Animating a curtain (open - close)

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi everybody
Fitst post here.
I’m trying to animate a curtain opening and closing.
I have no problem with the cloth but when I try to animate changing location the vertexes of the cloth go wild.
I guess I’m missing something.

Any help would be apreciated.
Thank you.

2

Try using Hooks. In Edit mode, select 1 or 3 verts at the top of the curtain where a real world hook wound be, then press Ctrl-H to add a Hook (an Empty that is attached to the selected verts). Now in Object mode animate the hooks to open and close. Once you have the animation of the hooks in place, bake your cloth sim. Here is a quick test blend with the hooks animated, you can just bake the cloth to see the final result:

curtain.blend (224 KB)

3

Thank you. Looks like what I’m looking for.
I will try tonight.
Thanks again.

4

Thanks, DichtomyMatt. I’m just getting into playing with cloth objects and your sample was very helpful to me.Would be great for a quick tutorial. Thanks for posting it!

5

Glad you found it useful. If I get a chance I might try to write up a tut. This is the second thread I have seen with someone needing to animate a curtain. I just need to find a simpler way of animating the hooks. For the sample I just animated each manually. There has got to be a better way though.

6

Animating them individually is fine for me, for now anyway.

So I’ve been playing around with it and tried putting the subsurf modifier ABOVE the cloth modifier to what kind of effect that would have. The movement looked a bit more fluid, but the baking took FOREVER. Literally 100x as long as when I had the subsurf applied after the cloth. Definitely not worth slightly better results in this case. I could see how it might be better for more complex scenes, though. Depends on what you’re trying to accomplish, I guess.

Is that fairly typical practice then? Keeping the mesh object for the cloth as simple as possible and applying “touch up” modifiers lower in the stack? I was surprised at how much additional time the baking took when I changed the order of the modifier stack.

7

The more vertices you have the longer the baking time will be. By adding the sub-surf before the cloth you increase the vertex count exponentially. So, I would try to keep the base mesh as low as possible while still getting some nice movement, then add the sub-surf. Also, I was on a slow machine when I made that Blend, so low vert count was a must. :wink: