Blender Cloth Dynamics Tutorial: Creating A Tattered Pirate"s Flag: Part 1 (Intermediate Level)
96In this tutorial, the CGBros show you how to make a sophisticated and professional dynamic Pirate"s Flag cloth simulation, and get it animation quickly and easily using Blender. Let"s get started.
Start with a new scene. Come up to Add Mesh Plane and then scale it up a bit
I want it to be flag shaped or proportional to the actual shape of a flag. The US government buys and uses flags in several proportions (2:3, 3:5, 5:8) for numerous civilian and military applications. Private citizens are free to use their own judgment. Let"s set it to 2 in the x and 3 in the Y:3.
I am going to rotate the plane 90 degrees so I"ll hit the E key to get my rotation trasform and set my value to 90.
The first thing I need to do is to increase the resolution of the mesh. I am going to hit the TAB button to go into Edit Mode and click on the subdivide button in the ADD tools. Then I"ll come down to the subdivide attributes and under the Number of Cuts I"ll enter in 10.
I want to start shaping the Pirate flag and give it some character and detail. I might do that by selecting the plane and hitting the TAB key again and be sure to select the faces icon and draga selection box around all of the faces and back under the Add tolls hit the subdivide button one more time.
Now I might come in here and select and delete some faces creating holes and battle damage. I"ll hit control and RMB to go into lasso select. I might come over to the edge and delete some faces here to create taters at the flag"s edge.
Then I might select the vertex icon and move the vertices around a bit to refine the shape and create a torn look to the holes and the taters. Now, I am not going to spend time fleshing this out to completion for 2 reasons. One, this is not really a modelling tutorial and Two, because I have already done it.
If I click on my layer 2 button down here in the layers section we can see the final flag that we are going to simulate. Come up to Add Mesh Cube because I want to have a collision mesh to test my flag against.
I"ll select the flag mesh and come over to the navigator and over to the Physics button here on the end and enable physics for Cloth. I alaways like to start with the presets and tweak from there so here under Presets, lets set it to cotton. I"ll leave everything else at their defaults.
Lets hit play and see what we"ve got. We can see that the flag mesh is responding to gravity and falling, but its not colliding with our box. Let"s fix that right now. With our box selected, come over to the Navigator, over to the physics button. Then select enable Physics for Collision. Now, lets hot play again and see what weve got.
The flag mesh is now properly colliding with our box. Great. I want the flag to fly from a flag pole so I will need to create an attachment or transform constraint. I"ll do this by selecting my object, hitting tab to go into EditMode, and draging a selection around some vertices that I want to constrain here on the left edge.
With the vertices selected hit the Spacebar to bring up the quick menu and type in vertex and select Assign Vertex Group. Come over to the Navigator and select the ObjectData button and hit the plus under Vertex Groups to load the group we just created. I"ll name this FlagPIN. This sets up the constraint, and now we need to hook it up to the mesh.
Hit TAB to return to Object Mode, be sure the flag mesh is selected and hit the Physics button on the navigator. Under the Cloth pulldown, check Pinning, hit the dropdown and select our FlagPIN vertex group. Lets hit Play and see what we"ve got. That looks great. The flag is now constraind to our invisible pole and colliding with our box.
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