N cloth research and tests

My premise animatic anticipates lots of flowy fabrics throughout my final animation. I therefore spent some time researching how this can be achieved in Maya, and discovered nCloth. Found within the FX workspace, nCloth can transform geometry into materials that respond realistically to attributes like gravity and wind. Passive colliders can also be generated, which interact with nCloth geometry.  

Test 1

The first test I conducted demonstrates how passive colliders work. The sphere has been set as a passive collider and the plane an nCloth with the preset of silk. I increased the gravity to speed up the fabrics fall rate. 

I started by creating a plane and set its subdivisions to 50, which prevents the fabric from having sharp low-poly angles as it flows. I next created a sphere, this will interact with the cloth as a passive collider. There's lots of presets and attributes to play with when generating an nCloth that change the fabrics constitution; a tshirt will respond differently to silk as it falls or flows in the wind. 

The image below shows how a cloth animation can be paused, and the geometry duplicated to create a static replica. This can be repurposed for a model set, like a table cloth. 

The Nucleus can be found at the centre of the viewport grid. This can be selected and, within its attributes, tick "use plane" to make the grid a real ground, similar to a passive collider. A fabric will not fall through the grid when "use plane" is activated. 

Test 2

The second demonstration explores the uses of gravity and wind within the Nucleus' attributes.

I started by creating a plane and positioning it, setting the subdivisions to 50. I selected 'nCloth' and 'created nCloth'. I hilighted the top and bottom pair vertices on the geometry's left side, went to 'nconstraint' and selected 'transform constraint'. This keeps the selection in position, as though tethered to a static object like a flag pole. Next, I selected the nucleus and increased the wind speed to 50, wind noise to 1 and X Y wind direction to 2 and 0.3. Wind noise adds randomness, preventing unrealistic rhythm. Finally, I scrubbed to the middle of the timeline and found a frame I liked, before selecting the geometry and 'field solvers', then 'initial state' and 'set for selected'. This removes the ease-in at the start of the timeline. 

Notes