nCloth - Tearing / Help Needed

#1

Hi everyone!

I’m trying to do something that should be quite easy to do (I would have imagined).
I am fairly new with Maya, so i’m sure the problem is mine! But i’m getting stuck with this problem with the nCloth “exploding” bits of cloth sort of debris like flying all over and i’m not sure how to get rid of it.

So i’m using contrains to held the cloth together and then paiting the area where I want to cut with the brush, apply a Tearable Surface on that section and finally use a cone with pretty reasonable density mesh as a passive collider to then do my cut.

Here’s a playblast from maya,
https://www.dropbox.com/s/l6lnphcf8vnsum5/TearCloth_04_B_.mov?dl=0

This is from Cinema 4D,

This is what I sort of wanted to achieve with the nCloth, but better results… but I would be happy to not have the cloth exploding debris to start with, https://www.dropbox.com/s/6jxras35s1uv7zu/01_SurfaceCut.mov?dl=0

Any help would be much appreciated as i’m completely stuck with this at the moment!

Thanks!!

#2

When you painted the tear line I think you may have made it too wide. Maya separates the edges within the area you paint and it looks like this has resulted in polys being completely cut off from the main cloth. Try keeping the painted line much thinner.

David

#3

Thanks for your reply David, I have tried it limiting the ‘brush’ quite a lot, and also tried with just selecting one line, but still getting the same result of the cloth “exploding” … :frowning:

#4

If you can post a scene that demonstrates the problem I can maybe offer better advice. I’ve done a lot of tearing but I use edge selections (not via a brush) to prepare the cuts and to create the vertex-to-vertex constraints. But I’m familiar with maya’s inbuilt workflow.

David

#5

Here is the scene file, thanks for looking into it!
https://www.dropbox.com/s/k0742ro6mj3i5v7/Cloth_Tear_04_B.mb?dl=0

#6

The attached image is a snapshot of the wireframe of your cloth input mesh with border edges highlighted. A dynamicConstraint keeps the border edges together until the force pulling them apart overcomes the glue strength.

As you can see you have many individual faces that are completely surrounded by border edges that will potentially separate from the rest of the cloth once the dynamicConstraint is broken - either by the cone colliding with the mesh or by the momentum of the cloth moving around. In your video you are seeing these small pieces breaking off.

When you paint the line for the tearable mesh try to do it more precisely with wireframe on shaded enabled so that you can see the edges your are covering - make sure you are mainly picking just a single edge path through the mesh. You may wish to make more of a vein like pattern, or like a river with smaller streams branching off the main one. This will look more like the jagged edge you showed in your c4d reference.

David

#7

Thanks for looking into it! I’ll give that a try!! Much appreciated !