draped fabric

[Scotters]

I am in search of a way of simulating draped fabric in Viz. In short, it’s a large tent structure and the fabric walls are rigid at the top but tend to gather near the bottom, forming a series of irregular ‘u’s. The model will eventually be brought into Lightscape which usually hates awkward geometry. Any ideas?

[David Barbarash]

Hmm... can either do some edge deformations in sub-onject mode, making use of the soft selection tool, or you can use some of the cloth simulation plug-ins. Digimation has a nice one though I can't remember what it's called off of the top of my head..... I'd probably go for the straight modeling method since it costs you nothing extra.

 

David Barbarash

[Scotters]

Thanks, I think that's what I originally did (my Viz lingo is rather limited) but had a lot of difficulty in Lightscape.

 

Basically I created a rectangle, extruded it to the width of very thick fabric so that I would have a double-sided surface, subdivided it and then manually moved the vertices. This almost worked, the surface didn’t look exactly like a tent wall in Viz but it was a complete mess when it got to Lightscape (the faces were everywhere w/ extensive splintering).

 

I think it’s plug-in purchase time.

[David Knourek]

You mite want to give Simcloth a try from http://www.chaosgroup.com/software/simcloth3 and the best part is its free and easy to use

 

-dave

[tcorbett]

If you've got processing power to spare, NURBS can make a pretty convincing fabric.

 

This was a curtain swag built using a U-Loft of point curves. Each curve was based on an original curve, then altered to simulate the fabric folds.

 

 

Converting this surface into a mesh, then optimizing also produces decent results, if size is an issue.

[Psychoscorpic]

I've seen a good tutorial in a 3D Studio book, regarding making a table-cloth (similar aim) along the lines of:

Create at least two Shapes - one to represent the top of the cloth (rigid) and another wavy line for the base edge. (You can have intermediate shapes as it goes over obstacles).

Then Loft between them. If your curves are drawn naturally, it can be pretty convincing!

 

Have fun.