In 2014, Carbon made its big screen debut in DreamWorks Animation’s “How to Train Your Dragon 2” where it was used for some of the most challenging CFX shots.

Ever since then, Carbon has been used extensively in the VFX industry for a variety of assets, from the most demanding Hero cloth and skin for animated and Digi-double simulations, to sails, ropes, chains and plants.

Most of your favorite blockbuster movies from the past 8 years have been relying on Carbon in one way or another.

Quality and Performance

Carbon Cloth uses an advanced cloth model to deliver high quality cloth simulation which combined with robust multi-layer collision, supports the very highest quality Hero cloth simulation. Highly optimized code combined with a multi-threaded design from the ground up, ensures that Carbon delivers high quality with maximum performance.

Carbon Cloth is production proven for simulation of clothing, ropes, sails, nets, and deformable skin.

Today, Carbon Cloth is used by many large and small studios, around the world.

Robust Collision handling

Carbon Cloth provides very advanced collision and can handle collision between fast moving objects with ease.

The Carbon Cloth collision supports action AND reaction between:

• Cloth and Character
• Cloth and Cloth as layers
• Cloth and Cloth as self collision within one cloth
• Cloth and Rigid Bodies like buttons, chains etc.
• Cloth and Character skin (where character skin is also a Carbon Morph)
• and also, reaction between

Cloth / Rigid Bodies and Velocity Fields (Wind)

By default, everything collides with everything else and Carbon Cloth's collision rapidly culls invalid collision objects from the calculation.

But it's also possible to define who collides with whom, if required.

 Carbon garment construction.

• Carbon For Maya supports a wide range of options in how garments are constructed.
• from welded meshes, to stitched panel garments,
• import from garment design tools or authored in Maya.
• garment processor nodes to accelerate the setup of complex garments.
• full support for anisotropic fabric properties.
• fast deformers to map thick render meshes to simulation meshes.
• There is a lot more information about Carbon garment constuction here.
• Art Directability
• A cornerstone of Carbon Cloth is its art directability, giving the artist the features and tools they need to create great cloth simulations. Almost all attributes can be animated and most attributes support paint map control.

The Carbon Cloth collision is also very robust, but sometimes you want it to be more forgiving, so there is also the option to relax the collision for specified colliders. This allows for interpenetration of body parts with the cloth (for example when they are out of shot) or when you are just not going to render the body part anyway (for example knees poking through a pair of trousers).

Wrinkle maps

Some creases are meant to be permanent. Typical cases for this include curtains, dress shirts with collars, skirts with pleats or pants with pleats. Carbon allows to paint areas where such a behavior is wanted and overwrites all start and reference angular information to ensure permanent creasing.

Creating permanent creases for pants.

 Folds and Creases

Cloth naturally has angular plasticity which determines how fast folds appear and disappear. Carbon provides the controls to replicate this behavior. This is a great feature for creating more believable cloth simulation. Using angular plasticity allows artists to control how fast folds/creases recover. It's also paintable and animatable and so fully art directable. For more information see here.