Cloth Simulation - Maya

Over the past few weeks in my Advanced Animation paper, we have been learning about cloth simulation in Maya. We have tried a few different things. One of the first things we did as a tutorial was to make a few spheres and suspend them in the air. These spheres were each given a different material quality from the nCloth preset menu. The floor plane was made a passive collider and then we played it through to see how the different spheres with different material attributes react to the passive collider (floor plane). This is a playblast of my own experiment. The different coloured spheres each have their own material attribute:

Red - Silk

Yellow - Rubber

Green - Airbag

Blue - Water Filled Balloon

Grey - Heavy Denim

Purple - Putty

Orange - Lava

Each sphere has had 100% of it's material attributes replaced with it's given preset. You are able to mix the material attributes to make the objects react differently to get the effect your project specifically requires.

The next tutorial involved making a washing line with a sheet hanging on it and colliding a sphere with the sheet causing the sheet to rip and fall off the line. We had to create the ripping part of the sheet by selecting an area that we wanted torn and using the tear icon in the nCloth menu. We attached the sheet to the line using a dynamic constraint. Below are a couple of playblasts of two of my experiments for this tutorial. There is a playblast of the front view and the side view for each different experiment. 

The sheet in the above experiment has the material attribute of ChainMail which is described as being quite heavy and not stretchy, it is however able to compress.

The sheet in the experiment below has the material attribute of Soft Sheet Metal and is described as simulating thin but soft sheet metal and when you tweak the other settings (bend resistance, compression, stretch and rigidity) for the material, it can make it a stronger metal that barely dents or it can make it a very "bendy" metal that dents easily.

The third tutorial was to put a cape on a character and make the character do a jump so that the cape would react accordingly. We had to change the attributes of the cape to make it react the way we wanted it to react. I wanted the cape on my character to be quite light and flow away from the body but not be that light that it would end up over my character's head when he jumped. As you will be able to see in this next playblast, my character has one leg shorter than the other, which is due to the fact that I accidentally scaled it down without realising before I put the character on reference while I worked on the cape.

We started off with a flat plane and used a lattice to shape the cape so that it was smaller at the top and wider towards the bottom. We attached the cape to the shoulders of the character using the same method as the washing line tutorial. The material attribute of the cape on my character is chiffon but I modified the bend resistance, stretch resistance and compression resistance. I also changed the lift, drag and mass settings as well as changing the wind speed and density slightly. Below is the front, side and back views of the character jumping with a cape on.

The latest tutorial was finally getting to put a piece of clothing on a character and making it sit on the character without the body intersecting or sticking through it. We modelled a t-shirt to go on our characters and then changed the material attributes of it to make the t-shirt react just like a t-shirt does on a real person. The t-shirt needed to move with the characters body and fit to the form of the character. We made the character jump so that we could better see the way the t-shirt moved and stuck to the body of the character. The t-shirt required a little more tweaking than in the previous tutorials and as I still am not quite happy with the way the t-shirt I have made moves yet, I do not have the playblast of this experiment ready to post on my blog yet. However, I will definitely have it ready for my next post which will be up in a few days time. Slowly, but surely I am getting the hang of cloth simulation and with a few more experiments and a little bit more practice, I am sure I will be a pro at it in no time!