I have no idea why they haven't lasso'ed someone into posting this already, but there's a cloth sim plugin available for Houdini now - I know a lot of people over the years have asked for one. It's called Syflex, more info can be found at their web site [syflex.biz]. You need to contact them in order to get a copy of the software, and also you will require a key in order to evaluate. It runs on Houdini on Windows and Linux, and I've been evaling it for an hour and it's pretty damned sweet. Speed is quite astounding, and it's very simple to use. Couple of gotchas in the interface(do not attempt to connect two cloth data inputs at once - crash!), but I sense this is related to having to deal with some Houdini GUI issues. Apart from that and a couple of refresh problems requiring a houdini restart, I haven't had any problems. I'm sitting here moving collision objects in realtime through a rippling cloth - all params are animatible, and there's an easy to use caching system which will let you scrub through animations in either direction which will greatly speed up the tweak phase.

For all you ex-Maya users crying for cloth, check it out…

Cheers,

J.C.

just read the article on cgnetworks, hopefully this product will do well and more products/plugins will become available. *crossing fingers*

Hard to say - I'm still not convinced there's a huge market out there for Houdini plugins(when I say “market” I mean people willing to actually spend money ). Houdini is so damned extensible by definition that so many things are just built in shop - more control over things, plus of course sheer number of Houdini cuts out there. However, this particular product might do well since there isn't any quick(and good!) solution for cloth on Houdini and certainly really good cloth is commonly needed. Other candidates I think that would be a faster/easier rigid body dynamics system and certainly some sort of smoke/liquid simulation(although I think Martian Lab has one of those - I wonder how that's doing?).

This was of course a port not an original product, however I admit to being quite impressed with not only the performance but the integration of the product. They allow such niceties as using a map to control attributes of the cloth so it lets you have multiple “materials” in one piece. I believe in Maya it used Artisan - and they could have just hacked in a “load texture map” approach and left it at that, but they have ther own “paint” SOP that lets you paint the attribute right in the pipeline. Very nicely done port - I'm impressed. We're going to buy a cut the very first job that asks for cloth.

About the only downside I've found is that they've appeared to work outside the Houdini point attribute paradigm - you can't get in there and fiddle with their numbers. I strongly suspect that would have required more port time, and very likely would have had a performance hit. They seem to have done come clever “cheating” to have the basic cloth type sim perform stunningly fast - so for many uses you just plug it in and run - but once you start fiddling with drag and stuff it begins to behave like the fairly complex particle sim we all know it is. Nonetheless, still very fast for what it's doing, and man it behaves *well* - very hard to “break” the cloth.

Cheers,

J.C.

>>We are absolutely thrilled with SyFlex. I won't get into all the
>>details here as to how we are using it (for more than just cloth),
>>but suffice it to say that we are thinking of printing up tee shirts
>>with the slogan “Just SyFlex It”.
>>
>>Bob Munroe
>>President & Visual Effects Supervisor - C.O.R.E.

I found it as testiomonials on their site.
What could it be?What can they use cloth additionaly for?
It comes to my mind as skin or alike with POP.
What do you think?

Best regards,
Ben

things that have cloth-like qualities :wink:

hehe…yah I think that's just more PR from the core machine trying to sound mysterious… Of course you could use it for any number of things, like skin, etc. When I was just fiddling with it, you can “drape” things very quickly, getting stuff to stick…I mean looking around the world at stuff that behaves cloth-like will answer that question fairly readily.

Also, these sorts of sims are sort of like “subsets” of larger dynamic particle simulations - the possibilities are many.

Cheers,

J.C.

well, a student of dvd and the special features will tell you that on Episode I ( i refuse to call it by the other name ). You will see things in the pod race break down which were a cloth sim for the crushed metal in the crashes. As arctor said things which have a cloth like behaviour… just put your fingers to the keep board and do a google search. you'd be surprised what you can do with it.

do a search for weta and cloth. you'd be surprised.

and yes, no hints from me other than it is fast, uses a lot of ram, and a few of us have those t-shirts already

-k

Hey All,

Oh good I can file this in my report and keep this in mind for future use. I will defantly look at getting this in the future once I get out in the Industry full time. Very nice. Oh Martin Labs Fluid Sim is doing well its been used in a lot of movies. X2 for instance when Jean breaks the water apart with her mind. Its been in about 4 movies recently but I can not remember them all now.

Looks pretty good. I don't think it looks quite as perfected as the Cloth Sim demo at Siggraph 2002 San Antino that was used on Episode 2. The cloth on their demos almost has like a rubbery movement to it. I don't really see the interactions of static fricition on the cloth surface. Still not bad though. I have not tried it out so I can not say one way or the other on the quality of the static fricition interaction with the cloth. I realise that alot to times demos aren't nearly as good as what the studios do with it.

Cheers,
Nate Nesler

You're looking at the optimized, default setting for the cloth. There's plenty of options to set things like friction, drag etc.
I'm not sure what you're comparing it to - a demo of a product or an in-house tool, but I wouldn't say it's “not perfected.”

Rule # 1: Never Trust a Demo!

Cheers,

J.C.

Hey,

Oh the Siggraph 2002 Transactions DVD under Videos under soft things. There is an entry for Robust Treatment of Collisions, Contact, and Fricition for Cloth Animation. One of the Developers is ILM John Anderson the others are from stanford Robert Bridson and Ronald P. Fedkiw. I believe the plugin is for maya if memory servers me correctly. Thats the one I am talking about. I totally agree with you as to never trust a demo. Files are setup in a way to give amazing results that work semlessly that would not work say in another situtation or file. This among other things. I did not realise that was a realtime simulation video. They would probably do themselves credit if they were to show Final Rendered Demos. Its good to hear about the static fricition. Mind you I have not actually looked at the plugin and I fairly careful in stating that the plugin could be much more powerful than what the demos show.

Cheers,
Nate Nesler