What is nCaching?
You can save your simulation data to a server or local hard drive by caching your Nucleus objects or fluid effects. nCaches are special Maya files that store the simulated point data of your simulations. nCaches also connect to the nucleus nodes in your Nucleus systems, which allows both cached and uncached Nucleus objects to interact.
nCaches are useful when you want to reduce the number of calculations Maya performs when playing back or rendering scenes that contain simulated Nucleus objects or fluid effects, and they allow you to easily direct, mix, and edit your simulations in an intuitive, nonlinear manner.
You can use nCaches to do the following:
- Improve performance by caching an nCloth outfit (shirt, jacket, and pants) so that its collisions and constraints are not calculated each time its scene is played back
- Improve control and direct the behavior of an nCloth cape by arranging and blending its cache clips
- Improve performance by caching a complex fluid or nParticle effect
nCloth caches only store information about the XYZ positions of an nCloth object’s vertices, not the translation, rotation, or scale of the nCloth’s Transform node.
You can create nCaches for your Nucleus and Fluid objects using the nCache menu. nCaches can be edited from the Attribute Editor or the Trax Editor.
nCache formats
When caching a simulation, select from the following Maya cache formats:
-
mcx files use 64-bit indices and can be larger than 2.0 GB.
Use the mcx file format to cache large simulations such as high resolution Fluid Effects.
- mcc files use 32-bit indices and cannot be larger than 2.0 GB.
The nCache file format is an open format that can be read with standalone applications. For more information, see the example Python script cacheFileExample.py located in the devkit\pythonScripts folder of the Developer Kit installation. This example script demonstrates how to parse the cache description file and its associated data. See also geometryCacheConverter in the Maya Developer Help.
The Developer Kit is available from the Autodesk Developer Network.
Save properties to nCaches
For nCloth, nParticle, and nHair caches, you can specify the properties saved in the nCache file by selecting them in the Caching section of the object's Attribute Editor. For fluid caches, you can specify which fluid properties are saved in the cache file by selecting them in the Create Fluid Cache Options window. See Create fluids cache files.