Hello, I am currently trying to create a rather hairy ape-like creature and would like to give the long fur a little dynamic motion during body movement. I have groomed the fur already and I have played around with the cloth dynamics system on a simple sphere. This works so far. The problem with using the cloth method on the creature is now, that the strand meshes are all intersecting with each other and the base mesh (due to the grooming) - which of course creates lots of problems with the cloth simulation, mostly it does not even start. I have found the option within the Edit-Guides-modifier to push away the guides from the surface but is there also a function to push the guides away from each other? Or should I start over with as few guides as possible (I have used about 5000 for now)? I needed to increase the guide count because for some reason the root distribution was quite even all over the body except the head, there I even had to plant several roots manually to even have something to groom with (I have tried several distribution methods). What would be the best workflow for this case? Are there any proven Cloth settings for different hair types? It seems there are very high settings needed for bend and stretch resistance and damping to make it keep the basic grooming. Thanks, Bob |
| Howdy Bob, There is not currently a tool or option to push guides away from each other. On thing you could try is to use the MassFX dynamics to do this. It will create a shell around each guide and push them out of each other. I would suggest using as few guides as possible for dynamics. This is always a good practice. Using few guides will should allow you to control them better and not have interpenetration too. Thanks Michael |
| Hello Michael, thanks for the advice. Unfortunately I am still struggling with the workflow. Here is what I did: - deleted all cloth-related modifiers for now
- added an OX Dynamics modifier on top of Edit Guides and played a while with the settings
- Baked the simulation (which took a surprisingly long time)
- Looked for a frame in the animation, where the guides were more apart than before (it is hard to pick a good frame since several guides were nervously jittering around and the others slowly sink in to the body)
- I chose a frame and used the Collapse-to-command on the dynamics modifier, saying yes to the warning
- put a new edit guides on top of the baked guides to use the push-away-from-mesh-function, unfortunately it did not do anything anymore
- so I looked in the baked guides and saw an option to specify the distribution mesh, so I did that. But then all guides were going into a completely chaotic mess. So where do I go from there? Have I missed something? I thought, I could somehow use the MassFX result as a new start for the cloth approach, or did you mean something else? Thanks,
Bob |
| Sounds like there is a lot going on here. If you can post a simplified scene that shows your issue I might be able to offer a better suggestion. If you do bake out your guides you need to use a distribution mesh and it seems like this is were your running into you major issue. Your guides can go "crazy" if the distribution mesh or guides have been scaled in some way so I usually recomend resetting the Xfrom on both just in case. This will usually make sure you end up wiht a propper result. Thanks Michael |
| Resetting the XForm unfortunately did not change anything, another checkbox did the trick: When I baked the guides, topology-based was activated, by selecting the distribution surface it got deactivated, which results in guide chaos, activating it again rearranged the guides again. So this seemed to work, but I still have no luck making a cloth-simulation out of it. I pushed the guides away from mesh again, maybe there are still collisions somewhere I do not see but I always get a "Warning! Simulation failed: cloth has become over-stretched". I even tried with deactivating solid and self collisions and changing the cloth settings back to default. Don't get me wrong, I highly appreciate your effort, but at least for this project the dynamics are becoming more trouble than it is worth, so I probably give up for now - unless you maybe have a great tip for me on how to probably overcome the simulation failure. Unfortunately there is no time to start from scratch with fewer guides, especially since the guide distribution was not even and I had to put several guides manually to have something to groom. I cannot make this file publicly available by uploading it here, are there other options? Thanks,
Bob |
| Sure Bob, You can upload to dropbox or another site and shoot me the url over email. michael.mccarthy@ephere.com Thanks Michael |
