Cloth with Mograph – or – R10 Key Reducer working?

[Dellanderson]

By way of clarifying part 1 of above question: Imagine I am trying to wave some flags attached to flag poles and controlling the movement via Mograph (to allow Sound effector etc)…

[Mylenium]

[DellAnderson] “1) Still trying to come to grips with the ‘clones as a single object’ paradigm of Mograph and was trying to belt some cloth to cloned objects in Mograph (tried placing the cloth both inside and outside of the Cloner object to which the cloth was to be belted. No luck. What happened was strange attachments being formed between the multiple cloths (which appeared in the correct places) to the original ‘source’ object (still at the origin!) for the clones (even though the CloneR Object generated ClondeD Objects corresponding to the multiple cloths. Confused? In other words, the belt seems to act more like the ‘fix points’ option (which stays put) in the dresser tab of the cloth, rather than the belt tag (which moves along with the attached belted object).

I tried using the Matrix Object and the DataNode to pass various parameters to the clones(similar to C4DCafe’s description of using Mograph with emitters), but still no luck. Has anyone been able to get cloth belting to work with Mograph clones? If so how? All I’ve been able to do is get the cloth to interact, not belt.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions or insights into Mograph’s inner thinking (this kind of brick wall keeps coming up for me so I’m obviously not thinking correctly about CloneD Objects and what happens to their matrix once dragged under a CloneR Object).”

Like any particle based system, Cloners work in world coordinates. Unless you explicitly convert each clone’s position to local coordinates in relation to the axis center, I doubt it’s going to work. I haven’t played with Cloth much, though, so it’s quite possible it has some option somewhere. If that fails, you need to have a hierarchy of real objects and link them to the clones using XPressso. It is the only way, I’m afraid.

Mylenium

[Pour Myl

[Dellanderson]

Thanks, Mylenium. Makes sense, I’ll probably go the Xpresso route as I have tried various permutations of the other without success. I’ll post my results when successfull! Thanks again!

Dell

[Dellanderson]

OK – I guess I must have misunderstood your explanation. I’ve spent two days now trying to apply Mograph cloneD object GLOBAL MATRIX (via Linked Lists and the Data Node) to the GLOBAL MATRIX (and LOCAL) of real cloth objects. I think I’m going to have to go onto something else unless you or someone else has further insight.

From what I understood of your post, Mograph CloneD objects are analogous to particles in a particle system. I created a test project and output the RESULT of LOCAL and GLOBAL matrices via an iterated DataNode. From my experiments, it does appear that the GLOBAL matrix output port of the Data Node gives the actual, world coordinates of each cloneD object within the cloneR object iterated thru and linked to by the OBJECT input port of the Data Node. The LOCAL matrix output port only gives the matrix with reference to the axis of the CloneR object itself, not the scene.

SO…with that in mind, I thought I could create a linked list of real objects and pieces of cloth (one linked list each). Actually, I really don’t want to transfer the matrix from the cloneD objects to the cloth (it makes the resulting animation look weird – like gravity is changing direction!) – I only want to transfer the matrix to the object to which the cloth is belted (e.g. flagpole). Simple enough, right? NO! Problem? The initial location of the cloth is so far from the Xpresso mandated area that bizarre movement goes on for a long time (even setting the cloth simulation prior to the animation it has a hard time settling down). Maybe what I need is a way to set the location of the cloth once but not update it continuously with Xpresso. Can’t find a way to do that (cannot animate the wires in Xpresso?) Apparently the ‘fix’ or ‘set’ command under the belt clothilde tag fixes the position BEFORE Xpresso has a chance to update the location of the object to which the cloth is belted (e.g. flag pole). So I get wild movements at the beginning which have trouble settling down.

I couldn’t find any way to adjust the clothilde tags for local or global matrices.
Here’s what I’ve done only using Xpresso, Cloth but WITHOUT Mograph (but would like to do WITH mograph:
https://www.anim8.com/PXC/PXC_Cloth_Danc2.mov