nCloth constraint?

[Anonymous]

Running Maya 2016

I'm currently designing an ncloth dress to look like Disneys Princess Belle's dress and have it working well with the exception of the shawl around her shoulders. The shawl consists of a polyplane with 40 x 40 subdivisions modeled to flow around her shoulders. It falls perfectly as an nCloth, but I can't constrain the cloth without running into some issues. I've taken the ending vertices of the cloth and Point to Surface constrained them (one side at a time) to the broach. When I play the simulation, the shawl cloth flies up like crazy (see attached pic). I've also tried the Component to Component, Slide on Surface, and Transform Constraint and I get similar cloth breaking errors for each.

Would really appreciate some feedback asap, thanks in advance!

[rellwood]

Is there any reason you constrained the shawl to the broach?

Try constraining the shawl to the character mesh, which I am assuming has been converted to a passive collision object. A component-to-component constraint should work.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the response. I've already completed and submitted the assignment, but I tried adding the shawl on top of everything. I have a lot going on in my scene including snowfall, leaves, and wind so it'll be hard to get the cloth to go with the flow, but I'm willing to try anyway.

So I made the cloth from a poly plane again, moved the verts to wrap around her shoulders, smoothed it out, then finally selected the front two verts of the shawl and component to component constrained it first to her head mesh (collarbone up), deleted that constraint, then to her body mesh (collarbone down). As you can see from the images, the constarints freaked out. I was only able to test the shawl to head mesh constraint once. It freaked out because the cloth didn't have proper time to settle since the rig already has an animation on it.

Is there an easier way to "insert" the shawl into this already complete project?

Thanks!

[brinsmeadd]

I'm not sure how you are getting those results with the constraints, but it looks like you did an attract to matching mesh constraint, which would not make sense for this kind of thing.

In general you want to make sure that the mesh you are constraining is modelled so it starts in roughly the right position and has no interpenetrations or penetrations with other colliders. Then when constraining apply constraints to the bare minimum number of vertices so that the cloth is free to behave like cloth. Also stretch resistance and collisions in the cloth can fight poorly setup constraints and make it unstable. 

To constraint to a position on the body one would select a few key vertices on the mesh to constrain along with selecting the body mesh( not the cvs). Then do a point to surface constraint.

If you need the cloth to settle more for the start of an animation you could nSolver:initialState:relaxInitialState.