When you create a jiggle disk cache for your scene, Maya stores the frame-by-frame processing of jiggle animation on disk. Before you can render jiggle animation with motion blur, you must create a jiggle disk cache.
More specifically, if the Motion Blur option is turned on in the Render Settings, you must create a jiggle disk cache before you render the animation. Otherwise the rendered animation sequence displays the animation incorrectly. The jiggling object’s Motion Blur option setting is irrelevant to this issue.
Creating a cache is also beneficial for scenes that play slowly because of their complexity. If you create a cache, you can go directly to any frame in the Time Slider and view an accurate jiggle animation. Without the cache, you would need to wait for the animation to play from the beginning of the Time Slider up to the current frame.
Jiggle processing is efficient and does not slow a scene much, unless your scene plays unusually slowly because of its complexity. You’ll want to create a disk cache only as a prelude to rendering with motion blur.
Creating a jiggle disk cache
When you create a jiggle disk cache, you can set creation options and then create the cache, or you can immediately create the cache with the current creation options.
Usually you do not need to know the location of the files. However, if you move the scene to a different project, you must also move the jiggle cache file to the corresponding data folder of that project so that the scene plays or renders using the cache.
See To create disk cache for jiggle deformers.
- By default, if you save an existing scene with a new name, Maya makes a copy of the jiggle cache file and gives it a name that corresponds with the new scene name. To save disk space, you can prevent this copy from being created by setting Copy jiggle files to Never in the Save Scene As Options (File > Save Scene As >
). - If you’ve never saved your scene (the scene is untitled), Maya creates the jiggle cache file(s) only after you save the scene.
Disabling or deleting jiggle animation after caching
If you want to modify the jiggle animation after caching, for example, by changing the Stiffness, you must disable or delete the cache so the scene plays with the modifications. Before you render again, you must create the cache again. Deleting cache is also useful if you need to free up disk space.
Be aware that if you disable a jiggle deformer (rather than the cache), you also disable playback of the jiggle cache and cannot create the jiggle cache.