Dynamics and cloth testing

Solution to my nCloth woes: instead of doing a general edge->edge constraint, everything is now vertex to vertex. There's a few tricky spots around the tips of the wings where it's been fly-awaying, because I messed up during a retopologize back in October, and it's much too late to redo anything now. But, that's brought under control so no worries. 

I needed to pin the elbow/membrane, which I've done with a block of nConstraints. The elbow pin can be moved around to accommodate for changes in the elbow rotation, which means I have control over the membrane stretching.

Also, fixed the disappearing constraint issue. It was a rigid body that was being created when I made the initial constraints, which was interfering with an existing one I'd already placed on the model before going into nCloth. 

Deleted them both, remade the constraints, and now I can safely reference the .ma file without having to worry about cloth dynamics going astray. 

Also, dynamics test for Charlene's fashionable new scarf. I can't get rid of the poly collision because the rigid bodies and the nHair don't recognize one another. So counter animating will be necessary.

Posed Chirop. Slaved for weeks on creating a manual/dynamic system for the feathers, fingers and tail so that I'd have nice secondary in the animations. Then I do a 360 and find that my IK Splines twist whenever they reach 170-190 degree rotations. Noticeable at 2 seconds, the mesh literally flips itself over 180 degrees. 

Chiropteramon, the rigged digital monster.

It's taken an age, but I'm comfortable that I have finished that rig for my friend the Chirop monster. I say finished, but it's more like, reached a place where it can be animated. 

There's a decent amount still to do, attributes which will control things like the parenting of the legs and maybe some blendshapes... definitely some corrective blendshapes. I've still got that issue with cloth and constraints disappearing on subsequent reloads, and no one knows why... A few skin weights still to be painted too. Maybe one day i'll do a flyover of the rig in a video with explanation? Seems like it might be redundant so it'll be an if-I-have-free-time addition to the blog I guess.

Cloth test shows that things work, though there's some ugly scrunching. Something I'll have to deal with next semester I suppose :/

Still have that issue with cloth folding in on itself around the elbow. I want to constrain it with a joint or something, but skinning and cloth don't really mix well. And after the fiasco with wrap deformers, it's not something I want to try too much of. Blendshapes?

Dynamics and Me, the love story.

The craziest, funnest thing I've found. I wanted to do a bit of dynamic hair and I found the goldmine of all tutorials by Zeth Willie. A rigger, Naweed Khan used Zeth's system in his fat Bat rig and the system looks to be really intuitive. The system lets you toggle dynamics on and off; and lets you manually override everything, so it's great for things like hair or tails, so you can animate your stuff as you regularly would, but you have dynamics on top just to add another layer of pretties.

Charlene's fab hairdoo is gonna be crazy

edit: The system isn't foolproof wich sucks. The twists in rotation are awful. But I will fix it.

nCloth with edge dynamic constraints.

Binding the cloth to segments of the wing.

Preliminary nCloth simulations. Nothing communicates "I've worked all day filling this bucket full of tears"  than a few simulation test videos

Jesus save me