CaronteFX General Forum

Hello,

Thanks for reporting the issue, we are updating the package in order to make it work properly in 5.5. We'll be uploading the update this week, and we hope it won't take too long to be approved by the asset store, so our estimate is next week. The update will contain more bug fixes than only 5.5 full compatibility and other interesting updates. We'll post a full changelog once it's published.

 

Hi， thanks a lot for making this great tool and the Adam demo is just awesome. I’d really appreciate it if you may give a few hints about the cloth settings. We attached a skirt to a humanoid avatar via a set of JointsAtLocators. If gravity is turned on, the dress will fold down until the fabric sticks to the thighs, therefore the skirt ends up hanging like a curtain. If gravity is turned off, the fabric will move around as the humanoid animation is dancing. We want the skirt (1) collide with hands and legs, this is done; (2) obey the physics law of inertial momentum when the avatar dances, this is done; (3) In other cases, the skirt should restore (lerp back to) the initial shape and stay stable, this is the part I need help. The cloth settings parameters we tried so far are similar to your samples of the flag on the pole, but the result is not what we want. Thank a lot for your time in advance.

 

Im looking forward to the compatibility update to unity 5.5, Thanks.

 

Hello,

An idea to achieve this we have used some times is to create a proxy rigid body with a copy of the skirt GameObject and attach this rigidbody to the humanoid avatar with other JointsAtLocators node as you attached the real fabric, then create JointsByMatchingVertices between the rigid body proxy and the fabric with limited force (you will have to experiment with force, and force by distance parameter of this joints to achieve the effect desired).

Once you have made this setup, you can activate/deactivate the joints by matching vertices when you want the fabric to recover the initial shape or let it simulate free. To activate/deactivate these joints you can use a parameter modifier node and connect it to the JointsByMatchingVertices node.

Let us know if this helps with your setup.

 

Thanks a lot, I will try this method. *_^

 

Just bought CaronteFX it looks really wonderful, yet, as i'm on 5.5 didn't have the opportunity to try it for myself yet :/ Getting an unhandled exception.
Has the update been submitted? How long does it usually take for approval?

Thanks for your work !

 

Yes, the update that contains compatibility with 5.5 has been submitted already to the Asset Store but has not yet been approved. It usually takes some business days to get approved by the asset store technical department. I hope they approve it this week, I will write here once it's online.

Here is a reduced changelog of the update:

• Added compatibility with Unity 5.5.
• Added GPU decoding of vertex animations. This improves runtime performance in many cases, specially when using interpolation mode in the player, but you will have to adapt your materials in order to use it (we have adapted the standard shader as illustration).
• Rigid bodies can now be created in shell mode or solid mode. In shell mode mass is located on the surface of the body, in solid mode mass is located through the whole volume.
• Improved creation of ropes from geometry (rope definition meshes are less restrictive).
• Rope bodies now inherit rope tile uvs properly and have better normals.
• Added angular limit property to servos.
• Added a menu to modify the UVs tile and offset of the fractured pieces. This menu can be accessed from any fracture nodes.
• Now you can use a baked CaronteFX as input of another simulation through an animated body node.
• Now you can include CaronteFX definitions in other CaronteFX (experimental). This feature allows you to combine different CaronteFX setups, and can benefit from the Unity prefab system.
• Improved visualization of collider meshes.
• Added re bake menu to the runtime player (animations can be rebaked and trimmed from this menu).
• Added elapsed time and real time counters to the scene GUI and simulation player. This improves simulation progression feedback.
• Added a significant amount of tool-tips.
• Added preview in editor of baked animation from the runtime player (now you can preview baked animations without need to enter play mode).
• Added an option to connect a default dust particle system to a baked animation (before you will need to setup a contact emitter node to generate contact events, the events can be baked and will produce dust in the contact points)
• Added a new example of a wall fracture to illustrate contact events and the connection between a baked animation and a particle or sound system.
• Improved OSX compatibility.
• Fixed simulation determinism in most cases.
• Added a toggle to recreate all bodies on simulation begin (this also helps to achieve determinism).
• Fixed rigid glue not disabling collision of rigid bodies when setting the disable collision options to enabled.
• Several bug fixes and optimizations in the physics engine.

