Windy Windup!

[TcJnr]

I have created my1st animation in Blender,… A ship with sails and a flag.

I have added an empty to apply wind to ‘fill’ them, When i run through in wireframe it works beautifully. but when I render the animation the sails and flag remain flat as pancakes, they do not even fall as cloth does.

If i run the wireframe, pause it and render that frame, it still renders flat and resets the wire.

If anyone knows what i’m doing wrong please tell me, I’d love my ship to sail!

Tc

p.s just tried making a really simple anim with the default square and a pane, both cloth with an empty wind gen and it seems to work. I wonder if in my noob like state ive hit something along the way…

[Atom]

It sounds like you have not fully generated the softbody cache.

You may already know this, but when working with softbodies and particles, you need to preview the entire timeline to generated the cache before you scrub the timeline.

Consider this workflow…
You have a timeline of 100 frames.
You create a softbody plane and rewind and play for 50 frames. Only 50 frames of softbody information is generated. (Thats what all those blendcache folders are about).
So you move the time line to frame 60 and nothing happens because you have not generated the cache for that frame.

My general workflow is to play the animation all the way through, then scrub. And remember, you have to do this everytime you make an adjustment to any parameter in the softbody or particle system. A good general rule is that if it is acting funny, just let it play through one time. Also in extreme cases, I will go to the folder system and simply delete the entire cache folder. Blender will regenerate this folder as needed.

This is also how Maya dynamics system works, so it is a common workflow for such tasks.