This has been a hectic couple of day animating. I hit a snag during a crucial action scene, and I spent several days trying to find a solution.

As you can tell by my previous posts, one of the characters in the first episode of The Last Burning Star is a robot with multiple retracting legs, and a long robe:

The Problem? Cloth physics are terrible in Blender. It's a dated engine, and they're currently in the beta for a new and more advanced system, but it's gonna be a while before it will have all of the necessary features to replace the old engine...

This robot has six legs, which are actually six small cylinders, extending and warping across individual curve objects by using the array and curve deform modifiers. The curves all have three handles, which are each hooked to different bones in an armature.

It's pretty clever, and it's gonna look amazing in motion, but imagine having six rapidly moving, sliding, extending and retracting objects affect a single cloth simulation. Now imagine having to adjust the collision settings for those six objects every time something goes wrong.

I spent several days trying to fix a shot where the robot was animated in slow-outs during a fight. The cloth simulation struggled to keep up with the rapidly shifting legs because it didn't have the time to process such instantaneous movements. Every sudden movement would cause the cloth to clip into the legs and twitch uncontrollably. I was at my computer for hours, trying to adjust the collision settings for the robe and the legs and find a workaround.

Eventually, I found the solution: Slow the shot down. I had to select every key-frame for every relevant object in the shot, and scale the animation time by eight times. That gave the simulation enough time to register the rapid movements, at the cost of a slower bake time. A few adjustments to the animations and collision settings, and I made this shot:

These 3 seconds took 3 days...

it might seem like a lot, but this was another case of research and development. Ordinarily, I would just animate the armature and do the cloth physics during the cleanup phase, but I got a hunch that I needed to test it in this shot. With that out of the way, I can get all of the hard parts finished. I'm still at the climax, but I have every shot perfectly planned in my head.