One important note for the update:

Since CaronteFX uses a native DLL you will need to remove the CaronteFX folder located inside the Asset Folder completely before updating to the new version. You will have to do this with Unity Editor closed, because if not you won't be able to delete the DLL file (because it's being used by Unity).

 

Sorry, probably it's a simple question: how can I make a looped animation? For example, if I want to create a flag animation always playing in loop?

 

guidoponzini, you can set the Repeat Mode to "Ping Pong" on the CRAnimation script.

 

Hello guidoponzini, ping pong can work, but the pong part may look weird in most situations. A better approximation would be using Repeat Mode - Loop, but the baked animation end frame should be equal or very similar to the start frame in order to work properly. Since this can be difficult to achieve manually we are going to add an option in the bake/rebake menu that giving a transition time will create a loopable bake automatically.

 

Hello,

Can I use CaronteFX for creating the soft area on body of the rigged character? For example, I want to make anthropomorphic character with dynamic soft-body belly. It is assumed that the abdomen will collide with other objects. How to achieve this effect? Sorry for any possible mistakes in my English.

Thanks.

 

Hello fink1,

CaronteFX is an offline simulation tool, this means you can use it to create an animation sequence or a deterministic game event, like a character cinemetic (where the belly moves and deforms when collides with other objects), a building destruction/explosion sequence, or any other background event that does not require many different outcomes or needs to be always the same. But If you need interactive simulation that respond to the character in a non-predetermined way, then no, there your will need online realtime physics. In many games both realtime and offline precalculated physics are used, depending on the needs. Let me know if you need further clarification.

 

Hello,

I am trying to sync up secondary animations (particles when the fractured chunks collide) with a rigid body simulation I have baked, and am having some trouble getting it to behave properly.

I tried creating a separate unity animation and syncing it up using the 'Sync with animator' option in the CR Animation component, which works, but it causes my speed value (which I've increased from 1) to do nothing. To clarify, the baked animation works at the desired speed, until I plug in my Unity animator.

I couldn't seem to find any resources specifically on the sync with animator and how to use it properly, but Is there anything else I can try?

As an aside, I also tried using a contact emitter action between my rigidbody objects and an irresponsive to fire events every time a collision happens, and then use CRDustEventsReceiver.ProcessAnimationEvent funciton, but due to the amounts of fractured pieces I need, I can't seem to bake it without Unity crashing.

 

Hello, yes, using the sync with animator option will override the speed in the CRAnimation component, and will use the time/speed from the Animator. In this case if you change the speed of the Animator it will change the speed of the CRAnimation as well, so this may work for you.

As you have already tried I think the Contact Emitter node would be the best option for your use case (emitting particles from contact points). And then use any method you want to process this contact events (you can implement your own method, not need to use CRDustEventsReceiver.ProcessAnimationEvent, that's just an included example).

When using the contact emitter node is crashing during the baking process? It may be due to the max. number of events per second parameter in the contact emitter node, you can try to lower its value to 50, for example, but it would be good to be able to look at it, is there a chance you can send us a package with the scene/assets setup that is giving you the problem?

 

I've tried changing the speed of the Unity Animator, but that doesn't seem to override the Caronte animation; it just defaults to playback speed 1.

I also tried dropping the events/second parameter to 20 and am still getting a crash on a bake...

Cranimation.cs seems to be throwing an error at line 1202, could that be causing some of the problems? We're currently experiencing these issues on 5.4.0f3.

Thanks for the quick reply.

 

Yes, that could cause some problem. We can try some alternative code to see if it helps with the issue. I'm writting you in conversation to figure it out. Also It would help to have your simulation setup to get an insight on why it's not baking when you setup a contact event generator node.

 

Hi,

I’m trying to make the simulation using CaronteFX.
But I found the strange behavior in the simulation.

My test scene has 2 object.

- Red Colmun <- Rigidbodies
- White Floor <- AnimatedBodies

"Red Colmun" has a pressure from "While Floor", But sometime the gravity had not affected "Red column" when the "White Floor" move down. This mean "Red column" did not fall, still keep the position.

How to solve it?


