Cloth curtain stays in straight line - doesn't fold

Support Particles and Physics Simulations
1

Hello.

My cloth curtains seem to work at random - at some points they do and at others they remain planar, although warped. I would like to know if anyone has had a similar experience, what it was caused by and how to get around it.

I’ve followed a fewtutorials on making curtains to the letter and have produced a few okay results, but when it comes to the project with a deadline the cloth doesn’t want to make folds or do anything physically logical. In the same file I managed to make a proper curtain right before. The procedure I used was:

  1. add plane
  2. subdivide
  3. make vertex group
  4. add shape key and set to 1
  5. scale in the vertices, shape key to 0 and keyframe.
  6. skip x frames, shape key to 1 and keyframe
  7. animate

But this exact procedure only works at random.

Coincidentally, I had two Blenders (zip type and installer type) open at the time. I don’t think I can add an image of what I mean. But there really is not much more to say than “it doesn’t make creases” and “the upper part is pinched while the rest is still a plane”.

2

Hi,

For the sake of a statistical data point I tried the procedure above, and it worked exactly as it should.
Without seeing the .blend or multiple files where it worked, and where it did not, there is not more I can check.
This is in blender 2.73a

SupportSimpleCurtain.png1056×657 173 KB

Best of luck

Martin

3

I think I figured it out: it seemed to have been caused by the proximity of the pinned vertices.

It does not at all explain how some other tests I did turned out okay even when pinning an entire row, but after allowing more space between pins it seems to work (more often).

For anyone else that might experience this and the upper fix doesn’t help there’s something else that works, though is impractical: during animation/baking grip a collision object and move a piece of the cloth with it. That should help, though it will show in the animation.