Curtains blowing in wind

[Terri Brown]

Hi guys,

 

I'd like to get your opinion out there - what is the best way to animate curtains very gently blowing in a breeze? I can't seem to find much online...what's there is about 10 years old and things change super quickly in this industry.

 

I usually build my curtains in Marvelous Designer, which is great for stills, and which has it's own animation system, but once I bring these into Max that's where I'm stumped. My experience with Max simulations are limited...so I'm not sure if there's more than one way to do this? Bar from manual animation? My previous encounters with Max's Cloth make me want to steer well clear of it.

 

Any suggestions?

 

Thanks,

Terri

[Nicolai Bongard]

I think the cloth system works pretty well, but the trick is to do your animation in a seperate scene that is not so complex.

The way to do this is to create a plane with lots of segments that is your curtain, make the top static and add a forces- wind in your cloth simulation. If some curtains are to be more affected than others (the ones next to an open sliding door or something), model a basic mockup of your room to use as blockers for the wind and whatnot. I would just google for some tutorials and you will soon get the hang of it. I am sure there a more people here who can chime in with better tips than me, i hardly ever do animation stuff. Best of luck!

[Nicolai Bongard]

Did some quick googling: If you prefer the animation in marvelous designer over 3ds max, there is aparently a wind effect in that program that you can use: http://manual.marvelousdesigner.com/display/MD4M/Activate+Wind

 

The problem with this is perhaps that you do not want to simulate wind for the entire film, you want something loopable?

If so you can aparently export animation as an obj sequence:

http://manual.marvelousdesigner.com/display/MD4M/OBJ+Sequence

If the result is for example 30 different OBJ files that have the same polycount you could use morpher to make an animation that morphs between the 30 different states of the object, and then go back to the first state/frame, then you would get everything required for a loopable animation.

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2015/ENU/3DSMax/files/GUID-506247E2-1F5D-4857-998E-8256FD88626D-htm.html