C8.5 Cloth w/ Attach

JoeMamma2000

I was poking around the release 8.5 to see if anything substantial has changed w/ regard to the cloth sim, and, unfortunately, as far as I can tell, not much has. In fact it appears they STILL haven't connected the Density slider, so it's useless. As well as the Pressure setting.

In any case, I needed to simulate a curtain, and was mulling over how I'd do it in Carrara. I then I decided to be bold and try something that I was pretty sure it couldn't handle, just to see what the limits were. I decided to fully simulate a curtain, attached to those ring thingies, sliding on a curtain rod or whatever you call it.

Now to do that I figured I'd need to have some pretty powerful soft body attach functionality, which I was pretty sure wouldn't happen. But to my surprise, it worked, and I made (for me) a rather interesting discovery.

Here's the final product:

http://youtu.be/U7HeqSxNDOU

To do this, here's what I did:

1. Make a simple curtain rod from cylinders.

2. Make a simple torus; make it a rigid body physics object; duplicate it twice

3. Make a simple square mesh. subdivide it until you get a lot of polygons. Then, most importantly, give it thickness. One of the best ways to get some really nice looking cloth is to add thickness. I think I did a simple vid a very long time ago showing this.

4. Now add soft body to the cloth mesh. Then add three soft body attach modifiers to the cloth. Yes, you can stack them and it still works,w which surprised the heck out of me. Then assign a SB Attach to each of the rings, and select some points right below each ring to attach.

5. Run the sim, and you should get a fairly nice result if you've chosen some good cloth settings.

Anyway, the SB Attach function is really incredibly useful. The fact that you can assign/attach cloth points to a rigid body physics object is a huge benefit, and means you can develop some really interesting cloth/rigid body combinations. This can be used in clothing and all kinds of stuff.

evilproducer

I had an interesting but brief discussion with DAZ_Spooky not to long ago about the improvements in Bullet and why it was included as it sounded kind of like a dead end for clothing simulations. It was kind of academic for me as I don't have C8-anything at the moment.

Anyway, onto the point. He said that most cloth sims, including Optitex, use a combination of simulated cloth and rigging to get the effect desired. Since it wasn't something I could experiment with I didn't follow up to find out more information about how it might work.

I thought it was interesting, and it may be something to consider along with the flexibility of the attach functions you found in Bullet.

wetcircuit

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HC6GOQzqJ0

My try. ^

At a small scale and only 3 attach points it worked well (a little weird fluttering at the corner)

but using the same "cloth" scaled up and more attach points (17) the soft body just imploded and crumpled....