Sail Rigging, My way of doing things

So sorry i havnt posted in a couple of days, i assure you i have been working. So since the last post we have designated tasks for everyone to accomplish, mostly all concepting and generally thinking about how we can do things. during the group session on wednesday I decided to focus on comming up with a convincing method to animate a piece of material to act as a sail.

I do not have experience with cloth, ncloth or syflex yet (i will soon!) so i was playing around with dynamic curves from the hairsystems menu. My concept was to loft surfaces together using dynamic curves, which gather their translate information from static regular curves. After around 30 minutes i had realised my initial ideas here is a play blast turntable of what i came up with:

Test01

This showed me that my instincts were working for me, and so i set about making a sail system which was a bit more of what we were after. I started by drawing out curves with the same direction and number of cv's. I then duplicated them by adding a dymaic system to them from the hair systems menu. This created nice bendy floppy curves which i could loft a surface from. this surface could then be animated in 3 ways. 1.) by affecting the cvs of the nurb, 2.) by affecting the cv's and translates of the static curves. 3.) by the dynamic attributes, all of which are keyable and customizeable. Here is the second test i came up with, although it came with its own problems to solve.

Test02

I was reasonably pleased with this system, however certain elements were not as i wanted. parts of the sail sag around where it would naturally be rigged to the mast in real life. I figured out that if i lofted a surface between both static and dynamic curves i would get the segmented look i was going for as the sails have a rectangular shape (see above) Here is the third test i worked on.

Test03

So i think the system here works really well. I was a little too experimental and jerky on the animating but the rig is very controlable, and with more time spent on this I believe this could give us the look we require. 'Nothing is working until it looks good renderd' has sort of become a moto of mine over the summer. Now im not saying im one of these people who renders everything in 1080p so i can show my cat how awesome software is. However in the view port i was seeing some very defined lines and so i wanted to see the level of smoothness i would need to add during a render to get a nice look. so here is the quick 15 minute back and front render. (mental ray, production default).

Test Render

So this was my productive output for the day, I learned a lot and got the chance to experiment with a few things i've been wanting to for a while. This is by no way the be all and end all though. Ollie and Sanjay in our group suggested that it may be easyer to use ncloth. I do not know anything about these methods/tools and so over the next few days i plan to undertake a tutorial introduction to teach me the basics which i can then apply to further tests. Ta-ra for now!