Tarpaulin pergola to retract

Hi everybody,

I am trying to retract a tarpaulin attached to a pergola.
I animate the tarpaulin with a plane through a curve modifier. And I deform the curve thanks to empties hooked to control vertices of the curve. I made an animation that corresponds to the motion that I want to give to my tarpaulin but the problem is that I need to modify the Fcurves ad thus the speed of the different controller because the motion of some of them is non linear. I wanted to know if it was possible to have a control that handles the whole and avoid modifying the Fcurves. Besides, if we want to make the inverse motion we cannot play the time back, we need to modify the F curves once again.(and the animation does not seem realistic).
How can I get this motion with the cloth simulator? I already tried with pin vertices but I have the impression that the Tarpaulin is then compressed and does not keep its intial length.

I attached the .blend so that you can see directly what’s wrong and how we can achieve it with a controller; just Alt A to see the motion.
Thank you for your help :slight_smile:

Cheers,

Attachments

removableTarpaulin.blend (1.87 MB)

Hi

It is reasonably simple to do this with the cloth modifier
{blend file attached}
The easiest/quickest way of setting the initial state is to have it extended and then move to the closed position
If you need the closed position as the first in an animation then bake the closing before the animation starts

Hope this helps

Martin


SupportClothMoving.blend (611 KB)

Waouh genial, this is exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted also to use the cloth simulator in order to have realistic motion of the tarpaulin when there is wind. This is just perfect, only with shape keys.
Thank you very much.