Build an Animated Fabric Weaving Effect in Maya

Evan Patrick shares a look at how to create fabric weaving effect in Maya, similar to some of the effects send created in Softimage and Cinema 4D. Evan shows how to set up the animation using splines and Maya’s hair System.

Evan uses a couple of freely available tools to help the process along, using MopKnit for Maya which will allow you to break a polygon mesh along its UV seams and deforms it to the UV layout in world space, creating a blendShape which you can use to transform it back to the original shape. This is quite helpful for creating the animated fabric weaving effect.

 

fabric weave effects Autodesk maya

 

Using MopKnit you can have a organic shape that inherently has a straight  UV layout and use mopKnit to set up the UV shape, then use Maya’s own Wrap deformers to attach your geometry to the layout surface, and blend back to the original shape.

Evan also uses random Offset Keys, which will Offset keyframes on objects by random values with user input limits and frame range.