In this tutorial I am showing a special use of Maya ncloth. Ncloth is a powerful tool. It can be used for any kind of dynamics effects from rigid body to soft body. You may familiar with the regular clothing of a character with the ncloth. This tutorial is at an intermediate level but the novice user can learn the procedure if watched carefully.
Parts covered.
Parts covered.
- Splitting a poly object into individual ncloth object.
- Adding fields to the ncloth.
- Caching the ncloth.
- Tweaking the cache file to look the effect in a better way.
Texturing and rendering part is avoided because this is meant only for the effect animation.
- Create a text using text tool in Maya with poly options selected (counts 100 and quad options selected).
- Delete the history and the output curves.
- Now assign a shader and texture it.
- Centre pivot the whole group and individual polys.
- Move the text above the grid plane.
- Freeze transforms the group.
- Now go to ndynamics menu and apply ncloth to the individual letters.(simply drag them in view port and assign the ncloth).
- Right click on the time liner and select “play every frame-maximum real-time” option.
- Play the animation.
- Now the texts freely fall. To get a collision ground, simply turn on the “use grid plane” in the nucleus attribute.
- Now play the stimulation. You will get a nice effect. To add little bit movement simply turn on wind in nucleus attribute and change the axis to Z.
- Optionally select all the ncloth and add a turbulence field with attenuation zero.
- Play again.
- Now we need the splittable mesh. So simply select all the text and add a tearable constraint from ndynamics menu. Select the dynamic constrain and set the glue strength to zero.
- Play again. Now you get the pretty text effect.
- Simple select all the text and create a ncache up to 100 frames with “cache each geometry and per frame attributes selected.
- Now is the trick.
- Select the text and go to polygon menu and give extrude.
- I hope you have understood the procedure well.
