Maya Cloth is a cloth modeler and simulator that lets you create realistic animated cloth within the Maya environment. Maya Cloth gives you the ability to model garments for any animated 3D figure, apply dynamic effects, and simulate the cloth behavior.

In addition to clothing characters, you can create many other types of cloth animation, including sheets, bedding, drapery, flags, and fabric goods of all kinds.

This book contains two parts

• Part 1, "Learning Maya Cloth"

"Learning Maya Cloth" contains four tutorials to get you quickly started creating garments with Maya Cloth.

• Part 2, "Using Maya Cloth"

"Using Maya Cloth" contains complete information on using Maya Cloth features.

To create and animate clothing, you perform the following basic steps:

• pose the character

• construct the garment

• fit the garment on the character

• simulate the motion of the garment for the animation

• texture and render the final animation

Posing the character

You use actual skin geometry as a mannequin to make panels and fit the garment when you build fabric models. You pose the mannequin in a dress-up pose.

The dress-up pose places the body in a position that eliminates any self-collision and minimizes wrinkling in the initial fitting of the garment.

After the garment is complete and you are ready to animate, you'll move the model from the dress-up pose to the animation start pose.

Constructing the garment

Using the dress-up pose as a guide, you draw curves to form the outline of a garment. You use these curves to create panels. The panels are similar to real-world fabric patterns that are sewn together to make a finished garment.

You seam the panels together to create a garment. This is the exploded stage of the garment, with all 2D panels sewn together in the desired places. You can modify the original curves and the garment automatically updates.

Fitting the garment

To fit the garment on a model and simulate cloth, you make the model a collision object and use the cloth solver to drape the garment over the model. If want to drape the garment about the character in a particular way, you use drag control to adjust the garment.

You use constraints and dynamic fields to influence the settling of the cloth. These exert forces on the cloth to influence the way the garment settles on the character. For example, you can pull out wrinkles or pin portions of the garment to specific places on the character. You can set various attributes of the cloth to change the physical behavior of the cloth.

You can set various attributes to create different types of fabric and affect the physical behavior of the garment. You can use different fabrics in the same garment, such as a baseball jacket with leather sleeves.

Once the garment has settled, you save this initial position of the garment and begin animating.

Animating the cloth

Before you begin animating, you move the character from the dress-up pose to the animation start pose. When you animate your character, the cloth solver calculates the collisions and motion of the cloth.

You can modify the movement of the cloth during the animation using constraints or adding dynamic forces. You can also manually manipulate the cloth.

When you run the simulation, you can cache the results for quick playback.

When you start Maya, Maya Cloth is automatically loaded. You can also load and unload Maya Cloth using the Plug-in Manager.

To load Maya Cloth:

1

Start Maya.

2

Select Windows > General Editors > Plug-in Manager.

3

In the Plug-in Manager window, click the loaded checkbox for CpClothPlugin.so.

Maya now loads Maya Cloth and adds the Cloth menu set.

You can access Maya Cloth's features from the Cloth menu set, or from the Hotbox.

Important! If you exit Maya using the quit -force command, temporary files may be left in the directory specified by the TMPDIR environment variable. If that variable is unset, any files are left in your /tmp directory.

To turn off Maya Cloth autoload:

1

Select Windows > General Editors > Plug-in Manager.

2

In Plug-in Manager window, turn off the auto load checkbox for CpClothPlugin.so.

Now, when you start Maya, Maya Cloth is not automatically loaded.

To automatically load Maya Cloth:

1

Select Windows > General Editors > Plug-in Manager.

2

In Plug-in Manager window, turn on the auto load checkbox for CpClothPlugin.so.

Now, when you start Maya, Maya Cloth is automatically loaded.

To unload Maya Cloth:

1

Select Windows > General Editors > Plug-in Manager.

2

In the Plug-in Manager window, click the loaded checkbox for CpClothPlugin.so.

Maya unloads Maya Cloth.

To select the cloth menu set:

• Click the menu selector in the status line and select Cloth from the pull-down menu.

The Cloth menu set is displayed in the menu bar.

All the procedures in this book assume you have the Cloth menu set selected.

Maya Cloth is available in two configurations: Maya Cloth Edit and Maya Cloth View.

Maya Cloth Edit has all the Maya Cloth features. With this package, you can model and simulate garments interactively or in batch mode. The results of your simulations are saved in a cache file that is referenced by the Maya scene file that contains the cloth.

Maya Cloth View lets you load a scene that contains a cloth animation into Maya and play it back. Simulation features are not available in this version. The cloth animation scene must have a cache that was created using Maya Cloth Edit. You can't start a new simulation or append to the existing cached simulation.

You can use Maya Cloth View when:

• you want to work with scenes that have cloth in them, but do not want to edit or create any cloth content

• you want to play a pre-simulated scene for rendering

Maya Cloth View can run in batch or interactive mode.

Maya Cloth View is the default configuration Maya Cloth runs in when a license is not found. If you have an edit license for Maya Cloth Edit, you can force Maya Cloth to run in view mode (and not use a Maya Cloth licenses) by using the -lic command line option or by setting the MAYA_LICENSE environment variable.

To run Maya Cloth View:

• At the prompt, enter the following:

maya -lic=-cloth

setenv MAYA_LICENSE -cloth

maya

See "Limiting the use of optional floating licenses" in Installing Maya for IRIX Version 1.5 for details on these Maya command-line options and environment variables.