 |
This short text based tutorial shows you how you can make a curtain by using blender’s physics engine together with the Weight Paint tool. This tutorial is mainly a technologie study about the possibilities of weight paint. It may serve your needs or not. But i love the idea to let the engine make the work for me. This tutorial is not specially aimed to sculptied prim creators, but more to the general blender users assuming you have at least some basic experience with blender. |
And here we go:
1.) Create a flat plane
If you are a sculptie maker, use primstar to create your initial sculptie plane. If you are just interested in the technique without wanting to create a sculptie, use add -> mesh-> Plane
- With primstar use the following settings:
- Sculptie type “Plane”
- 32 x-faces
- 32 y-faces
- 0 subdivision levels
- Now you have a simple 32*32 faces plane.
- Go to edit mode and select all vertices.
2.) Create a vertex group
- still in the F9 button menu locate the “Link and materials” tab.
- There create a new vertex group
- name it “Curtain”
- Assign all selected vertices to the group
3.) The Weight paint mode
- Switch to “Weight paint” mode in the mode selector.
- When you are in Weight Paint mode, the curesor changes to a paint brush and you can paint directly on your mesh. The painted color is mapped to a “weight” between 0 (blue=very smooth and moveable) and 1 (red=very stiff and imovable).
- The color can be changed with the Weight bar in the Paint tab (see left image belowbelow)
- We are coloring the top to red so that it keeps stiff and imovable, while further down towards te bottom we make the mesh smoother and smoother (turning to blue color)
- While painting use the Weight bar in the Paint tab (see left image below) to change the weight (and its associated color on the plane).
5.) The Physics buttons
- Switch to the Object buttons panel (F7)
- Switch to the Physics buttons (again F7)
- Locate the Soft Body Tab
- enable Soft Body.
6.) “Use Goal Button”
- Locate the “Use goal” Button in the Soft Body Tab
- click on the double headed arrow
- assign your vertex group (“Curtain”) to it (or however you named it in step 2. above)
7.) Animation mode
- Go to the top menu and locate the screen selection popup. It should be set to “SR:2 – Model”.
– Change that to SR:1 – Animation
- locate the play button and click on it. Watch your curtain wiggle in the air:
If you do not see the curtain moving during play, then try this:
- stop the animation
- rewind to frame 1 (left to the start button)
- play again
that should do the trick
8.) Select a still
Now stop the player and grab the green time marker in the lower part of the screen and drag it with your mouse from left to right until you found a good shape.Your curtain will now look similar to this image:
9.) Apply Softbody
Now go back to the edit button panel (Use F9) and apply the Softbody modifier:
And here is your curtain sculptie:
Of course you can add more wrinkles by modifying the top row of vertices before you go to the animation. But this is just a very quick and dirty go through the whole process…. Imagine what you could do with this technique if you take some time investigating on it. Here is a cloth made with this technique:
OK when I first tried it, of course it didn’t work. Then when I redid it, it worked fine. ( I’ll say user error, as in me lol ) Great Tutorials . Thank you so much for all your work in putting them together .
Thanks for the great tutorial!!
Just one question, I made the second example you showed above – the table-cloth like, but when on animation mode the corners of the cloth won’t go down, the middle part and the corners stay at the same level and the rest is wiggling nicely.
I have checked and there is no red color on the corners..How do I make them go down?
Thanks!
Adriana
Thank you so much for this tutorial. Worked perfectly for me! Now I know that creating curtains or other similar items in Blender won’t be a pain. Keep up the great work.
When I start the animation, the time marker is running, but the plate is still moveless, no wiggling in the air. I am sure I did evyrthing as you say, guess you forget to say something important again…:-( Be more careful when you write your tutorials, please!!!
Hi.
I am absolutely not aware of anything that i have missed to tell. It worked for me and i took the snapshots while i was walking through the entire proces. But blender is sometimes very(!) picky and even the slightest derivation from the path may result in unexpected results. Anyways i added a hint in step 8:
If you do not see the curtain moving during play, then try this:
1. stop the animation
2. rewind to frame 1 (left to the start button)
3. play again
That might do the trick for you …
Please can you report back ?
Well, I have found out what is wrong…:-) Just forgot to say that I need to click “Clear” button before painting. The color of plate will change from red to blue and then I can start to paint…
Thanks for that tip. I had the same problem.
I changed it to Weight paint mode, plate got red, but when I try to move the cursor across it, it is still red, I only see a yellow circle around cursor and nothing happens… Whats wrong?
Thanks for the great Tutorial, that really makes it understandable. Do you have a suggestion on making the other side of the curtain? so it can be seen from both sides?
Thanks for all you great tutorials helping all of us learn blender!!
I would just like to let you know that this sort of tutorial is exactly why I keep coming back to the Machinimatrix site. As a hobbyist in SL and OpenSim, I tend to pick up knowledge as I go along. Blender is capable of far more than I know about, and thanks to this and previous tutorials from you I’ve learned so much!
Thanks!!