Introduction

 
 
 

With the Maya® nCloth feature, you can create dynamic cloth effects in Maya. nCloth is a fast and stable dynamic cloth solution that uses a system of linked particles to simulate a wide variety of dynamic polygon surfaces, such as fabric clothing, inflating balloons, shattering surfaces, and deformable objects. nCloth is generated from modeled polygon meshes. You can model any type of polygon mesh and make it an nCloth object, which is ideal for achieving specific poses and maintaining directorial control.

nCloth is built on a dynamic simulation framework called Maya® Nucleus. A Maya Nucleus system is composed of a series of nCloth objects, passive collision objects, dynamic constraints, and a Maya Nucleus solver. As part of the Maya Nucleus system, the Maya Nucleus solver calculates nCloth simulation, collisions, and constraints in an iterative manner, improving the simulation after each iteration, to produce accurate cloth behavior.

Maya provides many predefined nCloths. These sample nCloth objects, also referred to as presets, can be used as a starting point in creating your own custom cloth effects.

This chapter includes these lessons: