[mtoh]

I can't find anyone to help me with this perhaps find help here. I want to model a blanket lying over a couch. I ran an Ncloth simulation with the couch as the passive collider but could not freeze out or extract a single frame for a static modeled scene. How do I use Ncloth to model my blanket. Would really appreciate the help,

Thanks!

[Zentrope]

For Maya 2009 and later

Make a Blanket with high density mesh(polygon plane with smooth applied).
In ndynamics turn the blanket into nMesh and Couch to passive collider!
with that you will get a nucleus node and the ncloth shape node.
In ncloth shape node in attributes editor > presets like silk etc are there which will assign the properties of that thing into your blanket.
play with the settings in the nucleus node like >increase the gravity from 9.8 to more higher number.
>in Ncloth shape tweak settings like Friction,thickness and stickiness accordingly.
In nucleus- tweak gravity direction, wind direction and intensity air density and wind noise to attain some real wrinkle folds on the blanket.

then select a particular frame you like and pause it and delete the History(all by type) and center pivot and Freeze transform.

Also if you want to not move the edges of some area in the blanket use nConstraints !

NCloth works with poly geometry, so you must first convert nurbs to poly if you wish to use them(use a quad tessellation...
it works better).
By default all ncloth objects you create will self collide, and collide with other cloths and passive(nRigid) objects.
As you noticed you should have your frame rate set to "play every frame"( this is true with playback of most dynamics in Maya ).
If you want to have a fixed framerate then you must first cache your cloth before playing back(the old cloth always cached by default).

In maya (older variants)

polygon plain with smooth applied
delete history
In ncloth- create ncloth (don't delete history)

Edit properties in ncloth (menu Tab)
paint vertex properties>wrinkles properties

The poly plain will turn white in color and you get a brush to paint the details.
Use soft brush and paint over the blanket and painting on it turns black .
black means lower and white means up!

And the rest is same.

Any thing else just ask