Motion Designer help needed

[Maxx]

Posted this over in the community section by mistake - so if it sounds familiar, that's why...

How badly does enabling self-collision kill calculation time?

I have a simple 16"x24"x.75" heavily subdivided cube. I've got my fixed part in the upper right corner, the rest - one surface name - set to cotton(thick). The calculation actually went pretty quickly before when I didn't have self-collision turned on, but I need to stop the interpenetration of the object.

This time around, it's stopped responding twice already and now it's been on Start! (frame 1) for the last 30 minutes - nothing's moved yet!

I tried making it a simple double-sided surface, but I need the back (where it wraps around the front) to have a different map on it. When I tried copying a flat plane, reversing the polys, pasting the original back in and merging points, the calculation became a crumpled mess.

Sorry, I've never had much luck with MD and was wondering if there are any tips out there (other than the old SkeletonMan (?) post from the NG) that could help out with this. I need the MD object to have some thickness to it.

Anybody? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Dodgy]

The best thing to do is use your original one sided object to do the calc with, but then save the motiondesigned solution (the save button on the start/propeties panel). This can then be loaded when you apply MD meta plug (in the displacement panel)to your double sided object. MD meta plug applies the deformation of one object to another, so your deformation from the single sided flag or whatever will be applied to your doublesided object.

[Maxx]

That's awesome! Thank you! I never thought of doing that... Going to try that now...

Thank you!

[Maxx]

Dodgy - worked like a champ! For some odd reason, I was thinking that, because I had doubled the polys, the .mdd file wouldn't work on the new object. Forgot that I had the same number of points!

Anyway - interesting new development... I'm using the MD_META_plug becuase it seems to be the only one that will actually work, and every time I reload the scene, I have to go through and reassign the .mdd file, target cage mesh, start frame and key options for every object using the plug. It just doesn't seem to remeber the settings between loads. Anybody else run into this?

[Dodgy]

Hmmm, I've not come across it... Let me check it out :)


Seems to work for me...

[Maxx]

Suddenly now it works for me. I think I'm gonna take a baseball bat to my CPU if it doesn't stop acting bizarre...

Anyway - thanks for the help! Saved my bacon :D