How did I deal with…?

Simulating Clothes Using nCloth in Maya

The goal of this exercise is to simulate a dress on a mesh driven by a motion capture. This are some key moments in the composited  scene (camera, model and MoCap provided by MPC):

These are the tasks I'm executing for this simulation:

Dress

I am using a Low‑Poly version of the dress to run the simulation. Once cached, I'm creating a wrap node to attract the High‑Poly geometry to my cached mesh. Also, I am skinning the upper part of the dress to a lower resolution version of the dancer's body, and using it as a collider to spare resources:

Necklace

I am simulating the necklace basing its deformation on a nHair curve node, an independent Nucleus, and another simplified version of the dancer's body as collider:

I am letting the motion capture drive the simulations, caching the Nucleus solution, and adding an attractor onto the high‑resolution model, keeping the general deformation.

Simulation driving another simulation

I'm following the same procedure on this other example (again, model, MoCap and camera provided by MPC):

This project has the additional complexity of simulating nCloth over a prior nCloth simulation. I am solving this by skinning the shirt under the vest, using the former as collision, simulating over it, and using low‑res versions of all 3 clothes as attractors:

There is so much more from VFX besides cloth simulation. Click on these case study links to know more:

Grooming Human Head

Grooming a human head using XGen in Maya, linking geometry to descriptions, simulating, caching, applying shaders, rendering and compositing.

Maya Muscle for Skinning

Simulating Maya Muscle on a rigged human character, using them as deformers on skinning and letting it drive Maya Nucleus nHair and nCloth.

VFX for Environment

Simulating nParticles and force fields in Maya for an exterior environment including wind on vegetation, air particles, volumetric lights and water.

Simulating Fluid Injection

Simulating a fluid injection for a shoe sole using nParticles in Maya. Understanding the briefing, developing simulation tactics, caching and rendering.

VFX Workflow

Letting animated characters drive VFX using Maya Nucleus, including flexible cables, molten metal, smoke, sparks, and optical effects.