Hi,
i’d like to make an animation of a flag on a pole that is affected by wind.
The animation looks fine, but i’d like to make it a repetitive animation that at some point continues at exactly the same position. Basically i just don’t want to make the animation “jump” from one position to the other when i repeat the animation at frame 1.
Is it possible to create an animation that loops and goes back from the end frame to the first frame without looking discontinuous?
Best regards,
Torsten.
Not to worry, my friend. This is a common mistakes with people new to animation. When you want an animation to loop like this: 
The trick is that the last frame should not be the first frame, rather the frame before it!
so you have a animation that is 150 frames long. the first and last frames are the same (1, 250) so playing it once it runs smoothly. but repeating it, you notice a delay when the animation loops. Our eye sees the same image in two frames, while the other frames changed images. We notice something different about this part of the animation and that is what causes our minds to assume it is looping. now render only frames 1-249. now for each frame we see a different image and we dont notice it looping.
hope this helped,
Tictoon
2 Tictoon:
I think he meant that he needs to force the cloth simulation to calculate the last frame the same as the first and make the simulation between them. Your explanation is good, but at 25fps the one-frame difference isn’t THAT visible for me…
To answer the original question, I have no idea, but it’s a rather interesting question. I’ll watch this!
oh ok, well IN THEORYm since I am not certain, you can get half of your cloth animation done, then copy the parts before it and paste them revered after, for example, your animation runs 100 frames. you render up to frame 5, then using a video editing software, play the last 50 frames backwards. therefore your last frame would be your first frame.
The only way I see doing this in blender is tweaking the settings and hoping for the best.
Wow, great idea! Nothing I would invent in an definite amount of time…
Hello,
thanks for your hint, reversing the animation is a great idea.
Best regards,
Torsten.
I think with something like wind you can’t just reverse it. You would be able to tell that the wind was not going in the same direction for the second half of the animation. For example if a ripple was traveling in one direction (direction of the wind) through the flag in the first half, you would notice it traveling backwards in the second half. In a real flag if the wind was traveling in that opposite direction, the flag would turn around and point in the opposite direction, but it sounds like you want your flag to stay facing one direction.
[ < < < < <]p
[ < < < < <]p
[ < < < < <]p
…p
…p
…p
[ > > > > >]p
[ > > > > >]p
[ > > > > >]p
…p
…p
…p
This is my ascii demonstration haha, try to follow me. The </> are the direction of the ripples. The first picture is a correct representation of ripple direction/flag direction.The second is false, if the ripples were to go that way, then the flag would be like this. p’s are “pole” by the way.
p[ > > > > >]
p[ > > > > >]
p[ > > > > >]
p…
p…
p…
it is tricky one huh. one solution might be to use the cloth sim as a reference to create shape keys on a normal mesh. Just pick a few frames of the sim and aproximate the shape with a different mesh. kinda hacky but it would work anyway. interested to see a solution to this one.
have fun