Only been using blender for about a month, but WOW! what a month it has been =P
Used to use Cinema 4d a fair bit, the main pro from that is the render time and ease of radiosuty use, other than that Blender is beautiful!
Anyhoo, i got a question about cloth animations.
I want to have a curtain hanging down (so far i weighted the top vertices to 1 and all the others to 0, this works fine, but i need the curtain to fall all of a sudden. I’m not too clued up on IPO’s yet, so not sure if that is how you do it… any help would be great
It sounds like you are using softbodies for the cloth. So you made a vertice group and colored the attached portion red (=1) and the rest blue (=0). You set the gravity to 9.8 but the curtain falls in slow motion right? This is because your curtain is huge. Right click on your curtain and then scale it down. Rerun the simulation and your curtain will fall as expected.
When i have weighted ALL the vertices to 0 (blue) it falls quite well, and realistically, i think i am just trying to find a way for the top vertices weighted 1 (red) to turn blue all of a sudden, allowing the entire curtain to drop.
I am not clued up with IPO’s at the moment, and not sure of their potential, or eligability in this situation.
i think i am just trying to find a way for the top vertices weighted 1 (red) to turn blue all of a sudden, allowing the entire curtain to drop.
So you want to key the vertice weighting of the goal group? I don’t know if Blender currently can set IPO keys for vertice weights. I am going to have to do something similar soon but I was thinking of using hooks. I guess you can assign a bunch of verticies to a hook in edit mode. I am thinking that I could then hold on to the hook and let go when needed. I think hooks have IPO curves. Maybe someone knows if it is possible to assign IPO curves to vertice weights?
You could parent the curtain to a pole or something and make the pole fall, thus moving the curtain and using the softbody at the same time. It should turn out decent…
The weight painted goals are read once on creation of the softbody. Even if you could IPO weights, it would not do anything.
However there is a object property “goalspring” which is
read live during simulation
accessable via python api (getSBGoalSpring, setSBGoalSpring)
If you turn that to zero all goal forces should break.
Oh… read a bit in the code … make sure you painted smaller values than 0.999 otherways vertices stay pinned.
(Vertices with goal values above are taken out of the regular mass spring system)
Nasty with this solution is that “almost pinned” vertices take much longer to be calculated.
Sorry i’m no pythoneer, but i think knowing that ^^^^ someone can help you.
I’m not sure that this will work - but it’s worth a try.
I assume you know how to ‘bake’ a soft-body, recording the object’s movement.
Let’s say the curtain falls on frame 50 and the animation is 100 frames long. Bake frames 1 to 50 with the curtian hanging, then turn the vertex group off, so that the vertexes allong the top of the curtian are no longer stiff, and bake frames 50 to 100.