trying to make a bed sheet with the timeline and while it looks like cloth it looks to perfect. Is there a way to add some folds to make it look a little more real? I don’t need it to look slept in, just not flat. I’m also really new to this type of modeling (timeline and collisions and the physics modifier) so keep it in mind if you can answer and thanks in advance.
how about using some wind to blow it around a bit.
Or a displace modifier…It’s a good, non destructive, way to add real geometry variation.
I have the strength a bit high to illustrate it.
0) Add a displace modifier
- Click new texture
- Turn the strength down to ~.08
- Click the button to the right of texture (to switch to textures)
- Change from clouds to one of the others, voronoi, stucci, noise…
- Tweak the strength back in the modifier, and test different texture parameters.
@Modron blow it around? are you being smart or is that a modifier function?
@ Blenderalldat I will try tonight or tomorrow, it’s 5 o’clock somewhere and somewhere is here.
Add some uneven geometry to the mattress underneath the sheet. Extruding a few random faces up a tiny bit will be more than enough.
how do I apply the changes made by the simulator to stay on the affected surface?
@Orinoco I was actually trying that but the cloth kept slipping off the bed, I’ve flattened them down and got a nice result but I think I need to do something called baking.
@Blenderallday, I will keep the displacement workflow in mind when I do this, thank you.
@Modron Now I see it, I thought you were being a smartass! Unfortunatly you opened a door to far too many possibilities than I can invest in but now want to get sidetracked.
You could simply sculpt the wrinkles onto the sheet mesh:
Find a frame in which the sheet looks to your liking.
Select the sheet mesh, hit “Alt-C” and click “Mesh from Curve/Meta/Surf/Text”. This will bake the actual state into the mesh, the simulation and its corresponding tags/modifiers are deleted automatically. The mesh is now static.
Add Solidify and Subsurf modifiers to your mesh (if needed).
Switch to Sculpt mode and go crazy. A combination of the Draw and Pinch brushes should get you a long way.
The more I thought about it, Orinoco’s suggestion to just add some randomness to the geometry of the bed is really much better. For one thing you can make them longer and running top to bottom like real bed sheet wrinkles.
And sure, if you are really going for a tight shot, sculpting those wrinkles with crease, pinch/maginfy will give solid results. That may be overboard though. Depends on the shot.
If you are happy with the way the sheet lies and don’t need the sim anymore, you can just click apply in the modifier. The cloth sim data will be gone and you have s static, shaped mesh. You might want to make a duplicate of the sheet or at least save an old version with the sim in case you want to go back. If you need to animate some gentle rustling of the hanging parts you can just use shape keys.
As for baking if you have hit alt-A to watch some frames of the sim, you have already baked a few frames to memory. But if you want to do it faster and be more persistant, you go to the cloth cache, select a start and end frame and click bake. If you close and reopen the file, the sim data will still be there.
The friction value for most of the cloth presets is pretty low, so the cloth slips. This can happen even on perfectly flat surfaces. Increase the friction too much and the cloth will just lay there. So play around with the values until you find one that works. I got some decent results using a ‘cotton’ preset with friction=15.00, but I didn’t try many values. 5.00 is too slippery. 50.00 is way too high, 15.00 is ok. So there are a lot of values I didn’t come close the trying, and some of them might work even better than 15.
I also got some interesting results by pausing the animation before the cloth had completely settled on the mattress, then I lowered the mattress a bit, and resumed the animation. There were some very realistic wrinkles on the surface of the sheet before it smoothed out again.
heheh. guess i should have elaborated somewhat. blender has various types of force fields and such that can effect cloth or particles.
Think it looking great mate! how did you got it to fold back, probalby with with and pinning some vertices in the middle right? Would like to know how you did this
Pillows are easy. There are quite a few tuts on it out there. Here is one.
I put a UVSphere on the matress and it rolled off. this was a total accident.
And now we know how it’s done 
Sometimes, the simplest answer is the obvious one. Added to the memory banks. 
hahaha wait, you mean you put a sphere on the matras and it started rolling and took the sheet along??? sorry english aint my native language
I think he meant he put a sphere on the bed, dropped the sheet on top of bed and sphere, but the sheet rolled off the sphere and landed on the bed in that position. When he rendered, the sphere was set to “do not render.”
Sphere on the mattress ,set collision to on, dropped the sheet, baked the result, removed the sphere. I’ll export the model from Blender as an OBJ, then import into another app and export the scene into LuxRender from there.