Blender cloth simulation capabilities

Support Particles and Physics Simulations
1

Hello Blender Artist community,

I’m wondering about the full extent of blender’s capabilities in terms of cloth simulations. I’m moving over from maya. Currently there are a few things that I can’t really find any things about online. For example, can blender blend caches? I have a character that has a cloth object attached. Rather than running the cloth through the entire animation sequence, I’d much rather create a few caches, for instance, idle, jump, running, etc. Then I would let these caches play when I need them to, and I would be able to freely adjust the weights of each cache to fit each context.
The other thing is, how do I transform caches? This seems like such a standard thing. Being able to cache a simulation and being able to transform, rotate, scale it freely.

Rather than asking about each of these individually and inevitably running into new problems, I wanted a broader comment from some of you more experienced folk out there. What red flags am I going to run into if I use blender for cloth simulations? Or is it the case that there is always a way, Its just that it will take a lot more effort?

Perhaps what would be best, is if you could point me to some great tutorial series that could get me where I wanted to?

2

I think you actually ran into important limitations of the Blender cloth sim with your questions. These are quite broad, though, so it is not easy to give you full answers.

A few remarks:

  • Not sure in which way you want to transform sim caches. What you can do is add deform modifiers to the mesh which will take effect after the sim, of which I would hope to be capable of what you need.
  • You cannot blend animations from sim caches directly.
  • You can blend individual states of the sims, though, by applying states of the sim as shape keys and blending between these.
  • Also you may want to take a look at the surface deform and mesh deform modifiers, which can transfer deformations from one mesh to another. I currently don’t know of a trick to blend these, but maybe someone else does.

Of course there might be addons for everything, including messing with caches in all kinds of ways. I don’t have an overview, though about what actually is available.