Tearing/collision Problem

[ametalspork]

Hello,

I'm new to using Maya's nCloth feature, and I've had little luck finding a solution to my current problem so far, so perhaps you board members can steer me in the right direction.

Here's what I'm trying to do:

I'm attempting to have my rigged character fall/tear through a piece of fabric. I've already got the cloth object, and I've attempted fiddling with the "Tearable Surface" option with no desirable results. I've also tried making my character a passive object so they it'll collide with my cloth. However, when I attempt to add the character as a passive object, I've gotten two different errors

1. Warning: Nothing to make passive: All selected meshes are already cloth (my character is most certainly not cloth). My only hypothesis for this is that a couple of separate pieces on my skinned character are constructed with nurbs, because when I try it again without the nurbs pieces selected I get an entirely different error:

2. Error: No object matches name: (insert name of selected geometry part).

The second error is particularly baffling, seeing as my character is indeed in the scene and the objects are clearly there.

Any suggestions? I've done all I know to do.

[mouseman]

here's what I would do and you probably have tried it already...

1.test it out on a sphere tearing thru that cloth mesh.... once you get that running, the rest is figuring out how to get your rig running thru that
2. Convert your character into one polygon mesh (history on, polygon-> combine) and cache it out (using Maya Geometry Caching) over your scene timeline...
3. Now all you need in your scene is your cloth sim mesh with it's ncloth properties.. and the cached out geo...
4. run your sim with that cached geo as your passive object... (no rigs or nurbs meshes stopping you there)
5. keep an eye out for the usual stuff (space scale, substeps, collision iterations...mesh density)...

if you have time to test this out, let us know... maybe we'll learn something too
good luck!