Thanks,

 

Hello,

I've tried mimicking you example but I can't reproduce the behavior. I guess it may be something with your simulation setup:
https://gyazo.com/d6be141df3e68f5c01dbf93aa5412b5a

From the statistics in your scene GUI it seems you have two irresponsive bodies (or animated) and one rigid body (while in my example there is only one irresponsive and one rigid body). Are you sure there is not other body in the scene which is producing that strange behaviour, like another static invisible gameobject? You can toggle on the "draw boxes" option in the scene gui to make sure.

Also if you want you can send us a package with your scene and animation so we can check it out and provide you with better support.

Thanks

 

Thank you for quick reply.

My scene has 1 RigitBody and 1 AnimatedBody.
No IrresponsiveBody.

I uploaded the Unity data without CaronteFX asset.
Please add the CaronteFX and setup the scene again as following.

- Red Colmun <- Rigidbodies
- White Floor <- AnimatedBodies

If you need a complete project, please tell me where should I share the data.

Thanks,

 

Addtional imformation,

I checked the scene using "Draw Boxies" function.
That scene does not have an invisible object. But the box color of "Red Colmun" is chenged to purple when the strange behavior is happen.

Thanks,

 

@tokky bumping up the quality to 100 (in the root object in the caronte panel) fixes your issue.

I'm guessing since you are not moving the floor too much and the cylinder is not moving for a bit at the start, some sort of optimization kicks in that makes the cylinder "rest" for the rest of the simulation.

 

@tokky

I've downloaded your scene and I've been able to reproduce the issue. Yes, it's a bug, the red cylinder enters the "sleeping state" (purple box) but it shouldn't. We'll fix the issue for the next version.

As a workaround as @AcidArrow said you can go to the simulation settings and increase the Quality of the simulation or even better lower the Anti-Jittering value (to 5).

Thanks for the feedback

 

Hi,
I appreciate the work you've done to develop and support this plug-in.

I was wondering if CaronteFX can be used for real-time deformation.
I understand that I can pre-cache a behavior and trigger (play) it later on after saving the object as a prefab. I read much about it and watched all your videos, but I still don't have a clear answer:

If I bake a simulation (let's say of a sphere that has deformable properties), will I be able to collide with it (say poke it with a stick) in my game and observe a deformation where the tip touches the corresponding portion of the sphere?

Can you provide me with an answer, since

 

Hello,

CaronteFX is an offline tool, so can't be used for real-time simulation. But you can combine both real time and offline baked physics in many situations inside a real time application. The bakes are animations so can be used in cinematics, background effects or game events where you don't need player interaction, or when you need deterministic behavior.

For the scenario you describe can be more difficult since you need interactivity. An idea is to make a simulation bake (or several, depending of the grade of realism you want to achieve) of the ball deformation in-place, where only some vertex of the mesh will deform (you can use joints by matching vertices to fix the vertices of the ball you don't want to move), then add a PhysX collider (also maybe a rigid body, if you are not going to handle the ball physics yourself) component to give him the real-time counterpart and detect the collision, and during game play the baked deformation animation when you detect the collision event.

 

Hello, we have now uploaded a new version(1.2.1d) of the package to the Asset Store which fixes the issue you were having (https://gyazo.com/7a71ada0f9bd45b4018de53783d8ef0e), the version should be available soon, once it completes the review process, but if you need it before let us know by private.

This is the full changelog:

• Added extended rebake options to the rebake menu (bake events and actual frame counters).
• Rebake now works properly in bakes with substitutions of objects.
• Rebake now works with events.
• Added radial fracture node tooltips.
• Fracture nodes now have a default automatic scale calculation for internal UVs in order to be similar to external original UVs.
• Fracture nodes internal faces can now be generated in the same submesh as the original faces.
• Fracturing with both restricted + extrusion options enabled now works as intended.
• Node objects fields now have extended options in their context menu (Convert GameObjects references to name selectors, enable/disable GameObjects, select GameObjects in hierarchy)
• Several GUI modifications (fractures buttons, fractures tabs, effect tabs, radial fracture controls, random sliders in radial fractures, servos)
• Contact emitter added for soft bodies, ropes and clothes.
• Improved mesh tools interface and now if you reuse a mesh tool, parent GameObject will be kept.
• Added CaronteFX icon to simulation definitions in the Unity hierarchy.
• Improved performance of collider mesh visualization.
• Fixed a bug that in some situations produced oversleeping of rigid bodies and incorrect simulation behavior (levitating bodies).
• Fixed joints damping not working properly.
• Fixed irresponsive/rigid body mutation crash.
• Fixed a compatibility issue with Unity 5.3.3/5.3.4
• Fixed using CaronteFX bakes as input in an animated bodies node.
• Knows issues: Using a CaronteFX bake as input in an animation mode does not handle properly changes of visibility of objects.

