Creating passive colliders

Now our scene is set up, and ready to animate. I just want to be able to see it a little bit better. It's a good idea to see the wireframes. In my panel toolbar here, I'm going to enable Wireframe on shaded. I'm going to hide that toolbar now; the shortcut for that is Control+Shift+M. Just get that out of the way, because we don't need that now. So, I've got a tabletop, and I've got a tablecloth. And so that the tablecloth will collide with the tabletop, I'll need to make the tabletop a so-called passive collider.

I'll select that, and I want to go into the nDynamics menu set in the upper left-hand corner. You'll see there's a menu that says nMesh. You can see, at the very top, we've got two different options to create. There is Create Passive Collider, and Create nCloth. I want to choose Create Passive Collider, and activate that. Now you'll see that with that object selected, I don't see anything special in the Channel box.

But let's open up the Attribute Editor, Control+A, with that object selected. Now you will see a few things. You will see nucleus 1; that is the master simulation node that's controlling all the objects. Then we've got an nRigidShape; that's a node type called nRigid, also known as passive collider. Just like everything in Maya, it needs to have at least two names for the same thing. It's got the menu name, which is human friendly, and then it's got the node name, which is more for programming purposes, or coding purposes.

In the next movie, we will create an nCloth for the tablecloth.