Introduction

In this lesson, we used nCloth to create simulations of cloth tearing and ripping.

Creating the Ncloth Simulation

In Maya I created a polyplane which would eventually be turned into the nCloth, and scaled and rotated it into a position I wanted. I then scaled a cube to create a post at one end of the cloth which would support it, and then duplicated it and moved the other post to the opposite end of the cloth.

Next I made the polyplane into an nCloth by selecting the polyplane going to the nCloth menu and selecting ‘create nCloth’.

Now, I selected the vertices of one edge of the cloth in vertex mode and selected one of the posts in object mode.

I then went to the nConstraint menu and selected ‘point to surface’ which attached the cloth to that post. I repeated this on the opposite side, and went to the nCloth menu.

After that, I selected some faces in the middle of the cloth and selected the ‘tearable surface’ option in the nConstraint menu. This would allow the middle of the cloth to tear.

I now created a sphere and made it into a passive collider so that it could interact with the cloth.

I then keyframed the sphere’s movement through the cloth to create an animation of the sphere tearing through the cloth

Here is the playblast result of the simulation I created

Conclusion

Over all, I gained some useful practice with nCloth in this lesson – an aspect of Maya that I do not have much experience in. I struggled a bit with getting my simulation to work, but after trying again I was able to produce the result that is shown.