ART 282: Animating cloth physics in Maya

okay in this video I'm going to cover how to create club physics in Maya for your animation right now we have the character performing his animation so it's at this point finished enough for the cloth you want to make sure animation is completely done and ready you could do cloths at any point but it's better to add it after you've um got your guy moving alright so once you have the animation of chapter with I have the cloth already here on its own layer right now it's kind of just parented to the guy so it's kind of stiff like a board just polygons just stuck to there so we're going to add a little physics that's looking a lens and kind of flow at the wind alright so to do that let's go back to frame 1 click on the 12 that we want to animate I'm going to move this into a position that kind of better matches his armor piece so let's say it's kind of duct to the armor so I'll put it under here slide it over some more and then rotate it out of this leg and pull it up a little more okay so we'll call something like that so it's kind of like attached to is our piece so we're going to take this cloth piece let's rotate it down a little more for gravity I guess rotate up a little more cool all right so we've got the cloth here we're going to go over to FX so pulling up the FX tab this is my 2016 Billy it matches with our version you're using once you're in the FX tab we're going to go to ncloth and we're going to go to create and cloth so we click on create and cloth and now there's physics on the clock relatively simple if you scroll through really slowly you'll start to see that the cloth starts to fall there's nothing colliding with it I'm going to play it at real time it's a very slow effect you can't calculate fast enough so I'll cover that a bit more soon so right now we want to add some collision to the guy as well so I'm going to click on let's say unreferenced I'm going to grab our park and then this armor piece and then let's grab his body so all three of these will have collision against the cloth I could grab some of the belt straps as well but these three pieces should work they're kind of the primary pieces to want to grab these pieces go back to where it says end cloth but instead of creating an end cloth we've already done that we're going to create a passive collider which is the collision against the end cloth so let's click on that and all three piece is now turning to a Collider so if I scroll really slowly again you can start to see that he's pushing the cloth away with his actions again it's not quite working together is not playing at them correct speed so what's happening is that we go to settings right now we're playing it at real time the computer can't calculate this physics fast enough to play at a real time speed so if we set this to play every frame and press save now when we press play it's not going to play at the correct speed but it will give the computer enough time to calculate all the different effects that are occurring with the cloth so you see the cloth is moving it's being pushed away and at some point it's going to just kind of fly off in the distance because he's pushed it out of the way and now I was just kind of drift away so the clothes physics works except to the fact that it's not actually attached to the character so it's in the very place but we need to glue it to the character so you can either glue it or like if if we'll just call it glue I looks like elastics it's like going around the hips or something or something some kind of shirt the gluing or elastic probably want to think of it so I'm going to grab this cloth and go to vertex mode and select the vertices that I want to be attached so let's grab this big cluster up here so that should grab all of these and once you've selected the vertices that you want to attach you click piece you want to attach it to the hold shift and then let's click you can grab the next piece so the armor piece will be the primary like glue point for this or if you're attaching let's say a shirt to a character you can grab a vert or let's say a skirt for the characters it could grow something you'd grab the vertexes around the top layer of the belts area and then use that and the main body as the glue point if you have like a elastic around the waist now I say either way we grab this and we go over to an constraint the last time we were doing end cloth for the cloth and the collider now we're doing end constraint there's lots of different types of constraints you can use the particular one I'm going to use here is point to surface from I've selected the points that I want and now I'm going to attach to the surface that I want to attach it to so I click on this one and now you can see that it kind of put some lines in here and it's glued to the piece that I am I want to have attached to so if I click off that and then do my little impress play what you'll see is that this piece is now pulling and attached to here so it's not going to fly off in the distance anymore so we'll keep moving and it goes really slow because it has to calculate a frame by frame but it's attached to the character it's not flying away you have all these physics already added in there the issue or not the issue the next thing you want to take into account is the quality of the fabric being blown around let's press stop let's go back to frame 1 when you're on frame 1 you can click on flowing frame 1 will reset the animation if you go too fast it just doesn't have time to calculate so let's set the back to frame 1 alright so click on this guy and if you press go to the attribute editor control a shortcut for that we look over here at collisions we have a bunch of different settings so you can pick on and if you go to dynamic properties we have a whole bunch more settings we can play with you can adjust things like the collision strength the collision layer the thickness of the cloth these self collide with scales kind of kind of figure all that is you might have noticed when it was colliding all the polygons were kind of intersecting with each other so adjusting the collision settings over here should help with that I could try out say putting the collision layer up one you put the collision strength up by something maybe collide self it just takes a lot of time to come play with these things kind of understanding we're always settings are you can go down here we've got to stretch resistance how my stretchy it is compression strength see what the compression is how much is it pushing it against itself a bunch more settings there's the dampening settings we've kind of like us smoothing out so it doesn't get too crazy I guess so all these different things you can play with so if I were to press play now it should act a little bit differently hopefully we won't collide too much