Any Tutorials on Cloth? Thanks

[jinanddong]

Beside the maya cloth tutorials on its documentation CD, is there any good tutorial on cloth? I want to learn more about the foundamental ideas and programming issues in Cloth. Thanks a lot.

[mestela]

Just finished that big cloth based job, updated my cloth notes again with more simple tutorials and a bunch of observations/tips:

http://www.tokeru.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/MayaCloth

-matt

[jinanddong]

Thanks very much, and your web really is helpful.

[krunko]

Hi Matt,
Great tutorials, thanks for making them available!
Best,
David

[jinanddong]

Hi, matt. the cloth tutorial is really helpful
you mentioned in the article an in-house tool that can cache out vertex animation to external files.
could you explain what it is doing in a bit more detail, how does it help in the cloth project? is it like syflex cache files, which seperate the vetex info of each frame? thanks a lot.

[mestela]

Its basically like a particle cache, but for any arbitrary mesh. We found it was getting unwieldy to do versions with cloth, especially if we had a scene setup for rendering, importing/exporting cloth sims into that hero setup got pretty ugly.

The other major advantage of our system is it saves out per-frame (or per sub-frame if needed) files rather than a single monolithic file, much easier on memory, much more renderfarm friendly too.

From my limited understanding it wouldn't be terribly hard to write, but its applications are endless. Anyone wanna volunteer to do an open source version?

-matt