Is maya able to simulate this? (3dsmax can't)

#1

Hello,
I have a technical problem:

I am making a sequence, where I show a growth of the human fetus, from week 1 to week 6 in one shot, which goes for 2000 frames.
I want it to be a soft body animation that sits on the table. In reality, when any object grows (like pumping baloon), it reacts with the table and table reacts back, moving the balloon. It is a natural feedback loop, sort of self-propulsion.

I work 15 years in 3dsmax, where I found it impossible to make physics rigid body collision with complex morphing/deforming mesh (or cached animation object). It generally seems to be a simple problem, but it turns out impossible to make it as standard physics simulation.
I even tried with turning the fetus into a particle system and meshing it, but then it cannot be properly animated, there is poor animation control over glued particles. Not to mention about unwraping, because final thing will have a photorealistic textures.

In the link below I’ve tried to change the idea of making preview 3dsmax animation of growth object pushing a large fabric beneath it. It may be considered as something growing on a white sheets:

//youtu.be/R2SxOkvO1bk

But I want it to grow on hard surface, table.

Is there any standard solution for this in maya?
Thank you, and please excuse me for my crippled english.

#2

Does the fetus cache have a changing point?
If not, it should be a relatively fun and exciting task for nCloth.
You could try a mix of input attract and/or input mesh. nCloth supports animated source meshes and pumping pressure effects as well.
You could get quite complicated if you want changing the base cloth properties based on distance to table. So the stuff against the table could be squishier than the main mesh.
This would need a bit of a higher level workflow but it could indeed work.

There are some options as well if the point count of the source mesh does change. But I will save any comments on that for more info.

Crazy test render there…and haunting…there is no way I ever looked like that…no way at all.
:slight_smile:

#3

There is a morphing of 10 different fetus stages during these 2000 frames.
I’ve tried to import the whole animation from 3dsmax to maya with alembic cache. It worked, but I am too bad in maya - for example I couldn’t even move the imported alembic, it looked locked in position. So I am f—ed right from the start with any experiments in maya…

I know basics of ncloth, but with non animated shapes only.
Do you think could you try to test if this is worth of try - if I provide you the alembic file?

Right now I did a partial solution by adding a 3dsmax flex modifier - it deforms a mesh (with vertex motion) according to it’s motion. It gives you a jelly/soft body effect. It can also collide with deflectors, so I colided it with table. It looks good, but its fake, there is no actual back action from table to the fetus. Therefore, it is not moving, “crawling” like every shaky object would do. I had to add this slight crawling by myself, manually.

Don’t worry, the object on the video has no proper textures, and it looks literally like shit on this youtube sample. Today I am working on textures and additional textures.

#4

The first thing you should do is create a wrap deformed cage to approximate your object as it goes through its “life cycle” that way you can test against a very low poly object. To try and sim against a high rez object like that would just lead to frustration.

Your alembic file is probably huge that is why your haveing issues in Mayas viewport.

If your using Maya 2015 I know you can GPU cache large files to help with playback, but I admit ive just seen this demo’d and havent played with it myself yet.

good luck…ambitious for a first time Maya shot.

#5

mandark, my alembic is not huge, it is very small, around 35kb per frame. It is a low poly model, designed for physical animations. So there is no need of putting it into a warp cage (FFD in 3dsmax).

Soon, I will put next test renders, I am still faking it in 3dsmax.

#6

Just trying to help.
Youll find that asking someone to do your work for you and responding that way to someone only trying to help wont make the professionals here want to help you.

#7

Okay, thanks mandrake.
I have a question regarding maya dynamics.

I was able to create a simple setup with torus-donnut which is inflated with pressure. It falls to the ground, and inflates even more.
It works in maya and it looks perfect.

But now I want to make a simple keyframed animation of donnut distortion. For example a noise effect - all vertices of donnut start to gently move around in random directions. In max it is called a noise animation.

how to animate it in maya?

#8

Here it goes with better textures and cord and wetmap:

//youtu.be/d03DY76GgPA

It is not finished yet, camera movement and some details around will be corrected.

Its partially done in maya (umbilical cord dynamics) and 3dsmax.
Rendered with Octane, about five hours on 2x780gtx in hd resolution.
Final, cinematic version is going to be rendered in 4k res.