 

Hello,

I have hit a stumbling block working with CaronteFX.

• I brought into Unity a pre shattered object from Modo as an fbx. I used Modo to create splintered fragments of wood which I cannot currently do in CaronteFX.
• The object group has about 60 parts which I am able to simulate fine using an explosions along with both rigid and responsive bodies.
• When I bake the simulation it gets hung up "checking visibility" on the second to last frame. My example is 180 of 181 frames. I have stopped the baking 3 times due to it not progressing past the second to last frame after a half hour which is exponintially longer than anything else I have ever tried with CaronteFX.
• I tried adjusting the quality setting for the simulation with no luck
• I tried unchecking compression, align data etc. With no luck.

Any suggestions as to what may be causing this issue?

 

I have exactly the same problem with my scene - getting stuck on "checking visibility" on the second to last frame.

Oh, with the error in console:
KeyNotFoundException: The given key was not present in the dictionary.
System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2[System.Int32,System.Int32].get_Item (Int32 key) (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/mono/build/mcs/class/corlib/System.Collections.Generic/Dictionary.cs:150)
CaronteFX.CarMeshCombiner.AddMesh (UnityEngine.GameObject go, UnityEngine.GameObject bakedBone, UnityEngine.Mesh mesh, UnityEngine.Vector3[] arrVertex, UnityEngine.Vector3[] arrNormal, UnityEngine.Vector2[] arrUV, UnityEngine.Vector4[] arrTangent)
CaronteFX.CarMeshCombiner.AddGameObject (UnityEngine.GameObject go, UnityEngine.GameObject bakedBone)
CaronteFX.CarAnimationBaker.CreateRgSkinnedGameObjects (System.String bodyNodeName, CaronteFX.CNBody bodyNode, System.Collections.Generic.List`1 listBodyId, UnityEngine.GameObject nodeGO) (at Assets/CaronteFX/CaronteFX_Plugin/Editor/AnimationBaker/CarAnimationBaker.cs:587)
CaronteFX.CarAnimationBaker.CreateBakedObjects (System.Collections.Generic.List`1 listBodyNodeToBake) (at Assets/CaronteFX/CaronteFX_Plugin/Editor/AnimationBaker/CarAnimationBaker.cs:407)
CaronteFX.CarAnimationBaker.BakeSimulationAsAnim () (at Assets/CaronteFX/CaronteFX_Plugin/Editor/AnimationBaker/CarAnimationBaker.cs:323)
CaronteFX.CarBakeSimulationMenu.<OnGUI>m__0 () (at Assets/CaronteFX/CaronteFX_Plugin/Editor/Windows/CarBakeSimulationMenu.cs:236)
UnityEditor.EditorApplication.Internal_CallDelayFunctions () (at C:/buildslave/unity/build/artifacts/generated/common/editor/EditorApplicationBindings.gen.cs:207)

 

Hello, I'm trying to reproduce the issue. The bake progress should be quite fast unless there is a bug we are not aware of.

 

Hello, thanks for the report. We are going to investigate this and give you a solution as soon as we can.

In order to properly investigate the issue, could you tell us what versions of Unity and CaronteFX are you using? (to check the CaronteFX version go to the Help menu in the upper right corner of the CaronteFX editor window and click on About CaronteFX...)

 

Thanks for the detailed description, is there any chance that you can share with us in private the scene that is giving you problems?

 

Hi, yes, in this example that is causing problems I'm running Unity version 5.5.0f3 and CaronteFX version 1.2.1d.

(In my example I'm taking the Unity standard Viking Village asset and fracturing & blowing one of those buildings up in a glorious explosion. Calculations work fine but as said, saving the animation fails.)

