Flying a dynamic kite

[Calvin]

Hi guys,

I'm trying to get a kite to fly in Maya and I'm thinking dynamics, either soft or rigid or both. The kite has to have a string attatched to it and a sort of tail that follows it aroud as it billows in the wind. I'm also thinking wire deformer. I seem to have the tools at hand but not the plan of attack. Any ideas on how to tackle this?

Thanks to all in advance,

Calvin

:beer:

[ragecgi]

Well, off the top of my head....

You could make the frame of the kite rigid, and apply the fields to that, so that way your dynamics solve a little faster.

For the actual kite cloth, depending on the material you want to use, (meaning cotton, linen or plastic etc.) you might be able to get away with using either blends, or sdk's maybe?

Just ad a ripple deformer to the middle parts of your "cloth" material and base the noise and/or magnitude factor of the ripple on the Kite frames' translateY?

That way, as the kite gets "blown" up into the sky, the ripple gets stronger, and as the lift slows, down, the ripple slows down as well.

On the topic of the string, I'm not sure, but there is a melscript on highend called: FixedLengthCurve found here: http://www.highend3d.com/maya/plugins/?section=animation#2125
You could maybe try using that as your "string" and make it a goal for a softbody extruded strip of NURBS material, mapped with a 2d string texture......

Just a few ideas:)

[Calvin]

That's a lot of the top of your head! All of them are good ideas I'm going to explore. Thanks alot, Ragecgi!

:D

[ragecgi]

No problem:) hehe...

[Calvin]

Geeze you're fast...
:beer:

[ragecgi]

hehe...

Well, I'm at work with only Maya 4, and since I do all of my work with Maya 4.5 at home, I can't do anything with any of my new stuff here, so I pretty much just hit "refresh" on my browser every 5 minutes or so to see if there are any new posts:)

During the day (us central time) is when I get to answer folks questions, and at night is when I get to work on my Maya kung-fu :)