New simulated cloth in Maya

There is a new simulated cloth solution called Maya® nCloth™ in Maya 8.5. nCloth is a fast and stable dynamic cloth solution that uses a network of linked particles to simulate a wide variety of dynamic polygon surfaces. For example, nCloth is flexible enough to simulate objects such as fabric clothing, inflating balloons, shattering surfaces, and deformable objects.

nCloth is built on the new 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. The Maya Nucleus solver calculates an nCloth’s simulation in an iterative manner, improving the simulation after each iteration, to produce accurate cloth behavior.

For detailed information on nCloth and Maya Nucleus, see the nCloth User Guide in the Maya Help.

Directable cloth simulation

Maya nCloth is a highly directable cloth solution. There are many different ways you can direct and control the behavior of nCloth to achieve the exact cloth simulation results you are looking for.

You can cache your nCloth simulations, edit, arrange, and blend the caches in a nonlinear manner, and then transfer the caches to your nCloth’s input mesh or reuse them at another time.

You can also bias your nCloth’s point positions towards specific cloth shapes to bring your nCloth closer to a specific deformation or the animation of another object by setting the following: the nCloth initial state, the nCloth rest shape, the Input Mesh Attract attribute, and the Attract to Matching Mesh constraint.

Component collisions and collision layering

Maya nCloth provides fast and accurate component-level cloth collisions. nCloth collisions let you create cloth effects like multi-layered silk garments, jackets that fall to the ground and crumple, and bouncing rigid objects. nCloth collisions can only occur between nCloth objects and passive collision objects that are members of the same Maya Nucleus system.

The Maya Nucleus solver supports the following types of collision: nCloth to nCloth collisions, nCloth to passive object collisions, and self-collisions. For these types of collision, you can specify which of your nCloth or passive object components (vertex, edge, and face) participate in the collisions. The collision component type you set for your nCloth and passive objects contributes to the accuracy and speed of their collisions.

For additional control over your nCloth collisions, you can place your nCloth or passive objects in collision layers. Collision layers let you specify how nCloth and passive objects that share a Maya Nucleus solver collide with each other.

Dynamic constraints

There are many useful Maya nCloth constraints that you can use to influence and control your nCloth objects. You can achieve the specific cloth effects you are looking for by constraining your nCloth objects or their components (vertices, edges, or faces) to other nCloth objects, nCloth components, or passive objects. However, nCloth constraints are not limited to attaching or linking nCloth objects or their components together. Certain nCloth constraints allow you to change your nCloth’s structure or behavior.

For example, you can use nCloth constraints to create buttons on nCloth garments, replace collisions, bind nCloth objects with different topologies together, and exclude and limit nCloth and passive object collisions in a Maya Nucleus system.

Inflation, deflation, and volume preservation

Maya nCloth has a default internal air volume or pressure that you can manipulate to produce effects like inflating or deflating tires, pulsating hearts, or squashy water balloons.

The nCloth object Pressure properties let you define, direct, and animate the behavior of your nCloth’s internal air volume. There are two methods of controlling an nCloth’s internal air volume: its pressure can be modified manually, or it can be calculated dynamically by the Maya Nucleus solver.

You can also set how difficult it is to create deformations in the surfaces of your pressurized nCloths, displacing their internal air volumes, with the Incompressibility pressure property. Incompressibility determines the compressibility of nCloth objects that have pressurized air volumes.

Tearing and shattering

Maya nCloth can be torn, ripped, or shattered by other nCloth objects or passive collision objects when it is constrained by a Tearable Surface constraint. This constraint allows you to create cloth effects such as cloth catching on a nail and ripping, cloth stretching and then tearing when it reaches its limits, and an nCloth glass falling to the floor and shattering.

The Tearable Surface constraint makes nCloth objects tearable or shatterable by separating all of their faces, generating new edges and vertices, merging the nCloths’ vertices, softening the nCloths’ edges, and then constraining the nCloths’ points (tear) or edges (shatter) together.

Surface restitution

Maya nCloth objects have limits to how far they can be bent, stretched and deformed. When an nCloth reaches this limit, permanent surface deformations are created. You can create permanent surface deformations for soft and rigid nCloth objects with the Restitution Angle and Restitution Tension nCloth properties.

Restitution Angle and Restitution Tension allow you to crush or dent rigid nCloth objects, or pull and poke soft nCloth objects beyond their surface deformation limits, so that their surfaces cannot return to their original shapes. For example, with nCloth surface restitution you can crush cans, dent cars, or permanently warp elastic clothing.