Working with cloth - Making a sack.
 

I want to make a sack to go on the back on Santa's sleigh, but I'm having problems creating 'thread' to pull the fabric together around a ball.

What's the best way to go about creating proper thread in Maya, so that i can simply scale it down at frame 48 and the material will be tied around the ball nicely.

Are you talking about creating the thread itself or animating it so it moves with the thread?

Well I assume I make a thread by extruding a circle around a cv curve, right? I'm ok with that, but if I try to get the thread to go in and out of the 'material' it screws up when i press play.

I've even tried deleting the material faces that intersect the thread, but to no avail.

how do you mean it screws up? what's it doing, and what do you want it to do? maybe some screenshots too?

Yeah sorry, screenshots attached. The first one is the result, and the second shows what i've tried to do with regards to 'threading' the thread between the cloth.

Second Image Below. The ball isn't shown, but I want the thread to rise up around the ball and close it at the top - Just like a sack would be closed.

It doesn't have to animate this process, but that's the only way I can think of creating the sack effect.

I'm really not making myself clear...

I want to make a sack which santa carries. How?

i think i'd just start with a sphere and towards the top move the verts around to appear as if they were the opening to a sack.

Problem is, I'd like to animate it afterwards (santa's sack on the back of his sleigh, waving in the wind as he flies).

Isn't cloth the best way to do that?

i kinda did something similair long time ago ..I could not find the tutorial on the sack part but here is the tutorial i used for the animated rope ...which i made threads out of it later by many ropes twisted ..hope this helps


http://www.dezfx.com/HTML_pages/Tuto...namicRope.html

Thanks for the link. I don't think i have a problem creating the actual rope - it's getting the fabric to interact with it properly. Currently I think it's too close or colliding with the rope which causes all the errors. Not sure what to do about it.