Looping cloth animation

[Jho]

Hi.

Many of the animations I make at work need to loop (game animations. Running for instance). I just added a cape to this one character and was thinking how I would make it's animation loop. I guess I could do it with actions, but I thought maybe I could just make a script that would copy the cape's bone locations from the start of the loop to the end (preferably with a slider of some kind, so I could animate how fast if fades in).
That sounds like something even I could do. But it also sounds simple enough hat someone else has probably already done it.

So does anyone know of an ICE, script, plug-in etc. of some kind that makes simulations looping?
Actually, it doesn't even have to make the simulation itself loop, as this is simulated with syflex and then baked to bone animation.

[Mathaeus]

Hi.
So does anyone know of an ICE, script, plug-in etc. of some kind that makes simulations looping?
Actually, it doesn't even have to make the simulation itself loop, as this is simulated with syflex and then baked to bone animation.

I'd say, animation mixer is your best friend, especially if you already have it baked to bone animation. Weighting of multiple clips, baking to new one, that's it.

In case of procedural animation, turbulence or so, there's old trick to use some sort of rotation. For ICE turbulence node, for example, you'll rotate the input point position around some axis, so 0 or 360 angle returns the same result ('animated' in this node should be off, in this case). But it has to be a long turn (in time), to get something believable.

[Jho]

Yeah, I think I'll go with actions after all. I'll make an action of the cape in a general starting position and blend that to where ever is needed. I guess it's the simplest way after all.
Thanks for the ICE tip though. I'm sure that'll come in handy with something else eventually.