Blender Cloth | Beginners Guide | Getting Started

so you're new to blender you've figured out how to do some basic modeling you've kind of figured out the user interface how to move around but one of those things you've just never really gotten to was cloth simulations you don't really know where to begin it seems all daunting and confusing so in this video here this is going to be a beginner's guide to cloth in blender we're using blender 2.91 and i'm going to be covering all of the basic things you need to know in one video it's not going to be overly complicated i'm going to keep it as simple as possible to allow you to make something like what you see over here so we're going to be covering how to actually add a cloth a simulation to an object in this case it's going to be a sheet i'm going to show you how do we make that cloth interact with objects in our scene because obviously you don't just want it falling through an object you want it to interact so i'm going to be going through that in detail i'm going to show you how you can pin certain parts of the cloth because maybe you don't want the whole thing to fall you want certain parts to kind of stick maybe you're making like curtains or something and normally i'm going to show you how to pin certain groups i'm also going to show you how you can animate or pin those pin groups to an object so you can animate that object that can give you all sorts of possibilities in blender so this is going to be a beginner's course in cloth simulations in blunder blender 2.9 2 and i'm going to keep it as basic and simple as possible and i will be making an example blend file available on my patreon so without wasting any more time let's get into this little tutorial so go ahead and open up a new scene in blender so i'm using blender 2.92 as you can see here and um to start off with we're just actually going to use the default cube so we'll leave it in in this case so i'm just going to get rid of this lamp i'm just going to select it and delete it i don't know why i feel like deleting it so we're going to then select the actual default cube here all right and we're going to just tab into edit mode so just go to edit mode and with all of this selected all of the geometry if you just simply hit ctrl b or command b you can bevel this like so we're just going to bevel it and then roll the middle mouse button just to add in a few more segments just like that okay the reason we're beveling it because if we were to just use the let's just go back into object mode by hitting tab if we were to actually run a cloth simulation on top of this object here and it has sharp edges that could like not work as well as it would with a bit of a rounded beveled edge so now we have this over here we're going to go shift a i'm going to go to our mesh options we're going to simply just add in a plane so plane is one of the best things to get started with whenever you're doing cloth so let's go g z and just move it up so g z and move it up now to make this look a little bit more interesting so it's not just landing on top of this the cube here we want to just scale it so let's just we have this plane selected hit the s key on our keyboard and just drag your mouse and you can see you can scale it up so i'm going to scale it up about that much doesn't have to be exactly the same this doesn't have to be precise so just something like that now whenever we're working with um physics simulations and blender whenever we scale an object in our object mode you can see up here in object mode if we hit s to scale it we really need to come in here hit ctrl a or command a and we need to apply the scale and that's going to be important because our physics simulation is going to be relying on so if you hit the n key here and you go over to your items and you go over here to the vectors here right you can see here if i hit s and i scale it you can see those scale vectors there are changing and our physics is going to be looking at these sort of vectors here to determine how it's going to do things so always make sure whenever you scale something where especially when you're doing cloth you want to go ctrl a or command a and apply that scale the same thing goes to objects that it's going to be interacting with so for example if we scale this cube we'd want to go ctrl a and apply the scale okay and you can see here if we select this plane here we can see all of these vectors here on the scale are set to one because we want control a to apply the scale so it should all be correct once you've done that we need to actually give this some geometry now we could actually run if we hit z we're going to wireframe you can see you have this plane here there is no faces here it's just for reverse if you're going to edit mode you can see one two three four verts okay so we could add a cloth to that but it will just fall like some sort of sheet on top of this we need to add in some more geometry geometry is gonna be one of those very important things you're gonna have to always take into account whenever you're doing cloth simulations now simple way to do it with a plane is just with everything selected in edit mode simply right click click on the subdivide button here then you're going to see over here a subdivision tab are popping up just click on that to open it up you can see here a number of cuts now you can make this whatever you want but i would recommend at least 22. in this case i'm gonna go with 50 because um i've got a little bit more of a powerful system here if you're working on a laptop or something you're not very confident you can get away with 22 or 30 even and it might not be as nice results i would actually recommend if you wanted to bumping this up even to maybe 70 um cuts or so but i'm just going to go 50 for now for this purpose i'm going to tab out of edit mode so now we have an actual plane here if we hit z we're going to wireframe you can see it has all that extra geometry now it can actually fold around this cube so let's with this plane here selected we're actually going to go over here to this tab down here that's our physics properties that's always where we're going to be working over physics so click on that you have the plane active here and you're going to see something here you're going to see