Cloth Simulation, Part 04: Create a Drop Curtain Falling Onstage

Photo of Donovan Keith

Instructor Donovan Keith

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  • Duration: 13:19
  • Views: 3699
  • Made with Release: 16
  • Works with Release: 16 and greater

In this video we’ll animate a curtain dropping to reveal a background plate.

In this video we’ll animate a curtain dropping to reveal our background. You’ve probably seen something like this at an auto-show unveiling or at the start of an epic concert. To animate the effect, we’ll create a large plane, then pin it in a few places along the top with the Cloth belt tag. We’ll then animate the strength of the cloth belt tag to create a dropping animation.

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Transcript

You've this at an auto start of some epic concert. For us animate this effect, we're gonna start by creating a large down in a few places then we're going to release the hold those cubes over time until we get something that kinda looks like let's just go ahead and go over the process of creating So if you would create a start add a plane. cameras, I'm gonna choose a minus z orientation. And then I'm just gonna chose 1920 by 1080 for my size of my texture that I might wanna put my final output, so place to start. Next up, I wanna move this so that resting on my floor, maybe just a little bit above. So, I'm view. And you also- when about dimensions of your want this to seem, and right now about 10 meters which is about 30 feet. So, imagine this is venue. If you want use your scale tool and scale it down whatever size you're trying to represent. Now because I wanna really soft sort of sheer fabric, make sure divisions here, and I have enough. So the first thing I want is, I wanna square, so I'm gonna set my width to 16 and my height to 9. And that's the number of segments to have the same aspect footage. number by 4, see pretty good. Let's double it again, times two, two. So you could probably have gotten away with or 128 by 72 a plane about the right size, and I'm planning on making this editable, I'm just gonna make a myself. I'm gonna call I'm gonna turn it off and hide it. Same thing like that, and let's now make editable. And I do that because we can't use the Cloth Tag object editable here. So wanna gonna use to cube to your scene, let's make it a smaller, maybe a size of 10 by 10 by 10 or maybe 20 by 20, just Something like that. Next up, I wanna go into my front here, and I wanna make a number of copies in a straight line I'm gonna use my MoGraph tool, also wanna Cinema 4D's not quite smart enough to exactly where to put your object in Auto Snapping. So with 3D now click on the upper left- my right. And and drag, I can adjust the number of objects. Now, what I'm looking for is, I think five or so. each of these cubes to lies within it. So, I situation, so and then I'm going to release the key. I'm gonna delete this initial cube and I'm now gonna Belt Cubes and let's now editable. separate individual Tag to work. And I believe the Belt also needs these to be polygon objects, so I'm gonna make these So, gonna belt Now, I just need to start setting up relationships. So let's first create a Cloth Tag on our gonna press play and see what start to this is much we've done, and that's because we've way more points. Next up, I wanna add a Cloth Belt Tag, so Simulation Cloth Belt, and I'm manually copy the command a few two, three, four, five. We now have five copies right here. And what I wanna do is drag each of turn. So Cube 0, Cube 1, Cube and then associating a object with the points or polygons on target object. And what I need to do is go in here and tell points they relate to. So, here gonna go into my Live Select tool, and I'm gonna my cloth object. I'm gonna select that first point, go to choose Set. Then I'm gonna point, Tag and choose same for the next guy here, select point, choose Set. Let's go one more over. Select that point, get this last one. Select Tag, So we now have our belts you know that they're established we now have showing up. And they're we turn that connection. So now, let's press play see what we have. We have cloth that is connected by a belt, rubbery and it's very slow to the probably Iterations. So in my tag here, I'm up my Iterations to something kinda crazy like 50, and then we get. Well, we get a simulation for one, but we also are better respecting the settings of our tag. I'm also gonna turn off cloth just drops really, I'm want it possibly avoid that. We're gonna Mass as is. And let's take a look at our Forces if we press play here, not too much is happening. We might Air Resistance later, but for say that's Dresser tab. So in have a fairly good or clean slate, say. And I wanna be able to get back to this whenever I in my Dress State here, Set. right, if you you can just press Show and you'll it." Next up, what I wanna do is I want to relax my cloth. And sort of pre-rolls my frames, so I'm gonna press Relax, it'll do about wanna keep pressing Relax until something that's looking pretty good. Now, one thing that I'm don't have a floor object anything really, for our cloth to collide with. So starting point. So already, we get to take advantage this Dress State. So I'm gonna choose Show, which will I'm gonna go to my Init gonna I've restored my that little bit of experimentation. go ahead and add a plane now, and scale up the size of this polygon object for it to gonna select this plane and I'm going to add a let's go back to our cloth, press see what happens. It's starting to fall and it's colliding that's what we wanna kinda want the start of So tab, we it's nice and clean here. And to Relax, let's say, 30 steps. The equivalent of a 30 gonna take a minute to might get some of those initial wrinkles, some of And we're doing this so that when we pressing play on our animation, it's not doing that whole the curtain to look like for a with 10 steps, that initial position. And once it's relaxing, I now wanna choose Init stet-, state rather Set. So of Dress mode, and the very my Again, at any point, I can click on next to my Dress state, and it's gonna go back to that. I can Init state, and we're in this pre-roll want to animate influence of my Cloth Belt Tags. So I'm gonna and I'm gonna change my Keyframe Interpolation settings to Steps, so I do that in my Project Interpolation to Step, select tags, and frame zero, for zero, they're all on. And now, at 30, let's say, or maybe frame 20, I'm gonna set Influence be a very hard switch interpolation, between on and off. let's press play and see what happens. It's gonna take a pre-roll, to play through all and our falling a pretty long distance, so gonna take a second. But I'd say, that's looking pretty good. instead of all of the cloth simultaneously, I want it to start on one side, other. So I'm gonna to my timeline, and I'm take these final keys over here, and I'm gonna jog them over then another five. And then ones, I'm between the other, so perfect release. And then having done that, I'm here to 50. And I'm gonna cache my animation, just to see what this is looking like. Now it's gonna take to calculate the cache, and that's where you've got cache is just gonna take a while. pressing play, we get a little bit of elastic bounce at then we've got a nice So this just a Gouraud Shading. And to my cloth gonna throw it into a hyperNURBS object or-, excuse me, I'm gonna throw it into a Surface. So I'm gonna hold option key or my alt key, and it child of it. Subdivision Editor and renderer to it's adding some smoothing but not too much. And already, better. And I want it just a more division on select this Subdivision Surface, and gonna use my Simulate Cloth Surface to add just one more step, more division. Notice, though, this too sort of weird polygonal look. So, I like to keep down at one. And if we press play now, we get our curtain that looks pretty good. there and you start texturing it, you start animation that looks like this. Just on the texture of your company or the phrase or slogan and all of a sudden you've decent whatever you want
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