Painting Cloth Attributes - especially Damp

If you've worked with nCloth longer than 10 minutes, you'll notice that your cloth can get, for lack of a better term, bouncy. It's sloshes all around and keeps bouncing and moving, even when the character has stopped. A few things can prevent this, but the main one is Damp.

What is Damp?

Damp diminishes the movement of the cloth by dissipating it's energy. Higher damp = less energy. Be careful with this though. If your Damp value is too high, your cloth can look gummy.

In previous versions of Maya, you could paint certain attributes like Thickness, Friction, Bounce etc. So if your cloth had a Friction value of 1, and you painted a third of it black, a third of it 50% gray, and a third of it black, the black section of the cloth wouldn't have friction at all, the gray section would have a friction value of .5 and white section would have a friction value of 1.

Now, in Maya 2012, you can paint more attributes, like Damp. I've been waiting for them to do this FOREVER! I'm so excited! Yay!

Painting attributes on cloth can be a huge help in getting it to behave properly. When one part needs to behave a little differently than the rest of the garment, painting the attributes could be just the trick to getting this to behave properly.

I'm creating a tutorial on it, so look out for it.

~Melissa