Hi all,
I have been trying several strategies to make a ribbon (or belt or strap) that could be animated AND that could make sharp angles, say like a ribbon around a gift box.
I have tried with Bezier curves + armature+ control bones but I found curves are not suitable to make sharp angles. In addition if I use 10 control bones I have to keyframe each of them independently, unless I missed something here.
Any advices to do that ?
Thank you
a couple of things.
There’s a ‘support forum’ for animation questions
and when asking complex questions try it with pictures. It’s overly confusing like that.
Sorry
I posted on the animation forum with attached Blender file
Thank you
I spent a LOT of time working on this a few months ago, and intended to post my findings.
There’s several things at work when creating a ribbon, the texture, the physics, and the way it plays in the air.
I’ll leave the material/texture up to you.
Animating the ribbon with an armature didn’t work for me, I opted to rely on the cloth physics. Except the cloth physics include stretching and it drove me nuts.
The biggest challenge to the ribbon is that it’s stiff in one direction, flimsy in another - that that’s what makes it ribbon instead of just paper or cloth.
I made sure the verts are placed accordingly so that the ribbon bends more along one side than the other, (when using the cloth physics simulator)
To get the ribbon to flow around a sharp angle that doesn’t actually exist, best approach is to use physical barriers that are hidden from the camera:
Create a vert group along the front of the ribbon, pin it in the cloth physics section.
Here’s a video.
To achieve this, I’ve had to animate the ribbon around the poles. The movement is too clunky, so I created a path for the ribbon’s verts to follow. This version has an updated ribbon material with shiny edges.