looping cloth
by Phil Biggs
on
Feb 22, 2008 at 6:51:43 pm
Hi there,
we've recently invested in C4D are very impressed with it's intuitive workflow. We have a large project coming up producing several hundred flag animations which have to loop seamlessly. We have tried Zaxwerks 3D Flag but we need a much higher degree of realism. We've just downloaded a demo version of Mocca and have been evaluating the cloth tag feature. This gives excellent results but we are unsure how (or if it is indeed possible) to seemlessly loop cloth animations. We don't want to go down the road of spiltting the animation and adding a subtle dissolve; we really need the loop to be perfect. If anyone can give me any pointers it would be greatly appreciated. We don't do charater animation so purchasing Mocca would only be for the cloth feature, should it be possible to loop.
Many thanks,
Phil
Re: looping cloth by Lennart Wåhlin on Feb 22, 2008 at 9:21:09 pm
No, I don't think getting cloth to loop is possible per se.
Either try using several flagdeformers (sans turbulence that doesn't loop) in combo with loopable noise driving a DisplaceDeformer (incl in MoGraphModule).
The FlagDeformer loops at value"10" equals 1 second.
Or, by all means, use Cloth since it is, as you saw, does look good/real.
Your option is, and I've done very convincing looped Cloth flags this way, to do the
disolve trick -on the geometry-, not the rendered result.
Bake your cloth (using Capuccino or possible PointCasheTag) at , at least the double length
of you final result.
Then copy your baked result, swap the front end with the ending part (just as you would
do in ei AE.)
Add a PoseMixTag to a "dead" copy of your flag object (not animated but the same geometry)
Now you can disolve the animated flags geometry. Since it is no-destructive you can
move the disolve till you find the best spot as well as make several versions using the same
setup for slightly different results (All flags doesn't look exactly the same).
