Ok, So I just have been trying Houdini VOPs this morning and even just after an hour I can see that this is going to satisfy my ICE-dependency. Its time for me to stop sitting on the fence and take time to dive into Houdini properly. Maya might make sense, convenience wise, to form a team around and...

I recently took on a job which required me to learn Maya. I've been using it for 2 weeks and thought it may be of interest to share my initial thoughts. I spent the first week getting constantly shocked at the ridiculous omissions and opaqueness of Maya. The fiddly nature of setting up joints and tr...

I don't know as I've not tried this exact problem. I guess a day of R and D would produce a result.

I'm just giving my experience regarding cloth, as I've tried to do something similar and I was disappointed with Syflex when it comes to multiple collision layers. I just think it might be better if he puts it down on a table, so you're starting with a cut on it being flat and square. Its doable, as...

I think you'll find that Syflex cloth wont be able to cope with this very well. It will have multiple layers of self collision and in my experience, even one causes Jittering. Also, the ICE version of Syflex would probably be necessary, as you need to 'grab, animate and let go back to Sim' . Its not...

Is this to be done in a stylised way?
Is it a "how to" illustration?
Or is it meant to be photoreal?
Or a combo of the above.
What do you need the result delivered in? Point cache? Scene file? Render?

You have to 'get closest' when you don't have topological matches

Yes, but how do you wish it to be deformed?

As if its an envelope?

Ok, having thought about it some more, my approach would be to create a field of particles on the water, that calculates per frame, the danger/safe areas by weight, based upon the trajectory and distance from the oncoming ships. Then the small ships can read the field by firing out an array of sampl...

Just an idea. You could make a rigid body sim on a point cloud with much larger boats and use an identical point cloud that uses the first cloud as a goal to move toward, but with actual size boats. This way, cloud 1 of boats will clash.. but cloud 2 will smooth out the movement, looking more like a...

when you say 'pushed aside' do you mean physically shoving them aside as it ploughs through, or do you mean that they tend to move themselves out of the way through motivation and self propulsion? If it's shoving, then maybe ice rigid bodies is the best approach as the particle needs to understand t...

Yes If you have some kind of vector field that 'holds' the force, you can apply as many curves to the field as you want, and smooth the vector flow out across the field as you need. the 'field' could be a mesh, or a 3D grid of particles if you don't want it just working across a surface. Doing it by...

Yes, that works. Thanks very much.

I can't quite see the logic of not being able to write the UV's in modelling mode, but as long as I know the rules, I can work with it.

Thanks. The bit that sounds like I overlooked (or wasn't aware of) is writing the UVs outside the modelling part of the stack. I did at one point make a second ice tree to write the UVs and it worked. Maybe I fluked it in animate mode that time, and on subsequent tests didn't. I'll try tomorrow. Muc...

Hello.. Before I ask the question. I'd like to say I've extensively tried many option and I'm convinced that there is something I'm fundementally doing wrong but I can't work out what; so I'd request politely that any reply be really idiot proof, comprehensive and coming from experience of having ac...

You don't write the name of the image file. You just access the texture map that contains the image.