intersects with itself it might take a little bit longer to calculate now that it's um has some new settings on there but more or less it's working go a little bit a couple more frames rotate screen a little and eventually when he turns around they lurk you'd screen a little more think you get it starting to get hot buns up too bad so we'll call it good enough for now let's go back to frame 1 and let's say you also have a couple other options you can go to presets over here by clicking on this presets tab click out of that go back on here so when you're on the cloth aside from all these options as presets and you can pick from lots of different things if you want silk you can replace the material or just start blending different layers of on type of fabric in there heavy denim loose knit you can do chainmail I'm not sure with honey and lava are you can do concrete there's a leather up here somewhere and rubber so you can play with those and kind of pick whatever settings you want and then after you've picked that you can also adjust the more settings here so those lots of different combinations you can work with once you're kind of happy with this I still won't play quite at real speed so in order to create that real life effect now we're going to go kind of like baking the animation in a way we're going to save the animation it's under n cache so we've gone through ncloth and constraint and now we're in n cache if you create an end cache let's say if you have to select on cloth first so once you select the cloth you can go to create and cache and object so by clicking on this sometimes might ask you to replace if you already have some saved in there so I'm going to replace whatever cash I had last time so now it's going to go really slowly just like usual and calculate the entire timeline for me once is calculate the timeline it will then allow me to play this back at real time having memorized all the effects we don't have to recalculate again it's just going to fit saving all the positions that are going to be occurring so let's just go through let's say once and so I can show you guys the end result essentially every time you make a settings change here you could leave this on play every frame and when it's on play every frame you don't have to worry about the end cache you just play it and it will update you adjust the settings play reframe and it'll update but when you want to see it at real time that's when you would use the end cache so once you've used and cash once it's going to keep playing that no matter how you change the settings so you have to if you want to change more settings again you have to go back up to end cache here and click on where it says delete cache once it's deleted the cache then you can go play every frame again and see the changes you make but then again it's not going to be real time so in that case if you want to make changes and constantly watch it at real time you just have to go to like I did and cache and replace the the previous cache and that way you'll play the real time but it is a little time consuming to have to sit there and wait for calculate real time every time but it's just about done now cool you can see it's a little bit jumbled up now so there's still some more settings to be played with but if I were to press play you can see it is playing a lot faster and cleaner and still jumbled up there but it's still not at real time because I think we still have a set to play every frame so I'm going to set this to real time now and since it already has cache in there and set this back to frame 1 now it should play at real time and have a cloud service already built in like gods move around and look at them from any angle it doesn't need to calculate all the collisions again it's already saved that again it does need a lot more fixing on the settings over here to correct for that another thing to take into account when it goes around and creates all this jumbly stuff if you want to smooth this off sometimes it helps to have more polygons more probably owns could increase your render time but if you click on this and go to how we're going to set it back to modeling mode and it's have right there mesh smooth mesh so that's going to add more density to your polygons which will allow more fluidity and smoothness to your fabric let's go back to modeling FX or the tabs for FX and it's not going to change your settings again click on this let's say I want to adjust some of these things put this back to where it was and sure let's put that down there and we could try it one last time so because I've already all the changes I've just made won't actually show off the catch is still remembering the cache that we've already made so if you want to see the difference you're going to have to go through and change it again you can see it's looking a little cleaner because we've added more geometry but it's not changing the settings so under over here n cache you can delete the cache in which case now you can go back to play refrain with slo-mo or you can create a new cache or just replace the cache you already have if I replace the cache on the an object I've already selected on the call so it's going to allow me to do it otherwise it will give me an error message so I'll replace this and it'll ask if all in a place at a price yes and now that I've made some changes it's going to save these changes and allowed me to play back a real time again hopefully won't take too long and this should give us a a new clean result you see it's the fabrics flowing a little smoother now that has more polygons so that should help as well once you're done and this is finished you could do the regular render settings or you can right-click down here the timeline and do a play blast and about to play blast so whatever option you like to go with if you have let's say a shirt or something else you just model the holster on him you wouldn't necessarily have to create the key vertices that were glued in place because the whole shirts coming kind of adhere to them hold on to him all right so it looks a little bit cleaner now let's play this back in real time and you can see that it's a lot more wavy it's getting a little more jumbled up in there I mean not as bad as was before just kind of colliding a lot which is a little more realistic that it would collide like that and more or less that's how you would create a cloth physics in Maya there's a lot more that you could go in more in-depth but for a quick quick overview of how that works that's how you would use end cloth when you're done just right-click playblast adjust some settings and play a blast off the copy cool

Channel: Aaron Granofsky

Views: 46,426

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Id: nNiX-6inysw

Length: 14min 27sec (867 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 24 2017