This may relate more to cloth simulation, but the issue I’m having is with animating other objects along with a cloth sim, so hopefully I’m in the right place here. Anyway, I’m trying to do model and animate a proper flag pole (pulley, rope, carabiners, etc…), but the cloth sim that’s animating the flag is proving difficult to work with, and given that I have very little experience in animating in blender, I’m at a loss. Basically, I’ve got the waving flag and the flagpole set up, but I need some way to put two rings on the edge of the flag to which carabiners can be attached. The carabiners/clips would then be attached to a rope which would hopefully move to some extent with the flag.
All right, that seems to be working (to some extent). However, what’s the best way to simulate the rope? I’m using soft body, but it seems a bit flimsy, and I’m not sure what settings to use.
I’m also having issues with collisions between the carabiner and the flag and rope. I can just hook the carabiner to the rope (in fact, that’s probably what I’ll do), so that’s not so much an issue, but I can’t seem to get the carabiner to stay within the holes in the flag.
Not sure how to fix the carabiner situation without seeing how you’ve made everything. You may need more vertices around the hole, or you may need to change something in the collision settings, or a number of other possibilities. It would be easier to tell if you posted a link to your your .blend file. Use www.pasteall.org.
So I’ve messed around with the settings and now have both the rope and the flag simulated as cloth, which seems to work reasonably well, with a carabiner (eventually there will be two) parented to a vertex on the rope. The pulley, through which the rope is fed, has a collision modifier that is managing to keep the rope in place. The eventual aim is to hopefully have each carabiner, simulated as a rigid body to hinge up and down in the wind, going through the holes in the flag and hold it in place as the rope, flag, and carabiners blow in the wind. The problem I’m having now is that the carabiners are not sucessfully holding the flag in place (even with the wind turned off, as I currently have it set), and I’m sure they’re going to be even more messed up once they’re simulated as rigid bodies.
Anyway, here’s the .blend file, and a screenshot of how everything’s currently arranged. Hopefully you can make sense of my somewhat sloppy modeling.
You have unapplied scales and rotations. That’s bad for simulations.
The topology around those holes in the flag is terrible. Did you use a boolean or something? I cleaned it up and added some extra edge loops.
You haven’t done the stiffness scaling I suggested, which keeps the carabiners from penetrating the cloth. I’ve added that in this file.
Your carabiner was vertex parented to the rope. This creates a circular dependency because the rope is a cloth simulation and the carabiner is a collision object. Furthermore, it’s passing through the mesh of the rope. You need to find a better way to attach them. If you’re going for realism here, this setup isn’t how flags are attached to ropes anyway. There needs to be something to hold it in place.
The way you’re doing the rope itself probably won’t work well. A cloth simulation will make the mesh’s volume deflate. Check that rope link I posted earlier for a better method.
Okay, thanks–I had to mess with the stiffness scaling a little, but the collisions work now and the flag is constrained by the carabiners.
However, I’m a little lost on the rope instructions, as simple as they are (forgive my ignorance–I’m relatively new to Blender, as you may have noticed). My current rope model is basically a twisted cylinder made from a circle extruded along a bezier curve. Will that work for what is suggested in the thread? There’s no explanation for whether the single string of vertices is part of a larger cylinder or a single bezier curve or path. Then are the hooks supposed to manipulate the vertices of a different curve that serves as the actual rope?
and as for the carabiners, the idea was to eventually model some kind of knot as part of the rope mes that would hold them. However, I am going to change the setup so that the rope stops at either end of the flag, as in this picture. Is there a particular way that would be better to attach them?
