How Can I Make A Custom Control For Switching Between Input Mesh And Simulated Mesh?

[haakon]

Hi! I'm rigging a cartoon character that has an animator friendly custom control for controlling the strength of Ncloth effects. The X-axis of the control is the driver, and is working well for controlling the strength of the Ncloth deformation, but I also want it to turn Ncloth simulation completely off and display the input mesh when the control is set to 0. How can I achieve this? Ideally I'd like to do this with driven keys, as I have very limited scripting experience. But I haven't found any attribute that controls the display of input mesh vs. simulated mesh. Is there such an attribute?
See the controller here

In the script editor it says:
displayNClothMesh "input"; When I click on display input mesh, and displayNClothMesh "current"; when I click display current mesh. How can I script this to work with my X-axis control slider? The script would have to select all the cloth objects on the character..

Any help appreciated!

[chris-wombold]

This actually is very easy to do. In the nCloth Shape Attributes (you can see them in the channel box) the very 1st one is "Is Dynamic" it's probably set to "on". You can use this attribute to switch the nCloth on or off. You could set driven key it or you could just direct connect it to your controller.

There may be some troubleshoot yet to do with this setup. I've tried doing this before and found it incompatible with certain rigs. I don't remember what they were or what specifically was messed up. But just be aware that there may be some future problems.

[haakon]

Thank you for the suggestion Calibrix! but I already tried that before I posted, that attribute does turn off simulation, but it does not hide the simulated mesh and show the input mesh. This means that the Ncloth body of my character does not smooth skin deform in the viewport(unless you play the simulation from the start). Anyway I found out the solution was to go into the hypergraph and set driven key on the visibilities of the right shape nodes, the one named Shape(mesh) and the one named outputcloth(mesh). Now it works like a charm! I hope this is helpful to other people with the same problem