 

@rainisto @foy

Thanks to your console trace we have detected and fixed the bug. When baking gameobjects which have submeshes that are not being rendered (because the size of the array of materials in their renderer is less than their number of submeshes), the baking process will fail and hang in the checking visilibity state. I guess this is what is happening in your scenes.

We have a fix for the problem that we will include in the next version we upload to the asset store, meanwhile if you send us you invoice number by private conversation, we can send you a beta version which has the fix already applied.

 

Hello, we have now uploaded a new version (1.2.1f) of the package to the Asset Store. This is a minor release but fixes some issues in the previous version of the plugin, the version is already available for download so we recommend to update as soon as possible.

This is the full changelog:

• Fixed bake process stalling on "checking visibility" when combining rigid body objects with invisible submeshes.
• Fixed a bug in the simulation player when handling the visibility of vertex animated objects.
• Fixed fracture by geometry node not chopping.
• Fixed an application crash when using "UNITE DISCONNECTED PARTS" option in the resctrict fracture section.
• Fixed a bug when trying to duplicate root effect nodes.
• Added F2 shorcut for list item renaming.
• Resize of bake menu to better fit lower resolution displays.

For the update process follow these instructions:

Since CaronteFX uses a native DLL you will need to remove the CaronteFX folder located inside the Asset Folder completely before updating to the new version. You will have to do this with Unity Editor closed, because if not you won't be able to delete the DLL file (because it's being used by Unity).

 

A little bit of advertisement here:

Caronte rigid body solver has been recently used in the production of one of the latest Game Of Thrones trailers for some cool destruction effects:

The use was done through RealFlow software (which has the Caronte solver integrated), but similar results can be achieved with the more evolved version of the Caronte solver which is included in CaronteFX.

If you are curious about the process you can visit the webpage of the author, where he details what tools he did use and why was Caronte his rigid body solver of choice:

https://www.joshclos.com/gameofthrones

 

One minor bug report:

-It seems that if I try to fracture an object that doesn't have UVs at all it crashes Unity. While I think being able to fracture items without UVs at all is a valid use case, at the very least, if UVs are required, an error message would be more appropriate than straight up crashing.

Also:

-I'm having issues with making the Attractor Daemon work. I could be doing something wrong (although I tried a lot of things), but it seems to be doing absolutely nothing. Also, the manual doesn't mention it at all (maybe it needs a but of updating ).

EDIT: nvm, figured out the attractor. For some reason, it seems the attractor gameobject itself needs to be a rigidbody. A proper manual entry for the attractors would have saved me some time.

 

Yes, it's a valid case, thanks for reporting this. We will look into fracturing geometries without uvs or normals, both of them should be available and not crash.

Yes, the attractor GameObject needs to be defined as a body. We'll add a warning in the interface when this condition is not met to make it more clear for the user. Thanks for the suggestion!

 

Hey CaronteDev, just bought the plugin and so far it is working great. Thumbs up!!
Some things though: I think the manual is a bit dry and this seem to be a general Nextlimit issue in fact.
I am missing examples so I can better grasp the usage of certain functions as well as their setup.
There is almost no documentation on how to setup Trigger and Actions, as well as explanations on cr animation assets / scripts and so on. Tutorials on this are also missing as well as indepth introductions. Can you do some youtube sessions on implementing caronte into Unity?
I think this would greatly add to this otherwise neat plugin.

 

Hello AFKruh and thanks for the feedback, I will pass it to the content department. We plan to update the manual further with the latest features we are adding, there are also some tutorials in our youtube channel but they are very simple, more advanced tutorials are planned. If you have not already done it, you can open the included examples to get some knowledge on the trigger-substituter operation.

 

Hello CaronteDev,

I'm deciding on purchasing CaronteFX. I'm absorbing all the YouTube vids, reading the user guide and visited Unity Asset Store to check compatibility with the current Unity 5.6/2017 for macOS.

Got a little confused about that because the PDF user guide states it required Windows systems only whereas on the Asset Store it says requires Unity 64bit Editor for Windows & OSX.

Please clarify as soon as time permits, thanks?

 

It's working fine for me on OSX, I think the manual is just outdated in that regard.

 

Awesome, greatly appreciate knowing I can use it in macOS Unity development!

 

Hi,
While still researching CaronteFX capabilities before I decide to pull the trigger and purchase it, a quick question came to mind.

