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Tips and Tricks

Here is a collection of tips and tricks.

If Chain simulation is misaligned

If you tried everything and Chain simulation still shifts from your initial pose too much, or if your initial chain is not aligned well enough for BroDynamics to work - you can use this workaround to simulate pretty much any chain in any pose.

For this you'll just need to simulate each object one by one. Let's say you need to simulate a ponytail of your character.

  1. Select head and your first ponytail control
  2. Set proper settings in BroDynamics Chain. Simulate. You'll see that BroDynamics will create a few locators to create a straight chain.
  3. Now deselect everything, then select your first ponytail control and second control.
  4. Simulate
  5. Repeat for the whole chain

To automate this process you can use Batch simulation tool.

It will take longer to simulate this way, but it will still likely be much faster than doing it by hand.

This may not work well with "Preserve animation" feature, however.

Preroll

It's often useful to use a preroll in your simulation. Add 1-3 seconds before your animation starts to let it settle.

Adding more attributes to simulation

It is possible to expose more simulation attributes to BroDynamics, if you're familiar with Maya's attribute system and JSON format. Under BroTools/BroDynamics/config folder you can find 2 files: point_properties.json and chain_properties.json.

These files are used when building Point and Chain tab Simulation Properties rollouts. Each file is an array of dictionaries. Important properties are attribute - any attribute of Maya's hairSystem node for Chain mode, and nParticle node for Point mode. And default value, which will be used to determine value type and default value of this input.