Page Comparison

Cloth setup

The Cloth Setup tool allows you to tag variation meshes as "hidden". You can access the tool via the Atoms menu: Atoms > Tools > Cloth > Cloth Setup

Hidden meshes will be added to your variations, but won't be rendered or displayed in the viewport by the Atoms Proxy.

They will only used when generating cloth caches, you would usually tag nRigid meshes as hidden if they are not meshes used at render time.

The Cloth Setup UI lets you tag, untag and select all hidden meshes.

Cloth Simulation Exporter 

The Cloth Simulation Exporter lets you generate cloth cache file sequences and debug the exporting process. The post process generating the cloth cache will only evaluate agents with variations having cloth and rigid meshes. 

The first parameter of the UI (Action) defines the behaviour of this tool:

• Build Scene & Export: builds the Maya scene and exports the cloth cache from it.
• Build Scene: builds the Maya scene only.
• Export: exports the cloth cache from a scene previously built by this tool.

UI parameters will be shown or hidden depending on the selected action. The "Build Scene" action has the same parameters of the Build Scene & Export mode except the cloth sim file field and the merge option.

Also the "Build Scene" action does not work with batches, it will only build the first batch scene.

Build Scene & Export parameters

When using this action the cloth cache frame range will have the same frame range of the input atoms cache.

• Cloth Sim File: destination path for the cloth cache file sequence.
• Merge: If this option is activated and the selected cloth cache file already exists on disk, the cloth cache generated by this build will be merged with the current content of the cloth file cache sequence.
• Cache File: the input atoms cache.
• No Batch/Use Batch: activates the batch mode. With batching on, the built/export process will be divided in sequential steps. This is particularly useful when working with a cache containing a high number of agents having cloth meshes. Even though batching will create a new scene per batch, you will gain performance from not having a heavy cloth simulation.
  On the other hand it's better not to use batches when you have a small number of agents you want to simulate.
• Batch: the number of agents per batch.
• Agent ids: you can filter agents with a comma separated string. (i.e. 1,2,5-10: this will only generate a cloth cache for agents 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10. Agents without cloth meshes will be ignored)
• Variations: only agents with the given variations will be cached. If the field is empty all variations this filter won't be considered. You can specify more than one variation with a comma separated string (i.e. Robot1,Robot2. Agents without cloth meshes will be ignored)
• From Scene: the variations will be read from your scene.
• From File: variations will be loaded from a file.
• Variation File: the variation json file.
• Pre roll: a number defining the pre roll value for the cloth simulation. The simulation will start at the initial frame of your cache minus the given pre roll value. (i.e. if the cache starts at frame 1 and the pre roll value is 20, the simulation initial frame will be -19). The agents will animate from their bind pose at the simulation initial frame.
• Height offset: an offset height value for your agents. The offset will be applied at the simulation initial frame.
• Rigid Meshes: users can also provide alembic files that will be used as rigid meshes during your simulation. Users can also provide rigid parameters for those alembic files to make the simulation more realistic.

Image Removed