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Activity Forums Maxon Cinema 4D looping cloth

  • looping cloth

    Posted by Phil Biggs on February 22, 2008 at 6:51 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

    Eric Woods replied 17 years, 4 months ago 3 Members · 5 Replies
  • 5 Replies
  • Lennart Wåhlin

    February 22, 2008 at 9:21 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).

    Cheers
    Lennart Wåhlin – tcastudios

    aka tcastudios

  • Phil Biggs

    February 23, 2008 at 9:10 pm

    Many thanks for your swift response, we’ll give that a try.
    Cheers,
    Phil

  • Lennart Wåhlin

    June 3, 2008 at 9:16 pm

    I’ve made a short tut now how to.
    The only error is that I say 6 instead of 3 seconds, but the principle is there.

    ClothLoop 30Mb QT

    Cheers
    Lennart

    aka tcastudios

  • Eric Woods

    January 12, 2009 at 2:17 pm

    I was following your Tutorial and it has been incredibly helpful. However, my cloth tag does not have the offset cache option. What version are you working with and is there away around using the offset cache method?

  • Eric Woods

    January 12, 2009 at 4:41 pm

    I answered my own question. I don’t know how to get the offset cache option to appear, however there is a work around. After you duplicate the object go to the Duplicate and turn off Cache Mode. Go to the Tag Tab and uncheck “Auto” under the Cloth Engine option. If you change the start frame to (in this tutorial’s case) 75 the flag will not change out of its initial state until the 75th frame. Therefor when you use the PoseMixer it work correctly for the rest of the tutorial. Also a Side Note. My PoseMixer was under the MOCCA tags menu not the Character Menu as in this tutorial.

    GREAT tutorial though. Thank YOU!

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