Ncloth: Component To Component

[walcottd]

It's been a very long time, but I sort of remember cpCloth plugin (I did a lot of cloth for Reloaded but that was in 2003) had the ability to constrain a piece of geometry to a cloth object. During the simulation, the geometry could ride like a "button on a shirt."

Now in 2009, nCloth, this idea of a piece of geometry riding a deforming cloth doesn't seem as straight-forward. Anyone know why? The docs mention component to component as the perfect constraint. I convert my geometry to passive object (isn't this counter-intuitive and extra overhead for the solver?) and constrain all of its points to a few cloth points. The passive object doesn't move with the cloth, in fact, it stays very, very passive. Any ideas on specific workflow for this effect? Or is it typical to convert the geometry to cloth as well, and use plastic presets? Again, seems like a lot of steps for something that should be intuitive.

Duncan's parentToSurface script works, but why wouldn't that just be a feature of nCloth? Seems like converting every character costume detail to passive rigid bodies would be expensive and this option from the previous cloth package would be ideal. It feels like I'm missing something.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. And, Duncan, if you ever read this, the parentToSurface.mel script is a clinic on how write mel code.

Thanks!
walcottd

[akjones]

Maya Muscle has Surface Attach, which might do the job for you.

[walcottd]

I'll look into that as it might be a good alternative. I noticed we have a lot of scripts here that do similar things to what Duncan script does. My fear is that this is something intuitive and a logical need that the button constraint fulfilled perfectly. Since I have to write a lot of docs for our pipeline, I like to keep 3rd party utilities out of the content until the more advanced topics. Maybe I'm just wondering out loud why it's been removed?

Thanks for your help mduvekot

[duncanbrinsmead]

The old cloth was a 3d party licensed technology that was replaced by nCloth. It might have been good to extract the button code from the plugin and put it into the base maya, but one can get pretty much the same functionality with the follicle nodes(that script sets up follicle nodes and parents the button geometry to them).

At some point I've been meaning to extract the constrain to surface functionality of the follicle to a simple node, but have not gotten around to it. It would also be good to have some nCloth menu items for button constraints... there are several possible setups depending on the desired effect. To simply tack an object to the surface the parentToSurface script should work well for most uses. This is now part of Maya, so you can simply drag the script onto the shelf and not worry about keeping versions up to date.

For tacking cloth together one can create component to component constraints for faces, which can create a button-like attachment. (constraints between faces keep the faces from twisting with respect to each other)
Buttons can also be modelled as simple poly planes which are then made into cloth and given constraints to simulate the thread. The actual button model can then be attached to the simple cloth planes using the parent to surface script. This allows the button to behave more like a dynamic rigid body.

Duncan