Well I don’t think there’s a lot of people trying to recreate Dumbo in CG using Blender :eyebrowlift: (or any circus/carny stories) so the method you describe is as good as any . You could substitute hooks for the armature bones but you would still have to have named vertex groups, do pinning in the cloth sim etc., so basically the same process as you describe with bones .
… Or you could enable collision on the tent posts and animate the posts themselves instead of using vertex groups if you have the CPU power, though you will get a lot more control (like stiffness weighting in the cloth modifier) with vertex groups .
Thanks for your reply Vertex Pusher.
Now I’m curious about the hooks.
Hope that the wiki is enough to understand how to use them in conjunction with the cloth engine.
Hooks are easy vertex assignments into Object/animation mode (with vertices selected Ctrl-H in Edit Mode) … It is usually a good idea to assign a vertex group to the set of vertices selected for a hook since it isn’t always clear which vertices are assigned to it when you make another selection in Edit Mode . Also another good idea is to insert a Loc key to the hook(s) when they are created since when they are first added they are centered on the group of vertices selected, but their location is relative to the global axes so you can sometimes loose track of where their origin is relative to the mesh otherwise …