Honestly, I needed the flag blowing in the wind ...

[Pancho]

I actually need a flag blowing on top of a building. So this isn't some lousy test because I don't know how to spend my time any better.

 

I came across this video:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=2iUX-I1Z-hM#t=418s

 

Blind me. Is the sim realtime? Actually that's lloking great. I spent more than 3h today to get anywhere close to this. I don't get it any more. I get, if I'm lucky, a lousy frame per second out of my sim. And till you get an idea how wrong it looks this time, 1-2 minutes are over. Actually I guess LW ten years ago gave me similar results. At the same speed.

 

So I guess I'm making something wrong. I added a null to move the noise texture. Otherwise it's impossible to tell what kind of speed the noise got, since you don't see it.

 

I played around with a lot of setting concerning the cloth, drag, wind and noise. It looks like a lot of things, but never like a piece of thin cloth blowing in the wind.

 

Since I took a look a the Cloth Masterclass I'm convinced that H can do it, the examples look great, but I have no idea how to get this quality on a flag.

 

So any wise guys out there who did this before are more than welcome to shed some light.

 

I found a thread at the H forum, but in the end they didn't get much further than this.

 

Do I need to do this in Maya? Don't want to believe it....

 

Cheers

Tom

flag_001_a_0030.hiplc

[Farmfield]

Try using the grain sheet, then just add some wind in DOP's, perhaps lower the gravity. Here's a plastic bag setup I did for a guy here a while back, more cloth/silklike than plasticy, but telling that this could work really well for a flag in the wind type setup.

 

[MENOZ]

..and if you don't want to switch to autodesk, blender should be good enough for a simple flag

[yesyes]

if u want simple simulation then don't use dops, just use "spring" sop

[Pancho]

Thanks for all the tips!

In the meantime I started to play with the granular sheets. Well, see for yourself. Good point: I don't get this sticky weird behavior of the cloth solver anymore. Bad point: Meat and thick rubber haven't been used for flags so far either.

I played with all the settings I could find. Even dissected some other scenes I came across. But it remains bouncy and resolves in only one plane. While a flag would "fold" when pulled down by gravity, the meat flag just bounces in one plane, perfectly.

I fired up my Maya 2015 and after 30min the flag looked almost as good as the one in the video posted.

Since I want to get independent from Autodesk, I want to stick with H. Maya delivered around 8fps, H so far with both solvers around 0.5-1.0fps. This is painful. Especially since there is the Open CL support (which doesn't work with most of the settings).

Can't we get the same quality in H as in Maya? Or how do I need the alter the grain stuff? It's the grain update, isn't it? But apart from making it more stretchy I couldn't get any other material behavior. Unfortunately SE don't throw around any scenes with the installation which could shed some light.

So, any tips still welcome.

Will give the wire solver a test if I can figure out how to!

Cheers
Tom

P.S.: No idea where I can change the weight, stiffness and (air/wind) drag inside the grain solver.

flag_001_a_0045_grain.hiplc

Edited August 1, 2015 by Pancho

[michael]

or the wire object:

 

 

wire_flag.hipnc

[Atom]

I found this one on a forum under the question of how to make a flag "loopable". This is more of a penant, however. Play the timeline from 140 to 240 to observe the seamless loop.

ap_loopable_waving_flag.hip

 

NOTE: No longer works as of H16.

Edited June 1, 2017 by Atom