Hmmmm, how to start… well for the beginning Maya is not my primary program… I have experience with cloth simulations in Max principles are similar, but Ncloth is (in my humble opinion) far superior compared to Max’s cloth.
So I have 2250 frames of character animation made in Max, with few hundred frames of him standing still in T pose at the beginning. Skin of a character has about 10 000 polygons (all quads) and it has been cached in the single XML file weighting about 750 MB.
It has been transferred to Maya in FBX format and cache works pretty well, now it’s time for cloth simulations. First odd thing is if I transfer pieces of wardrobe (i.e. french hat, sweater and trousers), nothing too complicated in modeling area… pretty light models… as FBX in Maya, their mesh is triangulated, no i did not check that option in FBX export options… skin preserves quads, wardrobe- not :surprised, I must add that modeling pipeline was the same for the character and the wardrobe!
So I had to transfer them as, OBJ… no problem, quads are here. So I decided to first simulate the french hat, smallest number of polygons, easiest to setup!
I must admit my computer is a 4 year old clunker, core 2 duo 2.6 Ghz, 4 GB of RAM, Win XP Pro SP3.
Setup of the french hat goes nice, first i wrapped it to the character, painted input attract values, scene scale, all those steps I red about in many tutorials… simulation itself, i.e. during ncache writing to HDD (a file for every frame), goes pretty smooth for this poor computer of mine… hat is holding nicely, not too many penetrations, nothing extreme what a few parameters changes couldn’t fix, processors are at 65-75% , RAM usage is about 38 %, everything goes well until the frame number 2231… then Maya crashes… drops like a stone… each time… same frame exactly! Here’s the best part… it happens in both Maya 2010 and 2013 with SP2.
It reports Kernel errors in case of 2010 and appcompat error in 2013. What is wrong? Too weak computer? Windows error? I have no viruses for sure… Bad cache on character skin? I’m slowly sinking in despair…
Question for ncloth experts... Mr. Duncan?
Well, the main root of your problem could be tricky to get to the bottom to as there are a whole bunch of variables going on here. Here are a couple thoughts for your setup. Your attachment method of using a wrap deformer will work fine for things like your hat (As long as it is far enough from your eyebrows if they have any movement) But wrapping could give much wonkier results for body and legs. Not unusable with the right settings…just wonky. (That is the technical term for janky) As a quick alternative, I would recommend skinning the cloth meshes with your character in Max. As for the triangulation on export…that is not good and there must be a way to pass that data without triangulating things. Any chance of using Alembic caches? But even if you have skinned but triangulated clothes, these might be better to wrap to than the body. If skinning the cloth is not an option for some crazy reason you may get better results than your wrap on the clothes using some of the powerful but enigmatic nConstraints.
That doesn’t really solve your issue though.
Unless someone knows the technical silver bullet for this kind of issue, I would recommend just reducing your “few hundred frames” of T-pose and maybe settle for 30-50 frames. It seems your cache is just a scant 19 frames from finishing. So just cut those first frames off and get back to work!
Hope that helps.
At least it will keep you busy until the real answer comes along.
Try just hitting play and let it sim. So you can eliminate caching as an issue.
Then just keep eliminating feature until it stops crashing. 
It may be you are running out of RAM.
You could try and cache half of it at a time and then append the cache files.
Solved… my mistake, although this looks like no real reason for maya to crash after all… it turns out that my skin cache from Max was 2330 frames long, while my time setup in solver was 2350 frames long, so when skin was left without its cache Maya crashed… although last pose of the character is same those measly 20 frames and the cloth is only settling down.
This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.