How to parent an object to a cloth object?

Support Particles and Physics Simulations
1

I have a cloth balloon and I’d like to attach a string to it.
I used cloth field weights to make the balloon float up.
I have tried all kinds of parenting and constraints to get another object to follow the balloon. It works when I grab the balloon and drag it around the 3d view, but it doesn’t work for the cloth simulation itself. (the other object will follow the balloon when I am moving the balloon, but it won’t follow the balloon when the cloth simulation is moving the balloon.)

It looks like the balloon’s origin point doesn’t move when the cloth simulation is running, even though the balloon mesh moves. Do I need some way to parent the balloon to itself before I can parent other things to it??

2

I don’t know, but maybe parenting to vertices would work. If you haven’t tried that already…

3

have you tried “pinning” on the cloth sim ??
don’t know if it will work for the setup you want
or there’s hooks they may do what you want

4

Thanks for the responses.
Hammers: Parenting to vertex is one of the things that works great when I move the balloon, but not when the cloth sim moves the balloon.
Heddheld: Pinning prevents vertices from being affected by cloth sim. It’s great for parenting a cloth object to something else, but I want to do the other way around: parenting something else to a cloth object.
I have tried hooks, they also work when I move the balloon, but not when the cloth sim moves the balloon.

Maybe someone who models clothing knows what to do here? like if a character has a long dress with some kind of beaded ornament attached to the hem of the skirt?

I suppose I could just turn off the cloth sim and keyframe the balloon’s location manually instead, but it would be nice to know how to do it with the cloth sim. Esp. if I wanted to make many balloons and didn’t want to be there forever keyframing each one. That’s what computers are for after all :slight_smile:

5

Parenting the strip to a vertex should work perfectly! u used this method a few days ago and it worked just fine, maybe you’re doing something wrong, post your workflow on that, or even better the .blend :slight_smile:

6

Thanks for the extra vote for vertex parenting, Thanzex. After both you and Hammers suggested it I went back and redid it with vertex parenting and it does work perfectly. Maybe when I did it before I had another constraint or two still active. It’s hard to remember sometimes what we have added when we are trying many things.
Works great now. Will post the blend in case this will help others.

balloons.blend (1.23 MB)

7

Good one! Glad we weren’t sending you on a wild goose chase!

8

I noticed in the .blend you shared, that the balloon only goes up. Why have the cloth simulation? when you can add the same effect by making the balloon an active rigid body and setting gravity to a positive number making it go up.