All images from Maya Plugin Power © Course Technology.

This month, VFXWorld begins a series of six excerpts of the Course Technology PTR book Maya Plugin Power, which will give VFXWorld readers to learn how to take advantage of the myriad of plugins available to Maya users.

For my money the best way to get cloth animation from Maya is the cloth simulation plugin Syflex. It has great advantages over Autodesk nCloth. It is flexible and easy to use and is very useful for other softbody simulations. Here is an easy way to make a skirt in Syflex.

A Simple Garment
This chapter would not be complete without an example of an article of clothing. Creating virtual cloth and clothing is usually a complex matter, but Syflex makes creating clothing a simple task. By hiding the user from complex algorithms and math, Syflex allows an artist to spend more time being creative.

Let’s take a short look at creating a spinning skirt. Load the scene pleated_skirt.mb, which is located on the companion DVD. The simple pleated skirt model in Figure 1 has a blinn shader for catching the light as we begin to spin the skirt.

Let’s start by selecting the pleated_skirt node. We need more polygons in this object to get a smooth cloth skirt. Under the Modeling menu, select Edit Polygons > Subdivide with two subdivision levels. Figure 2 shows the new subdivided geometry and the proper settings for the subdivide.

[Figure 1] Polygon skirt object and render with blinn shader for highlights. 

[Figure 2] Polygon skirt subdivided with two subdivision levels using quads.

The skirt is now better subdivided for cloth animation. With the pleated_skirt node selected, we must go through the workflow to change it to a cloth object that can be subjected to forces. This workflow is consistent with everything we have discussed in prior tutorials.

1. Select Syflex > Cloth > Create Cloth and change the name of the resulting syCloth1ShapeTrf to sySkirt_ShapeTrf and syCloth1Trs to sySkirt_Trs.

2. Next, select the sySkirt_Trs.node and select Syflex > Forces > Create Gravity. Running the simulation now makes it obvious that we must keep part of the skirt from moving under gravity, while the rest is free to dangle.

3. Select the syCloth1ShapeTrf node and choose the top row of vertices, as shown in Figure 3.