How to make character clothing react properly to air when falling.

Support Particles and Physics Simulations
1

I’m creating a scene where my character falls off a ledge head first. When he gets to a certain point in his descent his coat falls past him, not reacting the way a coat would if someone were to fall of a skyscraper. The coat is the only object with a cloth mod(cotton). I’ve played with the air settings but gotten poor results. I’ve also changed the mod settings to silk and applied a wind force(set at about 500) facing toward the character as he falls, but that hasn’t worked either. Any suggestions?

2

Got some what of a result by making a vertex group for pinning in cloth mod and giving the bottom part of his coat a weight of .25 and the shoulder and collar area 1.00.

3

Matching the cloth sim physics with keyframing, or vice versa, can be very tricky, but you’re on the right track using pinning group vertex weights to modify how the cloth sim works. When cloth is pinned at anything above weight zero (at which the cloth sim totally controls the cloth motion), then other influences such as an armature can be used to also control the cloth. It’s often useful to balance such influences when trying to get the best final result.

4

Ok, I am going to make some assumptions here:

  1. You have a man falling
  2. You have a building mesh
  3. The man has clothes made with the cloth sim.

I would render the man and the building separately. For the building clip you would move the camera “as if” it were following the man.

Next I would render the man, in the standing position using “wind” from above the man, to simulate the window blowing past the man as he fell. So in the video the mans head would always be pointing up.

In the composition I would blend both the man (eventually turned 180degrees) and the building.

Just a thought.

5

Yes it is tricky. I’m going to spend a day or two messing with motion and the mod settings until I get decent understanding.

6

@place57. Thanks for the tip. I was planning on using that technique when I cut to him in full fall. Right now though, I’m working on the scene where he first falls and the physics are a little harder to cheat. Which is making me over exercise my fatty brain.