help animating a flag in maya
Hello polycount people,
Im trying to animate a very simple and lowpoly flag in maya, for an iOS game, using unity3d.
The process im trying and not being very succssesful, is rigging the flag with 7 joints, aplying an ik spline to it, then aplying a wave deformer to the spline. But this way the base of the flag moves, and a i cant make the base vertices to stay in place and just the rest of it move, so i can bake the animation and export.
Anyone can give me a thought, idea or even teach me from scratch what im trying to do?
Thanks
Heres the model:
Im trying to animate a very simple and lowpoly flag in maya, for an iOS game, using unity3d.
The process im trying and not being very succssesful, is rigging the flag with 7 joints, aplying an ik spline to it, then aplying a wave deformer to the spline. But this way the base of the flag moves, and a i cant make the base vertices to stay in place and just the rest of it move, so i can bake the animation and export.
Anyone can give me a thought, idea or even teach me from scratch what im trying to do?
Thanks
Heres the model:
Replies
if you really want to use bones, you need to subdivide the mesh a little more. make sure your root joint has 100% influence on the verts at the pole, so they stay in place. i
for a simple animation, just animate all y rotation of the joints. for example 60 for +5 degrees to -5 degrees and loop it. then move the keys of child joint1 10 frames forward, child joint2 20 frames and so on. this offsets everything and you have a basic wave animation to start from...
Here is one of them :
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there may be a way to set up a complex rig, but i guess this is a little too much for this problem.
Create plane
add ncloth
create locators along the middle edge
parent locators to verts
parent bones to locators
result:
bones are moving with the simulation and only 5 mins spent on this
THe next step is to skin the lowpoly mesh to the bones and bake simulation and export to the engine.
I can place better breakdown later with final result and scene file if you are interested .
PS. I did some of the simulations in a bit same way for my UDK models
Here is my test preview
+1 exactly how i'd do it aswell.
i use this technique all the time for getting various n-based simulations into unity
never tried it that way, but sound nice.
how do you parent a locator to a vert? do you use clusters?
that's a neat trick for baking, thanks. i will try that out as soon as we have some cloth stuff in our games again.