Adam Trachtenberg
Forum Replies Created
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No special magic required here (r10.5). Just create the object and place a texture with alpha on it. Shows up in the viewport quite nicely.
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[Brian Jones] “you don’t really need the Coffee anymore, drop your movie in the texture’s Color and Alpha channels and you can delete the Coffee but you do need to check Animate Preview in the Illumination Tab.”
Right, in fact you’ll get faster playback without the outdated COFFEE expression.
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[Adam Trachtenberg] “Create the vertex maps you want to use, then give your object a tension tag (tags>character tags>tension), and drag your vmaps into the appropriate slots.”
Sorry, I was asleep at the switch on that one! What you do is create a tension tag for your object (tags>character animation>tension). Then click on the “fix tension” button to set the initial state. Then click the two “make map” buttons to create the vertex maps that will be used in the layer shader.
Then follow the diagram (which is from the help manual, btw) showing the shader setup, and use the shader however your want (e.g., in the displacement channel).
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Create the vertex maps you want to use, then give your object a tension tag (tags>character tags>tension), and drag your vmaps into the appropriate slots.
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Default lighting is applied if you don’t add any lights. Otherwise everything in your scene would appear flat-shaded (or totally black). To get pure white, either use a material with white in the luminance channel or (preferred) give your floor a compositing tag and check the “compositing background” box.
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You don’t want to belt *all* the points — that will basically constrain the whole mesh and prevent it from doing it’s cloth thing. Since you’re doing flags you probably just want to belt the points where the flag would attach to the pole or rope. Once you move the belt objects you’ll have to let the sim run for some frames (sort of a pre-roll) in order for everything to calm down.
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You should be able to use the free MDD Reader/Writer plugins available here: https://www.animationsnippets.com/plugins/index.html
to import point-level animation output by Point Oven, available here:
https://www.ef9.com/ef9/PO1.5/PointOven_15.html -
You can use the Belt Tag to fix some or all of your flag’s points to another object, and then move the other object. Being a simulation, you can’t move the cloth object directly.
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[Christian Remde] “Okay, so I found the “Surface Mode” thing, but that still arranges the clones around the edges of the extruded spline instead of in the center…”
Sorry, I should have been clearer. You set the cloner to *object* mode, then drag your extrude object into the Object link box.
Then you need to change the *next* Mode setting (under “up vector”) from the default “vertex” to “surface.”
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This is why you use the compositing background option in the compositing tag (to make the BG white).
Otherwise, though, you would create a light to illuminate your background (include only background in light properties), then duplicate the light. In the duplicate light’s “Details” tab, check the “Shadow Caster” box; now the duplicate will only cast shadows without adding illumination.