The Simulation Editor (Work in Progress)

One of the first tools I began making was a simple Simulation Editor. The purpose of this tool is to control the dynamic elements of the scene, to help animators with their workflow, and to initialize the states of most simulations. Although this tool is not finished yet, it does carry out most of its basic functions.

The first set of options on the Simulation Editor is made to enable or disable most of the simulations in your scene. When working with simulations, animators may experience a great deal of lag or slow playback when reviewing the scene. Because of this, making adjustments to a scene can be both a slow and frustrating process. The solution to this is to turn off all of the dynamic properties of the scene, allowing animators to scrub through the timeline, playback the scene, and make adjustments where needed. You can do this in Maya already but the two methods Maya provides are flawed. The first method is to select each dynamic element one at a time and disable them individually, which is not only a slow process but it becomes harder to keep track of which dynamic elements are off, and which are on. The second method is to go to the menu bar and select Modify>Evaluate Nodes and either hit Ignore All or Evaluate All, or select the dynamic elements individually. This is also flawed however because Ignore All and Evaluate All could turn on or off a node you didn’t want to touch. This also makes it hard to keep track of what elements are already on or off or what in the scene need to be turned on or off, and animators may forget to turn those nodes back on before it’s too late.

With the Simulation Editor you can instantly see if your simulations are enabled or disabled. It finds all of the dynamic elements that are in the scene and turns them off.

(Hover mouse over to "Disable" simulations)

It currently works for most simulations except nHair and Soft Bodies but the end result will definitely be able to control them as well.

The other options I added to the Simulation Editor are methods to initialize/uninitialized the states of fluid containers (it also works on ponds and ocean), and to ramp nParticles and/or nCloth of a scene.

Here is a scene where there are many dynamic elements. I used this to test out my tool. Let’s say we want to ramp the flag (which is an nCloth) so it doesn’t start off looking stiff. You can ramp it by playing the scene until you see a position you like and then select the flag.

(Hover mouse to "select" the flag)

Then by selecting the Ramp option on the Simulation Editor, it makes a temporary cache of the flag, sets the start frame at the negative value of where you selected, and adjusts the playback timeline so that the simulation starts where you set it.

There is also a Reset Ramp option on the Simulation Editor, which is added in case the animator made a mistake or wishes to start the simulation earlier or later, currently does not work exactly the way I had planned (I have a hard time deleting the cache) but hopefully once the simulation editor is finished it will look like this:

(Hover mouse to "Reset Ramp")

There is still a lot of work to do and more features I wish to add to it, but the Simulation Editor will hopefully be finished in a few weeks so the animators will have a chance to use it.