Using nCloth to simulate shrinkage in a knitted garment.

Anonymous

Using nCloth to simulate shrinkage in a knitted garment.

Anonymous
Not applicable

I have a piece of knitted cloth that I'm building in CG.  The reference cloth is knitted on an advanced knitting machine that knits patterns in the cloth, some of these patterns cause the cloth to gather together in some areas which pull the edges of the cloth inward and creates warping in the cloth.  The output cloth may have an hourglass shape instead of being a rectangle because of this warping.

 

How can I recreate this effect in Maya?

 

I first tried using the textured stretch map on nCloth using a radial field to pull the cloth outward to create the stretch pattern I'm looking for but the cloth will fly way.  When I try to constrain it in place with a transform constraint it will stretch weirdly around the constraint.

 

 My closest attempt thus far is to use a textured stretch map on a piece of nCloth and transform constrain the edge vertices and animate a scale to enlarge the cloth.  This pulls the cloth out while keeping the spacing of the vertices that are painted white.  The problem here is that the edge of the cloth doesn't pull inward because it is constrained.  

 

Another way of describing what I want to accomplish is that I want to use a map to change the scale of affected polygons while the unaffected polygons would maintain size pulling inward towards the scaled polygons.  Ideally I'd like to to have separate controls for the shrinkage in the x and y directions.  

 

Any thought on how I can accomplish this?

 

I've attached my Maya scene with the shrinkage texture map and a screenshot of my best attempt.

 

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Anonymous
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If I'm understanding correctly, you could create a piece of polygon geometry that is in the shape of the path of the sewing path.  That geometry would hover above your cloth and be put into a visibility layer.  The you do a point to surface constraint between the geometry and the fabric.  Then you keyframe the geometry squeezing together and it should pinch the fabric 

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