ncloth simulation not baking on an animated rig

[yyumii]

Hello, I have an animated character that is wearing clothing with ncloth applied. I am trying to export the animation as an fbx by doing edit>keys>bake and have turned on control points. I have a screen shot to show my settings. When i open the exported fbx in a new scene, the character is gon and so are most of my rigs, plust the cloth is no long attached to the body.

this is my first project using ncloth so I don't know much about it other than what i have tested online but haven't been able to get it to work...

And help would be appreciated.

[Kahylan]

Hi!

from what I'm seeing, you have two issues here.

The first issue is that you want to bake your animation. But to bake animation onto your rig, you need to be sure, that you have all your controls or joints, whichever you want to bake the animation to, selected. Not just the groups above them, the objects themselves. Then baking the animation should work with the settings in your screenshot.

The second issue is, that you want to bake your cloth simulation. Cloth simulation is a deformation and not keyframe animation, so the edit>keys>bake command wont work for that, unless you bake on PLA (Point level animation) meaning you select all your vertices and then bake, but this is not advisable as it makes the file extremly slow and tends to crash maya pretty often. What you want to do is caching your simulation or geometry.

For this you can either use an nCache to cache your simulation itself (FX toolset>nCache>create new nCache) or cache your geometry itself, (Modeling toolset > Cache>Geometry Cache) depending on what you want to do further with your project.

May I ask why exactly you want to export it as an FBX? Depending on what program/engine you want to import in and on what you want to further do with your animation, there are probably more stable ways of exporting what you need, Alembic Caches for instance.

Tutorials:

nCache (7:39):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFa_lTm8hmM

Geometry cache:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nM6e-X_PzA

Hope this helps!

[yyumii]

Hello, Thanks so much for the detailed response and resources, will check them out now. I am exporting the fbx to use as an asset in unity. just looked at the difference between ncach and geometry cache. It looks like ncache is better if different animations are to be applied to one rigged character, where as geometry cache is a once and done animation, is this understanding correct? Do you have a reccomendation for what should be used? It looks like geometry cache fits what i need... In unity, the animations speed will slow down/speed up, controlled by the first person controller's proximity to the animated asset. Thanks again.

[yyumii]

Hello, I just tried n cache and have the .mcx files, but can't find any tutorials on what to do after this step. I need to export the simulation as an fbx, can ncached files be used to do this or is it only good for animation?

[Kahylan · Accepted solution]

I looked up what kind of caches are compadible with unity. From the quick search I did, it seems like both nCache and Maya Geometry Cache are not compadible with unity. But it seems Alembic caches are compadible.

To create an Alembic cache, you first need to make sure the "ABCExport.bundle" plugin is loaded (Windows->Settings/Preferences-> Plugin Manager), then you can export the Alembic at the same place where you create a Geometry cache.
The following steps are described in this tutorial by the looks of it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ww5Gkd_s7E

I'm not sure how helpful it is, as I myself haven't worked with Unity in over 8 years, so my knowledge is limited.

Hope it helps

[yyumii]

thank you, the tutorial was extrememly helpful.

for future reference, it doesn't show the steps for imprting alembic. you need to install unity's alembic 

windows>packages manager> Packages: Unity Registry> install alembic

and to open the timeline: 

window>sequencing>timeline