Maya - Looping Simulation

Rigging
#1

Does anyone have experience or tips for looping nHair simulation in Maya for animation cycles? I have some thoughts on how to approach it but it seems like it might be very heavy handed and not have the best result. I have considered weighting heavier to the attract curve on the ins and outs, that will hit the poses but does not lend itself to better motion. Duping the animation so that there are three cycles and pulling the simulation and loop from the middle one is usually a good fallback but the simulation itself is not as consistent. What would you guys suggest is the better approach here.

Thanks!

#2

We’ve always ended up baking and hand editing where we’ve needed simulation to hit a loop point or neutral pose. I don’t think that will help you here.

#3

Geometry caches appear in the trax editor and there you can blend between clips etc… I’ve used it before to loop a soft body simulation on a pony tail using an IK spline setup.

#4

I have no done geometry caching before. This is something I can do with animation ctrls? I’ll look into that.

#5

animation controls on your hair guiding curves will for sure give you a higher level of control / with time better result but I’d highly recommend you to look into blending of caches as well (in your case not necessarily geometry caches, whichever cache you use for your hair driver system) :smiley: