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Animated Flag
Next you will select the Particles of your flag and create springs (Soft/Rigid Bodies > Create Springs > Option). Set the Creation Method to “Wireframe” with a walk length of 2. The walk length of 2 generates springs between adjacent particles as well as diagonal ones. This will allow each particle to pull on the particles next to it helping the flag return to the original shape when it reacts to fields. Since the springs are very visually obtrusive, you may want to hide the springs and select them via the Outliner. Even though the springs are hidden, the dynamics will still calculate without the springs getting in the way visually.
When you create springs, the two main attributes to work with are “Stiffness” and “Damping”. Stiffness refers to how quickly the spring tries to return to its rest length and Damping is how quickly the spring looses energy. The rest length is determined by the spacing of your particles when the spring was created. This is why it is best to have your U/V spans to be as square as possible on your original NURBS surface. Set your stiffness to a value of 150 and your damping to a value of .8. Press play and you will see your soft body is very close to cloth. You just need to play with these values to change the look of your material and its bounciness. Increase your stiffness to 500 and play. If your simulation starts to explode, you need to increase your over sampling. Use the pull down “Solvers > Edit Oversampling and Cache Settings…” and change the Over Samples to 2. This means that when Maya calculates your scene it increases the number of calculations. This may cause your scene to slow down, so only increase this as a last resort, if the scene explodes using the settings you need for the desired dynamic simulation. One way to possibly get around needing to increase your over sampling is to increase your spring Damping. This will cause the springs to lose energy faster and come to a rest position sooner. Another way would be to lower the Conserve attribute on your particles. This is what we will do now, so set the over sampling back to a value of 1, the spring stiffness to around 250, and the damping to .5.
Select the gravity field and change the magnitude back to a value of 9.8.
Select the particle node and set their “Conserve” value to .99. This will cause them to lose their energy faster and the flag will come to a rest state sooner and save on memory because you don’t have to increase over sampling. Even a small change in particle conserve has a large effect, so from 1 to .99 makes all the difference you need for this simulation. Play your animation and the flag should come to rest somewhere around frame 1000.
With the flag at its rest position, select your particles and set their initial state (Solvers >
