Cloth modifier - is it really this glitchy - or is it me??

[Roodogg]

Hi guys. Bit of an annoyance here, and a bit of an essay. I've been through books, the internet, endless forums and help files but can't find anything so any help would be appreciated.

 

I've decided I want to make my own cloth curtains, please read my workflow carefully, it's a bit of a palava but I got the basic idea from here; http://marlev.deviantart.com/art/Mak...-Max-117249472

I started with a rail, then modelled curtain rings, I then animated them to 'open'. As the tut states, I then assigned individual (non instanced) cloth mods and left them on 'inactive'.

 

I then modelled a curtain, applied a cloth mod, set to 'cloth'. I added my sill and set to 'colllsion object'

 

In the 'layers' rolllout of the curtain cloth mod, I selected the verts under the 1st ring, hit 'new group', selected 'node' and then clicked on the 1st curtain ring. Then repeated for the others. When simulating, the curtain moves along with the rings beautifully but thinks the sill is much bigger and freaks out, or it tries... then doesn't even simulate at all.

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]44144[/ATTACH]

 

Deselecting 'solid collision' makes a beautiful flowing curtain movement

but

the curtain clips the sill. I need this to work beacuse it would look awesome. Any cloth experts out there would be helping a great deal

Thanks for reading.

[AubreyM]

The only thing I can think of would be the offset or a problem with the units.

Have you tried using something else for a sill as a test?

[Roodogg]

My gosh, what a rapid response. Thanks!

 

I have tried the offsets, replacing the sill with a box, flattening stacks. Resetting, new scenes, xforms, merging into new scenes. nothing works. Though weirdly when I set up another test scene with a plane and box, it works fine...

 

What do you mean regarding units? I have always used meters as sysyem and mm as display... would this be an issue?

 

I was actually wondering about this 'node' technique' - could it be a problem? Is there another way to get cloth verts to follow seperate objects?

Edited August 5, 2011 by Roodogg

[AubreyM]

Only if you have it set to meters and in the offset instead of 1mm it's 1m.

Any chance of a rouge vert or something?

[Roodogg]

So if my system units are m and display units are mm, the offset should 0.001??

 

It's not even simming 1 frame now, gives up straight away.

 

The curtain is 7000 polys, no rogue verts on anything - running a quad core w/ 8gb ram...

[Tommy L]

Your system using should relate to the scale at which you work. Its like telling Max what size its world should be. If your doing landscapes, then 1m would be a suitable system unit. Doing residential interior scale with cloth dynamics you should use 1mm as your system and whatever you like as your display (Id use 1cm).

Think of it like a voxel grid. Max is going to calculate in 3d space in a 3d grid for dynamics, you are giving it chance to think inside of mm's for dynamics. The reason you have a huge gap between your objects is because its 'integering' between 1m voxels. Thats not a technically accurate description of whats happening, but a reasonable conceptual description.