Blender Layered Cloth Tips

Saturday, 07 November 2009 16:22 Last Updated on Thursday, 31 December 2009 13:32 Written by Administrator

I was doing some testing with Blender for an animation I am planning and among other things I was testing Blender's cloth simulation. After puting some work into the tests, I decided I should make the tests into something instead of just throwing them out when I was finished. So, I combined all the tests and I made a music video. I wish I could have spent more time on the animation, but I didn't want to take too much time on these test because I wanted to get going on the animated short I was planning ...

Let me start by stating that I am not an expert at using Blender (If I was I probably would not have needed to do the tests). This is not a tutorial. It is just some results of what I learned when testing layered cloth simulation in Blender. There may be better ways of doing this that I don't know about. If so, please help me and others by leaving some insightful comments.

The problem I was running into was that when I had a piece of cloth that was sandwiched between the body and another piece of cloth, then I was getting a lot of tearing. After doing a lot of fiddling with the settings and still having no success, I finally found a method that worked for me.

I found that I would get the best results when I would move all the layers of cloth, except the undermost layer, to a different visual layer (note the term "layer" here is being used in two different ways). Then I would bake just the undermost cloth layer by itself. After that, I would then move the next cloth layer back to my active visual layer and bake that, and so on. I would also increase the cloth simulation quality slightly as I moved outword in cloth layers. It is also best if you can make it so the undermost cloth layers are slighter stiffer than the outer layers. In other words, increase the flexibility slightly of the cloth layers as you move outword.

I did not employ this technique on every sequence in the video. In the beginning sequence, where she is not moving as much, I just baked all the cloth together and you can see that sometimes the belt comes through the overcoat. On the main dance sequence, where she moves a lot and where I was having the most tearing problems, I used the technique above.

I hope this helps someone out there who is having trouble with layered cloth. Also, after Durian, I am sure things will be much better anyway. Until next time ...

Thanks.

Jason LaDere