Problems with Technology

After a disastrous lab session on Wednesday where I corrupted my maya file, I've learnt to save both maya binary and ascii form of my project, to return to previous nodes. Ah well, only one way to learn I suppose. Luckily however I had been saving all my presets onto my external hard drive, so it was move an inconvenience rather than a problem which would have restarted my project.

After a couple of weeks of work, I still wasn't getting the movement I desired in my cloth. I couldn't understand why there were some small inter collisions and jagged pieces of material. This week however I began watching tutorials on Digital Tutors and immediately found an answer to my problem. I was smoothing the wrong mesh - and instead of smoothing my input node, I was smoothing the Cloth shape, creating a simulation which looked jagged and wrong. I also had a low number of substeps in my nucleus, and by increasing this it changed the iterations per frame creating a more detailed cloth simulation. My plan is to continue watching these online tutorials as they appear to address many of the problems I've been having.

I've still had no luck in finding a way to connect a particle emmiter to vertices on an nCloth object, but will continue to research this in the coming week.