest… works pretty well.
http://www.paralumino.com/downloads/pvts/Scrim6_ConstructionExamples.mov
Could be nicer with a little more adjustments. I just wanted to show that it is possible to do it. You have to apply Rodeo first then, when it is calculated, apply SimCloth to the flag and render. Then adjust… then render… then adjust…
As for the flag plugin, I seem to remember you have to run the animation once (after making any adjustments to the plugin) before rendering. Otherwise, there are problems.
It’s been a couple years since I used it, but I found it works quite well.
JM
I did that and it works but with a large scene with many groups and camera movements it could become tedious to adjust SimCloth for a believable flag simulation.
Well the simple fact is we need more dynamic forces. Ultimately, EI needs to integrate soft body capabilities into Rodeo because I doubt the Igors will take SimCloth much further.
Rodeo is based on ODE, which is a rigid dynamics system. To do cloth, you would need to license one of the cloth systems, simcloth being based on the open source one… You would get a lot further working more with simcloth, poser’s cloth system is based on it, and it very useful.
I would love to see the Igors take simcloth further, but I can imagine their free time is short.
Cj
Very good point Cj. Rodeo is hard surface dynamics only. I would just like to see a soft bodies modules added to the dynamics subsystem…and it would be nice to also tie it somehow into Rodeo. Perhaps its not possible.
As for the Igors availability, you’re definitely right. They’re working on v8.
I have recompiled Flag for universal-binary and handed it off to Matt for distribution.
