Hi folks, back again, interesting new posts.

I’ll answer to them in this post, and a next.

But first of all, here is my animation as promised http://www.artbeeweb.nl/artbee0110212.wmv =  3Mb wmv http://www.artbeeweb.nl/artbee0110212.avi = 22Mb avi (cinepak)

both medium quality, for some reason I couldn’t get DivX working and high quality took too much time. I needed Poser back for answering Bagginsbills remarks.

Second, completely off topic, for all of you having fun with simplifying things, this is the best short I’ve seen in some time. I ran into it yesterday. Now I like cubes even more. Pixels, by Patrick Jean - http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=10829255 

Bagginsbill really started to cut the beast to pieces, in order to get a thorough understanding, and publish every single step. I couldn’t agree more on this principle, I look forward to everything coming out of this, and I’m happy to support. 

= = =

While he starts with the simplest cloth object possible, I prefer the hires plane for a good reason. That is, we are into a simulation of reality. And reality is a very fine grained or even continuous thing. Even when you divide a m2 of cloth into 10.000 quads of 1cm2, then still 1cm is 100 times as wide as the 0,1mm thickness of a thread the cloth might be made of.

Next to that, simulations in general have a problem: they are inaccurate and unstable at the boundaries, the edges (years of personal experience and observation. I got my MSc on this.) 

Good sim routines are succesfull in limiting the inaccuracy, the instability, and prevent it from rippling inwards. Note that the Poser sim routine might not be the best available.

One way forward is to get rid of the edges, by performing calculations on a sphere (meteorologists can do that), or by extending the object at hand (financial planners can do that, they move the sims end out of sight). A second way forward – since edge width is determined by the number of nodes/vertices and not as a portion of the overall object – is to raise vertex density at the edges. The last way forward is to distrust any conclusion derived from anything else but the inner 2/3 of the simulated thing.  

My issue with the ultra simplified 4-vertex cloth approach is that it’s edge only. This might turn out great, I’m really curious how the story develops. But in the meantime I do ask myself whether this approach is really going to help us at larger scale issues.

While writing this, I realize that there is a scale difference on scene effects between nodes in Material Room and vertices in Cloth Room. Material nodes do have an overall effect, they can change the appearance of a whole object. Like a raw potatoe effects the menu. Therefore you need to know how to cook the potatoe in order to get your third star from Michelin. But cloth vertices are more like the cells in the potatoe.

Of course, microbiology will help us to understand how to cook our potatoes better. But this does not mean – for me at least – that doing microbiologic research yourself will make your meals tastier, and bring you that extra Michelin star. Good cooks will have some basic microbiologic understanding, and some microbiologists might be proper cooks. But that’s about it.

In other words, although I welcome the detailed approach I’m not that sure it might give us the results as we got from a similar approach of Material Room. Like Pose Room, Material Room is about Virtual, while Cloth Room is about Reality.  = = =

I do like Bagginsbills materials suggestion, but as the thread has developed since then it might be questionable whether the renderer itself can help us in our understanding of cloth sim details. 

Having that said we should realize that in the end only the renderer result is what we work for. Whatever it takes, the sim result should look good in there and nothing else.

Then bagginsbill observes anomalities. His rendered results are clear to me, as far as the cloth behaviour goes, sorry for that. The quad (was it really?) had been divided into two triagles, and a mild fold has become manifest as a simulation edge effect, as mentioned above.  Again, any clear understanding will be an understanding of the sim edge artifacts only. I’m afraid it won’t help us out on the mainstream issues.

= = =

I’ll address the gravity and zero air issues later, tests are running now to meet bagginsbills high  standards. Hope I’ll pass.

To BionicRooster I can only say: just look at one of my previous posts in this thread. When I suffer poly-explosion or sim-time explosion, the checkboxes are the fix. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Indeed, when you have no initial poke-through all goes well. As long as you stand still or move so gently that any pokethroughs can be fixed by the sim routine. Buth when you enter the danger zone, by more exaggerate moves for instances, the routine does well with some side arms.

happy draping

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Usually I'm wrong. But to be effective and efficient, I don't need to be correct or accurate.

visit www.aRtBeeWeb.nl (works) or Missing Manuals (tutorials & reviews) - both need an update though