Moving Objects With Ncloth Attached

Maya
1

This is a basic question but one that seems hard to find an answer to. I have a character with a ncloth skirt. I have a point to surface constraint to hold the skirt to the character and it is parented to the bones. The skirt sticks to the object fine where it was originally bound and if I move it at a normal rate in my scene. However, I need to translate the object some distance from the origin for my animation. When I go to move it into place, the ncloth will shoot into place.

I see that there is a "start time" in the nucleas node. But when I set the start time and move the object, the ncloth skirt stays at the origin until the start time begins. At which time it shoots into position (going nuts to try to resolve why it just translated hundreds of feet away from its start point). There is something I'm missing here.

I think this really comes down to proper parenting of all the garbage that ncloth creates--I'm not sure where things need to go.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

2

It turns out that the solution was this:

I made my object ncloth and used the "local space" option when I assigned it. (Not sure if this fixed it as much as the item below)

The constraint object that served as my "point to surface" constraint was parented into my bones (I had it that way before, so this wasn't a change)

The real fix I believe was this: I took the ncloth object (the skirt) and parented it to the same bone as the "point to surface" constraint mentioned above. I then set the start frame on the nucleus node to the start of my animation (in my case, it was frame 2100).

After that everything worked fine.

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