nCloth and PFX, What to do with a magnolia, Boats

In the world of 3D modeling, animation etc., I made a discovery recently that I thought I should share. You can use Maya's Paint effects in conjunction with Maya's nCloth. I used it in this example to build a rude hammock. I built the geometry for the hammock as a polygon plane and turned it into an nCloth object. Once I had the evaluation behaving the way a hammock should, I made it live to add the PFX brush fiber>rope.



I see this new found marriage as a really cheap way to illustrate earthquakes and fiery lava flows with sparks, things of that nature, but it would be a good way to show living tissues with bronchioles or other nasty inner space visions too.

On a personal note, I cut down a beautiful Star Magnolia or Northern Magnolia today, shown below after flowering. It died of unknown causes over the course of a few years. I was really sad to see it go and I am mystified by its passing, so if anyone knows why a 60 year old Magnolia might up and die, please pass it along.



My son Xander and I have begun work on our father/son expedition boat, most likely to be named the Dawn Treader. She is a plywood sailing skiff and I will be posting a photographic log of our progress beginning with the next post. In that vein I have decided to add a new blog link section see Kick Ass Boat Blogs for more info.

Here is the boat we are building:

I screened the film "24 hours on craigslist" last night. I had really high hopes for this film and wish I could say it lived up to them, but it doesn't. As a huge craigslist advocate, it pains me to warn you away from the film.

And that's the Cold Hard Blog!