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New Features
1 Physics Modelling
Run Carbon like a game engine - in Maya and Houdini !
Timeline-independent live simulation supports modelling of Carbon Cloths and Rigid Bodies.
This is 100% physically correct motion, not some sort of quasi deformer.
Game changer for simple tweaks and more complex draping - such as scarves or shirt sleeves.
Supports toggling the Carbon Stasis mode on a per object basis - freeze objects in space while still respecting collision and Cloth constraints.
Check out the tutorials:
2 Procedural Cloth Detangling
Carbon has long been recognized for the best Cloth simulation. Nothing beats Carbon's robust collision, speed, and realism, but some users can find it too technical and unforgiving.
With procedural detangling that all changes, as now Carbon is detangling your intersecting layers in real-time, as soon as it detects an issue occurring.
No matter whether you are already using Morphs to deal with intersections under the armpits or behind the knees, or if you have been using Colliders and struggle with intersecting animations … this is going to be even more robust now. We have been testing this technology on our most notorious scenes and have been blown away by the robustness and smooth behavior of this new Detangling. This is a game changer.
Check out the short clip of detangling in action:
3 Physics LOD
Now you can iterate fast by running a low resolution Carbon Simulation and once you have the basic look, use that to drive a high resolution sim.
Physics LOD is very different to a geometric upres using a deformer.
With physics LOD:
- It generates physically correct detail
- Collision is fully managed as it is running a full high resolution collision solve.
Taking advantage of the new Goal Pose Trail parameters, setting up Physics LOD is easy and only two parameters have to be manually tuned.
Watch the videos below to see the whole process start to finish:
4 Easy Garment Import from Clo and Marvelous Designer
The latest Carbon Garment Processors make it easy to import garments from Clo and Marvelous Designer.
Artists using Carbon have been keen to simplify and speed up the process of taking Garments from Clo3D (or Marvelous Designer) and bring them to life with Carbon.
The new Garment Processors take you through the setup process in Houdini and Maya step-by-step, doing all of the heavy lifting, and taking advantage of exported XML information to set up stitching and crease angles. We support both welded and panel-stitched garment workflows.
5 Crease Angle Control
Crease angle Control is a feature that has been on the wish list for a while, but quite hard to implement - it has finally arrived in Carbon 3.0
You can now precisely set and animate angles on Carbon Cloth edges.
6 Point Mass Override
As an alternative to Density based mass distribution, we have added a direct Point Mass Override for Carbon Cloth and Carbon Tissue (Note: Carbon Tissue is only available in Houdini).
Using the traditional Density based approach, points are internally assigned a mass (in kg) based on the triangles, quads, or tetrahedrons that they are a part of. This ensures that variations in the size of triangles in your mesh tessellation do not have an impact on the behavior / weight of the Cloth.
Imagine a scarf hanging over a bar.
If one side of the scarf has a lot more triangles (and therefore points) on one side than the other one, you typically wouldn't want one side being heavier than the other side. But, if you were to directly set a uniform mass for each point, you would get exactly that: One side being heavier than the other. And this is why a Density based mass distribution is usually preferred.
Mesh vs Simulation. From the top down: Uniform Point Mass, Uniform Density, Uniform Point Mass, Uniform Density
Similarly, you could imagine a situation where you are setting a uniform point mass, and then changing the mesh to a higher resolution mesh. If you have twice as many points, your Cloth will now be twice as heavy as before, and obviously interact differently with other Cloths.
You might wonder why anyone would choose setting explicit mass per point. The main use case for the Point Mass Override is when you have geometry containing (near) zero-sized primitives, i.e. triangles, quads, or tetrahedrons.
Especially when using the Carbon Tissue node in Houdini, having (near) zero-sized tetrahedrons leads to strong imbalances in mass, which makes those tetrahedrons very prone to inversions and can lead to heavy artifacts and instabilities, which might even blow up your simulation. In this case, swapping to using uniform point mass bypasses the issue and drastically increases the stability of your simulation.
7 Enhanced Cloth Models for improved anisotropic behavior
We have now reworked our Cloth models. First of all, "Tailored" is now called "Welded Panels", and "Face-Segment-Crease" is now called "Standard". This is to signify that "Standard" should be your go-to Cloth model, while "Welded Panels" is a model supporting the specific use case where your Start Mesh is a single welded mesh, while the Reference Mesh is a mesh composed of flat unwelded panels in the XY plane.
Anisotropy is now available to both models and can be applied to the Standard model, regardless of the nature of the Reference mesh. Please note that for optimal anisotropic behavior, we recommend using flat panels in the XY plane.
To further improve Cloth behavior, especially anisotropic behavior, we have created a new "Carbon Remesher" node, which is a custom Houdini HDA, but it is also available to our Maya customers via the Houdini Engine plugin.
The "Carbon Remesher" creates quad aligned geometry, which is optimal for the expression of anisotropic behavior in Carbon.
Top: Original Geometry. Bottom: Remeshed Geometry
It also is able to preserve edge groups, which can be user specified, or extracted from XML meta data which can be exported from Marvelous Designer or Clo3D.
8 Material Presets
The final piece of our efforts to simplify the Garment workflow is the addition of Material presets.
We have a wide selection of presets which should cover your standard Clo3D materials and beyond.
Please note that we always recommend using the Carbon Remesher to convert your meshes into Quad aligned geometry for optimal expression of anisotropic behavior in Carbon.
You can download the latest Carbon Material Presets from this link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KsftLtm8kJZbUZyrtbLax9FzAqIhNIwqabYp5lhcDcE/edit?usp=sharing
Please make sure to also read through the document linked in the spread sheet explaining all recommended Material Preset Requirements!
9 New YouTube Videos
A total of over 30 new YouTube videos were added to our channel, covering a variety of topics, ranging from the new 3.0 features to explaining basics, like all parameters of the Carbon Simulation node. They are a mix of Maya and Houdini centric videos and many contain information valuable for both platforms.
Carbon For Maya 3.0 Evaluation Sign Up Here
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