Layering cloth collisions. How to do?

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I’m using the cloth collisions to stack the ingredients on a hamburger, as I haven’t been able to find any other way to make everything fit together realistically. Bun, meat, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, etc – Each ingredient is a different piece of cloth, and they fall onto each other in order and, with friction set up all the way, don’t slide off into the abyss.

However, I don’t know how to make the cheese stop on top of the meat, then the lettuce stop on top of the cheese, etc. Everything wants to stop on the bottom bun, as it is the first declared “collision” object.

Anybody know how to make this work? Or a simpler way? I don’t need the animation of the hamburger going together, just the finished product.

2

I haven’t tried it but I think you would not drop all items at the same time, but one by one.

  1. Make meat cloth, then drop it onto bun.
  2. Apply cloth mod to meat.
  3. Make meat collision object.
  4. Make cheese cloth, then drop it onto meat.
  5. Apply cloth mod to cheese.
  6. Make cheese collision obj.
  7. Repeat for each ingredient.
3

Maybe try the Shrinkwrap modifier in conjunction with vertex groups to both limit and weight the wrapping effect? Using the Projection option you should be able to get the surfaces to conform to one another in varying degrees depending on the nature of the object, with a little Sculpting afterward to polish it all off.

Also you might consider using Soft Body instead of Cloth, as it seems to work better with closed mesh objects, and has the Goal option for preserving modeled forms and also providing weighted Soft Body characteristics. You can do that with Pinning in Cloth but in my experience Soft Body is a bit more manageable in that regard.

4

This is the way I’m doing it. It doesn’t work.

5

I’ll look for a tutorial on these methods. I haven’t been able to make soft body do anything yet. So I obviously need some guidance.

6

OK, I gave up on the cloth collision idea. A glorious defeat. Also, after playing with the shrinkwrap idea for a day, I gave up on that too. Not enough control of how the surface turns out (or at least I couldn’t control it) My cheese slices started looking like scary lichens from outer space.

So, I just went lo-tech on it, and made the cheese slices out of NURB surfaces, sort of bent them to fit on the meat and left the soft body idea for another day. Which proves the old maxim, there’s more than one way to slice cheese. I think that’s an old maxim…maybe not.

Blender wins this battle. But I’ll be back…