Cloth in AM ~ Suspension CPs
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CLOTH IN AM
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INTRODUCTION
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HOW AM CLOTH WORKS
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COLLISION DETECTION
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CLOTH CONSTRAINTS
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SUSPENSION CPS
Part 6: Giving control back to the bones.
Delete all the material generated by the Cloth Wizard. Then go back into the model and select the entire grid. Hit ‘E’ to make an Extrusion group. Pull that up above the model and hit delete. What you should have now is a lot dangling splines above your model, like in this illustration.
Extruding an extra set of CPs.
These are what I call “Suspension CPs”. In point of fact, they are regular CPs that will serve to scaffold Cloth. Notice that by hitting delete, you deleted the patches, so you don’t have any new geometry to render. Also, since the curves of patches are defined by an intersection of 2 splines, these new splines rising out of the grid’s intersections do not alter the shape of the geometry in any way.
Make sure to go into Bones Mode and add the new CPs to your grid’s bone.
Go back into your Action and to Frame 0. In Muscle Mode, from the front view draw a bounding box around just the grid, leaving the Suspension CPs out of the group. Right click on the group and select the Cloth Wizard.
After extruding the extra set of CPs and adding them to your grid bone, select only the grid itself to apply Cloth to the whole of the renderable geometry.
Run the simulation. Here is my result.
My animation with Suspension CPs.
The Cloth now follows the bone’s movement, but I haven’t sacrificed the automated secondary motion
The motion may be a little odd, but the thrust of this example is that the Cloth is now following what the bone is doing. This is because we added those Suspension CPs which are animated simply with bone movement. By leaving those Suspension CPs out of the Cloth group, we’ve forced the Cloth Wizard to create Masses with Mass to CP Constraints at every one of those CPs and springs to connect those Masses to the grid beneath.
By leaving the Suspension CPs out of the Cloth group, they all get Mass to CP constraints applied to them.
This is the most direct method of applying control over Cloth. By extruding an extra set of Splines and CPs that neither render nor effect the shape of the geometry, we can make use of near-direct bone control of Cloth. I say “near-direct” because what is actually happening is the Cloth group is still ignoring what the bone is doing just like it always has. We’ve made it exert influence on the Cloth group by binding Masses to parts of the mesh that are not part of the Cloth group, but connected to it via Springs. So, in point of fact the Masses and Springs are dictating the movement of the Cloth, but we’ve forced the Cloth to pay close attention to bone movement via the Suspension CPs.