Understanding Particles and Dynamics in Maya

Preview:

1. Creating Rope With Plane

Step 1

Open Maya.

Step 2

Go to Create > Polygon Primitives > Plane and draw a plane on the perspective view port.

Step 3

Keep the Width and Height values of the plane as 1 and 25 respectively. Set the values of Subdivisions Width to 2 and Subdivisions Height to 40.

Step 4

With the plane selected, jump in the nDynamics mode and go to nMesh > Create nCloth.

Step 5

With the plane selected, press F9 key to jump in the vertex selection mode. Select the left and right ends vertices as shown in the following image.

Step 6

With both ends of the plane selected, go to nConstraint > Transform.

Step 7

With the plane selected, go to Attribute Editor > nuleus1 > Scale Attributes and set the value of Space Scale to 0.500.

Step 8

Press the play button and you'll see the plane hanging between its ends as shown in the following image.

2. Creating Rope Mesh and Attaching with Plane

Step 1

Go to Create > Polygon Primitives > Cylinder and draw a cylinder on the perspective view port.

Step 2

Keep the height of the cylinder similar to the length of the plane. Increase the Subdivisions Height value to 50.

Step 3

Make three copies of the cylinder and keep them together as shown in the following image.

Step 4

With the four cylinders selected, jump in the Animation mode and go to Create Deformers > Nonlinear > Twist.

Step 5

Go to Attribute Editor > twist1 > nonlinear Deformer Attributes and increase the Start Angle value to 1500. You'll see the rope mesh twists accordingly.

Step 6

With all cylinders selected, go to Mesh > Combine to combine them together.

Step 7

Select the cylinders followed by the rope plane. With these all selected together, go to Create Deformers > Wrap.

Step 8

With the rope plane mesh selected, press Ctrl-H to hide the mesh.

Step 9

Press the play button and you'll see the rope mesh is simulating and hanging between its ends as shown in the following image.

3. Adding Passive Objects

Step 1

Create a sphere and a plane in the scene as shown in the following image.

Step 2

With plane and sphere selected, go to nMesh > Create Passive Collider to make these meshes as the passive colliders.

Step 3

Press the play button and click on Allow interaction with objects during playback button.

Move the sphere to interact with the rope and you'll see the sphere is interacting with the rope in the view port.

Conclusion

You can put some passive rigid objects in the simulation and you will see the rope is reacting with the objects. You can apply this theory to advance simulations also.