cloth and wind.

[super gnu]

its been ages since i did any cloth sims. i remember in the past i was able to animate cloth with wind and have objects occlude the wind as they passed by?

as an example a window opening a crack to let a jet of wind in, then closing again.. causing one side/corner of the curtain to be lifted.


im going back to what i remember but the max cloth and wind system doesnt seem to offer any kind of geometry occlusion for the wind.. im not sure how i did it before. damn my goldfish memory. 15+ years experience and im constantly having to re-learn stuff i did ages ago.

[Morne]

If you're using MassFX for this, just add the window and walls etc as part of the sim. It will work out when the wind goes in between the opening in the window.

You could add lowpoly (not renderable) dummy objects for the walls and windows so the sim can do its calcualtions faster

[super gnu]

ahh possibly thats my issue, i was using the old cloth modifier, not the newer mcloth one..

[super gnu]

hm, redone the sim in mcloth. apart from seemingly being worse than the standard cloth modifier for simulating cloth (one! cloth preset for cotton, as opposed to the many in the previous modifier, no sim with drag function, pinning of vertices seems even more flaky.. etc. etc. ) ,

i dont see any improvement in wind occluding.

ive got a low poly mesh for the wall with holes where i want the open windows. the curtain runs over the whole wall. wind is outside facing openings.

ive got all elements added to the massfx sim correctly (i think)

when i sim, the entire curtain is lifted by the wind, equally along its length. no sign of the wind preferring the opening to anywhere else.

[Morbid Angel]

post your scene so we can take a look.

[super gnu]

UPDATED! i had the sim settings too high so it was slow, heres a faster one : wind blocker.zip

max 2014.. as far as i can see there has been precious little massfx development since, so i assume newer max version wont help. .

[joconnell]

Yeah, mass fx was nvidia physx which looks like it's been superseeded by nvidia flex, there's bullet by alpha vfx too which looks cool but I'm not sure if any of them can occlude forces.

[super gnu]

Yeah, mass fx was nvidia physx which looks like it's been superseeded by nvidia flex, there's bullet by alpha vfx too which looks cool but I'm not sure if any of them can occlude forces.

hm. i know ncloth in maya can do it, has a feature called "wind shadowing" i kept finding links to it when i was searching for tips for max. so are you confirming its not possible with massfx? the other two got my hopes up. and to be honest im sure i did it somehow in the past. maybe it was with reactor (RIP) now, i cant even see how to do it manually, since there is no option in the wind gizmo to limit it to a volume of space, apart from decay, but that only works along the wind axis.

[super gnu]

oh ho ho bloody ho.. it was reactor, the sadly missed (if rather flaky and outdated) dynamics system that autodesk replaced with something more stable but infinitely less capable. it featured "wind sheltering" using rigid bodies. X years later and it still has tons of features that the latest max is missing. (soft bodies, "water" etc..) i might have to go back to max 2008 (or whichever it was)

[super gnu]

i saw somebody suggest that you can assign the vertices of curtain in front of the window to a group linked to the wind force as a workaround (hack) however that seems to be broken. i get no response from the wind at all when i set it up like that. sometimes i hate the half-baked tools in max.