I've read some older post (on odforce) where people state that cloth in H9 was close to unusable so with the new H10 i thought i'd give it a try.
Allthough at very low res i get reasonable simulations with multiple rdb-objects, the moment i triangulate2d the grid i use for a cloth a little too much it slows down tremendously and errors out often with memory allocation errors even though I have 16 GB ram in this machine.
Has anyone found a good workflow for cloth or is it still not really usable?

Also the Aprentice HD version does not allow an AutoDopNetwork to be saved out with a ROP output driver so how can i get a initial state to work?

I also very often get the error on the clothsolver: “cannot retrieve data from previous solve”. When this happens, solving just stops and all objects remain static for the rest of the timeline.

Hi,

Thanks for the file. I tried out your file, and it actually simulates fine in today's daily build (Houdini 10.0.259, which is not to be confused with the “production build”). You can get to this daily build by logging in before you go to the downloads page.

The Houdini cloth solver works directly on non-triangulated polygons.
It is unnecessary to use triangulate2d; I recommend not using this for cloth geometry. You can use a regular quad grid instead of simulations like these. This will be more efficient, and the results will look better.
The cloth documentation is out of date on this topic; this will be updated in
tomorrow's daily build.

To create a stable initial state, you can run a sim, write out the stable geo with a file SOP, and then use that geometry as your initial state in a simulation.

I noticed in your file that the stretch damping is set to a very high value.
This may cause some of the problems that you have been experiencing.
I'd recommend a smaller damping value in your example, say 100.
For good results, the damping should typically not be more than a few percent of the corresponding stiffness. That is usually more than enough to have the cloth calm down by itself.

One last thing to note: there is a “Cloth Thickness” parameter on the cloth object that affects collisions. For good results, you want this to be significantly smaller than the smallest polygon edge in your geometry, say 1 percent of smaller than the shortest edge length.

To get a somewhat faster simulation, it may also be worth it to set the “Symmetrized Max Sides” to 3 on the cloth solver.

I attached a modified version of your file for you that you can look at.

Michiel

Wow, thank you very much for the reply in such detail, that really helps me a lot to get my head around cloth in Houdini. I just downloaded the latest daily build and your edited hipnc file and it's simulating right now, so far so good.
Thanks again!

Rudi