Marvelous Designer Support

Hi Folks!

I'm using marvelous 9.5 in work for some visual effects shots and I've found a few things a bit annoying to work with. Hopefully nothing too big to add!

1. Have the end frame value work as a stopping frame for the simulation. Often I want to sim 500 frames of a generic animation - lets say a flag billowing in the wind for example. I'd love to have the end frame value in the timeline be a frame where the simulation will stop so that I can let marvelous run over lunch and not continue to make a massive cache file.

2. Turbulence seems to change it's random seed very often. Right now I'm trying to animate some cloth with some gentle billows and ripples. Say I like the first 100 frames of animation but want less / more wind in the 100 frame after that, I'll adjust the later keyframes and resimulate. I find if I'm using a high turbulence value though, it looks like the random seed of the turbulence is completely different any time I adjust a keyframe so the first 100 frames I liked is now quite different. Is this the case and if so, can we get it fixed?

3. Turbulence and wind strength are very hard to plan. The manuals for wind are quite basic so they don't explain how turbulence is applied. I'm guessing that since it's 0 to 100, it's a percentage value of variation of your wind strength? This would mean if I have a wind value of 100 and a turbulence of 50, my wind strength can vary anything between 50 and 150? Would it be possible to show the final wind strength including the applied turbulence some how, maybe something like the final number for wind strength in brackets beside strength in the property editor like Strength: 120.00 (135.79) Ideally the best thing would be to have a line graph in the animation editor showing a curve of the final wind strength with the turbulence applied so I can see where the peaks and troughs are in the wind!

3. Could we get a turbulence frequency / wavelength control? I love the idea of being able to do a few overall keyframes for wind up and down and then using turbulence to add a bit of natural randomness. Right now I don't know how fast or slow the turbulence changes though. I'd love to have a control for how quickly the turbulence is changing / evolving. Again ideally it'd be lovely to see this in a graph but if I had frequency at least I'd be able to do some quick tests on simple cloth objects to get the speed I want before running a simulation with all of my complicated patterns and avatars!

4. Being able to save out the wind controller and it's keyframes! I'm doing a load of different cloth for a city scene so we have different marvelous files for each piece. It'd be great to be able to import / export a wind animation easily so that all my cloth is run with the same timings!

Thanks folks!