problems baking down maya ncloth anim for use in unity

Unity Engine
1

Hi

im doing a little animationin Maya of a ringing clock and used ncloth to animate the cable thats attached to the phone. I was hoping that I could just bake the simulation down so that it would export as a standard animation in an FBX.

Alls working fine, and I followed the following instructions (for motion builder I know) http://knowledge.autodesk.com/suppo…cles/Export-May…

…to bake down the animation for use in FBX. However, when viewed in Unity3d the animation still doesnt play

This is really frustrating, as the animation plays great in Maya and the cables animation all looks nicely keyframed in the timeline - but alas, not exporting.

any help would be much appreciated!
thanks
Nick

PS: its exporting outputCloth4.mcx & outputCloth4.xml files, but I dont know what to do with these (or even if they’re needed)

2

Max animator answer - Im not entirely sure if this is exportable by any means other than by baking the vertex data into the mesh - but not sure.
You mentioned clock and phone so Im a little confused - but ill just assume its something with an electrical cord attached to the object.
A couple alternate solutions -
Instead of using the cloth - create the cord as a renderable spline object then generate control objects via spline IK rig. Hand animate the control objects and/or by applying noise animation controllers to the objects. Ive done this before and read the animation needs to be baked, but I exported without baking from Max and the animations worked flawlessly.
Renderable spline will need to be converted to a mesh prior to export after baking - if baking is required in Maya.
Alternatively check out MegaFiers in the asset store. Im not affiliated with the asset and Ive never used it - but Ive only heard good things from using it. Also the asset publisher is very active on the forum here an is very helpful to all devs including asset users.
That asset may be able to help with deforming mesh data not driven by bones.

3

thanks for the reply! yes, Im animating the chord of a telephone that moves with the handset as it moves up and down. I want to bake the simulation into the mesh so that it can be used in unity (similar to how you can bake in the joint animations I guess).

I suppose Ill have to look for another way if I can’t figure the ncloth thing - its just that the ncloth is such an easy way to do it (at least I thought it was)

thanks for your suggestion
N

4

Thanks @theANMATOR2b for the mention :slight_smile: @Yonderboy_1 If you do want to use Geom Cache from Maya then MegaFiers will play that back for you, it supports .mc files, or you could use the Spline system that included in MegaFiers to turn your splines into a mesh, we have a exporter for Maya to get the splines out, and you could animate the spline in Unity and then turn on the meshing option.

1 Like
5

:slight_smile: Thanks - Mega Fiers looks great, but i was hoping to do this within Maya (low on the spondulix unfortunately :frowning: ) Is there no way of doing this direct out of maya?

thanks again

6

Yeah @SpookyCat ! Always forget your forum tag, sorry bout that. :confused:
Spline IK is an alternate that can be accomplished wihin maya but its a different config from ncloth.
Im sure maya has spline IK - because Max has it and maya has always had superior rigging tools compared to Max - unfortunately for all Max animators. :slight_smile:

7

Ill give the Spline IK a try then. its a shame there’s no way to bake out an ncloth simulation within maya :frowning: (although @SpookyCat doesn’t mind that I’m sure :slight_smile: )