Technical Direction 1

Cloth Simulation

Here are the steps to simulate a Nimmie scene:

• Set the Cloth_ExpandWaistBand pose to 100% at frame 0 of the chor or action.
• Check frame 0 carefully, to be sure that Nimmie’s dress isn’t touching any of the deflectors. If they are touching, fix them by reposing that frame with muscle or any other technique.
• At frame 1 of the chor, set the Plugin Properties.SimCloth.Scale property of the Cloth_WaistBand group to 75%. This will shrink the waist band down, and grip Nimmie’s waist without the need for attached groups, which have problems with penetrating her body.
• Set the collision radius property of the chor to 0.5cm. It can be larger to prevent penetrations due to spline curvature, but then everything must be that far apart at the beginning too.
• Set the substeps to 16, and the subdivisions to 0. These are Plugin.SimCloth properties of the chor. For fast movements, this can be set higher, for slower movements it can be less. I have had better luck when the steps don’t change dynamically.
• Set the Time range. (only if something less than the whole chor length needs simulated)
• Add the Deflector Material to any additional needed deflectors, like the ground. You may need to embed the model which you are adding the deflector to, unless it should be a deflector in every scene. Embedding is a little dangerous, since the embedded model will never get another update when the original model changes.
• Then choose the Chor/Plugin/"SimCloth Simulate" menu, and watch and wait…
• If there are problems, see my cloth tech talk for some of the answers.
• When you are happy with the results, the Muscle motion from frame 0 to frame 99 can be deleted from the timeline to save space, since the motion there is never seen in the shot anyway.

Note
Nimmie Aimee’s apron will not currently simulate and is going to require some serious ingenuity, or a new feature to get it right for the final shots of this film. More about this later.