I have been working with this feather tool for two years now my formula to make it work is:
Step1 In scene one Create the feathers with mbfeather tool on your character save this as a base scene Step2 PolyMesh Duplicate the feathers (this example is for one type of feathers) Step3 With that *poly mesh* of the feathers, save it out as a obj and texturing that.(remeber to set the UVs before export) Step4 In scene two, I animate the bird. Then point caching animated Character and a applying the cache to the mbfeather character in your base scene, the character now movers and the feathers go with him. Step5 cache the mbfeathers* Poly mesh* as it still is linked to the mbfeathers sim Step6 apply the cache to the exported obj, in scene two, the animated scene. Works nicely Ben On 4 November 2013 16:05, Jonny Grew <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello list, > > Just wondered if anyone can shed any light on some issues we have with mb > feather tools.... > > When we're caching out the pointcloud we're getting sporadic results in > reading the cache back. > > We have 3 separate mb feather tool setups (body, head and wings) all under > different models. These all reference the same feather group in it's own > model) and all nodes have been switched to say 'this_model' as advised > within the documentation. > > We're using 6 different feathers and populating the surface using the > envelope weights on the 'envelope mesh' that determines which feather > within the feather group goes where. This all works great when live but > when caching out we're finding that either: > 1/The instances aren't there (the particles are - you can see if you > change the pointcloud display property to point) > 2/Certain feathers are missing (ie feather 3 and 4). > > You can force the instances to be visible by adding another ice tree on > the empty cache read point cloud with a 'set instance geometry' node, > however this only populates with the first feather in the feather group. - > As the compounds are locked we're not sure what attribute we could use to > ensure that the correct feathers are in the correct place. > > It appears that when things do sporadicly work that they only do from a > single scene. Exporting the model from this scene and caching causes even > weirder results which means it looks like using reference models in our > animation scenes is a no-go. We'll have to export animation action clips, > apply them into this scene that sporadicly works and export the ICE Cache > into our render scene. > > Any pointers much appreciated on stating our blindingly obvious faults or > hooky work-arounds. > > Cheers > Jonny > > >
