Advanced Tips

#21

what does this refer to? your example didnt have any thickness to the skirt, it was just a single poly thickness. Im having a hell of a time with dynamic collisions, this is unacceptable really.

#22

The dress is only one poly thick but its not paper thin.

#23

i still dont understand, is there a “not paper thin” check box im missing somewhere?

#24

Stooch

The dress is a cylinder with one smoothshift thickness or 1 poly extruding inward.
without it, it would be “paperthin”: Polys with no extrusion on the z axis.
So yes the dress does have thickness to it.
The thickness is the space between the two opposing faces.
Open the model in a modeling app to see.

Please read the manual on the softbody toolset if my example is not doing it for you.
better yet gotoPMG site and check out Joe’s softbody tut.

#25

ok thanks, that cleared things up. I think it was a terminology issue, instead of saying “paper thin” its better to say that the dress is extruded solid instead of being single polygon thickness. You can still have “paper thin” thickness with an extruded solid volume, thats what was confusing me.

oh and i watched joes tutorial 10 times allready, nowhere does it mention anything about solid cloth, in fact the tutorial on the pmg website is what made me use single polygon thickness…

edit, update.

i tried giving thickness and playing around with my model. the verdict is, softbody in messiah is useless for collision. its just not worth the hassle. So far my experience with messiah is raising serious doubts that our company will ever adopt this program full-scale. it just has too many bugs and not enough documentation. Sucks, but what can you do…probably the best layout and workflow i have ever used is being crippled with serious issues and a dubious update cycle. :frowning:

I am eagerly awaiting the new update, definitelly holding my breath as far as SBD and documentation is concerned.

#26

I don’t know about you, but wasn’t it always a pain to use RenderGroups? Dragging all objects to a group to render it with one specific material (let’s say specular only)? And then dragging it back again to get another render with different settings?

Well, now you can have that all way more easy. I just found out (thanks to an innocent comment of Thomas) that you are able to stack RenderGroups.

Just take a look at the image, that should explain everything. If not just ask (yes, I know I am lazy :twisted: ).

RenderGroups.png820x541

Some people don’t seem to understand the above graphic at first sight. My bad. PaulNewman made another picture which hopefully helps explaining the use of RenderGroups.

#27

Alex! Dude! This is very cool!

#28

Ever wondered if it is possible to link, say, two MultiNoise nodes together, that are not in the same material?

Well, it is actually quite easy.

Select the node, that is your controlling node (your parent and in this case MultiNoise_2) and then ALT-click in front of your child node (MultiNoise_1) - click there, where in the image the “1” is shown in front of MultiNoise_1. You should see two “1”'s appearing. Done! Now whenever you change the parent (the node with the big number on the left), the child (the one with the smaller number on the right) changes accordingly.

Be aware that the GUI of the slave will not show the values of the master, but it will render correctly.

Edit: Of course, I completely forgot to give credit. Thanks goes to ThomasHelzle for remembering that is was discovered on the Beta list ages ago. :slight_smile:

#29

You don’t really have to alt-click. Left clicking does the job!

#30

A video demonstrating how to create a simple head rig. Video by Taron.
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=341005

#31

Create a metaeffector and effector and name them properly, move the effector out of your mesh where it does not touch your mesh at all. Then select the bones you want to disable and assign newly created metaeffector to those bones under setup-bone-weight panel. When you need them back just select the proper meta effector or “none”.

#32

Below is a link to an excellent SSS tutorial by Gary.

Here’s the first video tutorial (.wmv format) on how I use SSS with messiah 2.4d. I essentially learned this on my own. So, this is not the final word on SSS in messiah. So, with that having been said … I hope you guys will learn something new … enjoy!

#33

An interesting little write up on metaeffectors and particles from Thomas:

Ok, the basic idea is:

  • Make a Metaeffector.
  • Add as many effectors to it as you want particles.
  • Create a particle effect.
  • Select the Metaeffector (that has all effectors as children) as the “Slave Parent” item in the particles interface. This makes all children of the Metaeffector into particles.

The other stuff should be easy. Select the Metaeffector as the weight in the weightspot and do with its value whatever you want…
The main problem with messiah particles is, that they don’t have real instances, so you have to have as many effectors as you want to have particles.

If you have collision with full friction and no bounce, you should be able to get it to work as you described. Having no gravity will prevent the particles from moving after collision. If the mesh is moving, you will have problems since there is no “sticky” behaviour yet.

But it should give you a lot of options to play with. :thumbsup:

I hope this helps

Cheers!

Thomas Helzle

This originally was in regards to this post: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.php?p=1800691&postcount=11

#34

Workflow tip:

If you select the ‘edit’ button on the bottom of the ‘list view’ box and open up your items in the ‘animate’ tab, you can edit values in the list view rather than going into the dialogue box below.

In the ‘render ‘materials’ sub tab, and the list view, you can edit ‘node values’ rather than selecting the nodes from the node window.

tip. If you don’t see the channel you would like to edit, just right click the channel to activate and it will appear in the list