Is there a crumple or smash node? If not is there a way it can hide the seems of a fractured object so that an object appears wrecked or slammed into?
It would yield the appearance of crushed wrinkles like an aluminum can for example.

 

Yes, the manual is outdated in that regard. CaronteFX also works with the OSX 64 bits version of the Unity editor.

Different types of deformation effects (plastic/elastic) can be achieved with soft bodies in CaronteFX. For example in this scene the banner posts were made with soft bodies with plastic deformation:

 

Ah, I see what you did there-very nice!

2 hurdles I have remaining that'll affect my purchasing decision:
#1, Can CaronteFX handle Shader Forge or Vertex Colored models (will the applied shader and/or vertex colors remain intact and survive after the baked simulations, or does it only support meshes with U/V coordinates)?

#2, AFAIK in order to manipulate and use a Baked Animation in Interactive Game Time, I will need to disable it and copy its transform to the game object with the baked animation. I'll be attempting to do this with PlayMaker if its possible, so can I apply runtime physics, NPC controls, etc., to the baked CaronteFX Prefab or Asset directly (another example would be to attach a script that would allow a TPC character to pick up & throw or move the rubble produced by an explosion effect)?

Your response is greatly appreciated.

 

Hello Again,

#1, Vertex colors won't be preserved when using the fracture tools on any meshes, right now only positions, normals, tangents and uvs0 are preserved (for the original faces) or computed (for the newly created faces). We've considered keeping other vertex attributes in the fracture process but it's not implemented for the moment.

On the other hand if you make a bake using input objects with vertex colors, they will be kept a long as you don't collapse those objects (collapse is an option in the bake menu that groups meshes of rigid bodies into skinned meshes), adding vertex color to the collapse option is straightforward and it's something we'll add into a future version.

#2, I guess as and alternative you could stop playing the animation (set the CRAnimation animate property to false, so it won't further modify the transform of the involved objects) and enable the components you need to handle you runtime logic, picking of objects or anything else)

Kind regards,

 

Outstanding! Thanks for these solutions. I've purchased, excited for what future updates will bring.

 

Is there a way to get results from realflow into caronteFX? I have a old version of realflow which I have stopped using when I moved over to doing unity (was for film/commercials), which I was thinking of upgrading with your recent deals for old users. So I currently have a carontefx and realflow8 (which I am thinking of updating), but I can't figure out how to move something like a water simulation over from realflow to caronteFX (perfect world would load a particle/point cloud from realflow, but even a mesh output from realflow would be nice). I also have a couple of old maxwell licenses which I don't use anymore for similiar reasons(i.e. I need 360 top/bottom renders from unity). It would be real nice for me to be able to use my old film cinematography workflow on unity? I btw want to use caronteFX rather then alembic loads directly into unity, because carontefx is so much more stable & flexable in unity.

 

Right now there is no way to import RealFlow simulations into Unity through CaronteFX. CaronteFX is designed as an independent tool for simulation and baking directly into Unity. But I'll pass your feedback to the involved departments so they can consider adding an import option in the future.

 

I need guidance to create curtain (open/close)..

By following the Flag example, what I need ?

One MAST, two "FLAGS", how many hinges and washers ?

MAST - Irresponsive Bodies
FLAGS - Cloth Bodies
WASHERS and HINGES - Rigid Bodies
2 Joints by Locators: Washers with Flag and Hinges with Mast

Why in flag example are 24 Joint_Washer and 4 Joint_Hinge (12 for Washer A and 12 for Washer B; 2 for Hinge A and 2 for Hinge B) ?

Have I to follow this logic and make 2 flags (10 hinges for Flag A and 10 hinges for Flag B) ?

And finally how to move hinges along the mast (with Motor and Servos or with the Wind) ???

 

With 2 joints between rigid bodies and/or irresponsive bodies you can create an axis of rotation or hinge. The other joints are for the small holes in the clothes, that region of the cloth is attached to the ring shaped rigid bodies. The number of joints in this case is higher to keep this rigidbodies (washers) well tied to the cloth.

In your case the easiest way I can think of is to have each curtain joined with joints by locator to an irresponsive body located near the top region of each curtain, and when you want to open the curtains, set the velocity of the irresponsive bodies so they move in oposite directions.