I’m making what’s called a “poncho”: really it’s a fancy shawl. It has a hem and from behind it drop “tassels”. I plan to animate it. Due to the nature of the thing, not too many vertex groups are useful…
WIP Shoulder view: <-- elbow
Since I’ll be making it a softbody, my question is this: is there anyway to connect everything without making a non-manifold mesh? Would it matter? (Currently it’s somewhat of an S-shaped cross-section.)
As it is, if I apply SB the hem falls open. And the hem must be entirely affected by the SB…
I hope this makes sense…
Oh yeah, any pointers on the gold texture?
Color Ramps:
Pos 0.000 Red 0.700 Gre 0.300 Blu 0.170 Alpha 0.317
Pos 0.250 Red 0.700 Gre 0.300 Blu 0.200 Alpha 0.477
Pos 0.490 Red 0.787 Gre 0.477 Blu 0.317 Alpha 0.116
Pos 0.500 Red 0.019 Gre 0.511 Blu 0.695 Alpha 0.301
Pos 0.510 Red 0.420 Gre 0.500 Blu 0.913 Alpha 0.176
Pos 0.750 Red 0.759 Gre 0.426 Blu 0.278 Alpha 0.638
Pos 1.000 Red 0.964 Gre 0.604 Blu 0.186 Alpha 0.500
Input: Shader
Method: Mix
Factor: 1.000
No spec ramp (hmm, there probably ought to be though)
I’m a complete airhead when it comes to materials…
What I did was add a few edges (no faces) all the way around. It seems to keep the hem from unfolding OK…
Anyway, I’m really getting frustrated with the softbody. There seems to be far too much energy in the system and I can’t seem to get rid of it. Here’s how it’s set up:
I know the animation is a little choppy yet… this still has to be fine-tuned and textures fixed, stuff added, etc. Also, I know about the under-arm area (it needs some vertex weight adjustments). What I’m interested in is the effect displayed in the first two animations.
In both, there’s simply too much energy. In the second, I’ve got an array of vertex-parented empties with Force Fields set as:
Strength -1.000
Fall-Off 5.000
MaxDist 0.50
In that one, the front two tassels are actually tossed up over the hem and fall back (through the ‘poncho’) to rest behind the belly. In simpler tests I couldn’t replicate such a forceful ejection and if I make the force fields any weaker it seems the cloth just goes straight through…
I am no expert on SB, but i have been playing with it a bit lately as well…
if there is too much energy in the system, i believe there are a couple of things you could try tweaking:
in the SB panel, there is the “Use Edges” slider, currently set at .800. Try increasing this to almost .999 and see if that doesnt help calm things down a bit. I noticed when making a sail for a sailboat that this really helped to tame things a bit.
Friction/Mass/Speed. All of these things might help a bit in calming down motions. Try Mass first, as it may help to really slow the movement down a little bit and give your mesh more “weight” in the SB system.
I think your cloth is too heavy, try reducing the mass. Also try increasing the gstiff and gdamp, that should make it calm down more quickly and be less responsive to movement.
I don’t know why, but after selecting SOFTGOAL I just automatically began ignoring those two parameters. Also, the mass thing seems a little counter-intuitive… hmm…
In the moment when you select a vertex group for goals the strenght of the goal springs is multiplied with the weight painted value of the vertex. By default the weights in a vertex group are set to 0 –> vertex is decoupled from goal. Nothing ignored … the system is just doing what you told.
<-- elbow
That’s just what I needed!