Wednesday, 7 February 2018

Major Project: Initial nCloth Silk Tests

After some feedback in regards to my silk textures, I began working with nCloth and different Fields/Solvers in Maya. It took me many attempts to create something that wasn't too plain/boring such as the cloth just sliding across the floor, or something that was too chaotic and made the fabric go crazy. I wanted something that had interesting movement but wasn't too hectic. I experimented with different fields and solvers, but ultimately I just worked with gravity and wind on the nucleus node. I did use a Newton Field to morph the polygon plane (what I used for my nCloth) so I could have the fabric already draped/flowing for its initial state. I did not want to have the fabric follow the Newton Field though since I felt this would look too artificial. I tried out the Vortex Field as well but I found that was too chaotic and didn't give the effect that I wanted even when I changed the settings.

For these tests I rendered out longer animations than normal, so I'm including the full videos via YouTube since the GIF files would be too large to include the full duration.











I tried different camera positions in relation to the fabric, one being more distant, another tracking the fabric, and the other staying stationary but closer to the fabric. I still want to experiment with this overall as I feel it needs more testing and tweaking, but I wanted to show my progress with this so far. Also to note, this has been tested and rendered in Mental Ray so this is not the final textures/lighting, it is only temporary since it renders faster and I'm using my other computer for Arnold specific work.

2 comments:

  1. I think this is going to work, Dee. I would suggest as you experiment more trying out different shapes - for example, the sequence could start with the camera looking at a complete flat circle of fabric commensurate with the other objects/entities in your space, but it catches a breeze and is suddenly free. The other thing - and this is subjective I know - that the red colour is so indicative of danger that it's hard to find it as peaceful/restful as the poem itself sort of requires. I'm happy to be shot down on this because the colour maybe deeply significant in terms of your network of meanings...

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    1. No I agree...I was thinking that as well actually. I think my initial texturing tests I was trying to figure out how to make the light scatter properly rather than the colour then with these tests I focused more on the fabric simulation. I actually tried to tone down the red in that final test a little bit because I didn't like how the red was looking. I was thinking of doing a pale blue or pale purple, but I'll probably put together some colour variations soon to see what works and to explain my reasoning behind different colours :)

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