a few other things but the one we're interested in today is going to be the cloth so let's click on the cloth and by default out of the box it's going to give you a pretty good cloth setup right here in fact if i were to hit the spacebar you can see i'm in frame one here if i were to hit the spacebar and play this animation it's working now it's not actually interacting with the cube i'm going to get to that in a second how we add that sort of interactivity there but for now we're just going to go to frame one and we're gonna grab the cube over here and we're gonna go over to our physics tab as well make sure here and this time we're not gonna give it a cough we're gonna give it a collision so now this cloth knows that it has to interact with this object here so if we go to frame 1 and we hit the spacebar now we're going to see the cloth is actually interacting and that's all really good so if we just select our cloth here select the cloth and go back to frame one and just hit the spacebar again you can see it's working beautifully but the only issue here is that the cloth is actually going through itself and you can actually see over here penetrating for itself so what we need to do if the cloth selected is go to our physics tab and we're going to be talking about the next thing and that's going to be self collision so let's go over down here in our cloth and we're going to be going to the collisions down here so you can see a tab called collision just drop down here and now you're going to see there is a thing here called object collisions by default that's tick that's what enables us to interact with that collision object there we're going to go down here and we're going to click on self collision now one of the reasons this is disabled by default is because whenever we able self-collision there is more calculation that goes into the simulation thus it will kind of um increase the time that this has to cache out so if you go ahead and hit that and we go to the first frame and hit the spacebar this time it's going to take a little bit longer to calculate but you can see now the cloth is not going through itself and that's giving us a little bit more of a realistic cloth simulation here and while we're at it and we have this cloth selected just go to object mode and just enable shade smooth so we have some smooth shading on this here so now we have a proper cloth simulation and one of the nice things is whenever we have a cloth simulation in blender and we can actually go to our modifiers you can see here we now have the cloth modifier here if we go add modifier on top of that we can add a subdivision surface modifier so now we have a subdivision happening on top of this now you could for a nicer result put the subdivision on top of the cloth and then go to the first frame again and then hit the spacebar but now it's going to be looking at a lot more calculations here because it's actually taking into account the subdivisions as well so it's working with a much denser geometry so for me personally you could go something like this if you want really nice results you can see here we're getting a lot more detail in there but for me personally i'm just going to keep it underneath the cloth for now that's usually how it works with my cloth simulations i'd rather actually just go in edit mode and give it some more subdivisions rather than relying on the subdivision surface modifier in front of the cloth okay so now i'm going to teach you another thing and by the way if you just want to like grab an object if the object that you've added a collision to if you actually go shift d to duplicate it and you move it over to the side of something that will have the same property so just make sure if you add any new objects in here for example if i added another plane just make sure to always add that collision as well so any object you want the cloth to interact with make sure to give it a collision and it should work just fine so you can see here that's working really good and what i'm going to do here just quickly so you can see just this little example scene i'm going to just come to my end frames here because i don't want an animation that's too long so i'm just going to go something like 70 frames you can do whatever you want now if i were to actually save this which i'm going to quickly do and i were to reopen this you can actually see down here if we go to frame one it's going to be this blue bar that forms when we run the simulation and that's actually our cache if you select the cloth and you run the simulation you can see this blue line appearing that's actually cashing in but it's not going to save that case so what you need to do is actually bake it out so select the cloth then you go over here to your physics tab under your cloth obviously you're just going to simply go down to the section here called the cache and all the cache does is it's just gonna like take your starting frame in this case we'll leave it at one because we're starting at one but like i said i changed the end value here to two to seventy but you can change it to whatever you want so i'm going to also make the case here 70 because there's no point having an animation that's 70 frames long but unnecessarily caching it out to 250 frames so make sure that these two numbers here match up with these two values here as well now once you've done that go ahead and just bake it and now it's going to bake this into your blend file just keep in mind whenever you bake anything to your blend file that blend file will be a lot bigger so if you have a blend file that's like a megabyte big if you bake something out it might be 120 megabytes big so just keep that in mind whenever you're working on projects and just check out how much storage you have on your drive so there we have it so now we can play this in real time now one thing i'm going to stress here is once you've actually baked this out if i were to grab one of these collision objects here and i just want g x move it over to the side and i play the animation it's not going to be redoing that because now it has all of this cloth information here baked in so whenever you change something around like that you have to actually come over here and select the cloth again go over to the cache and delete the bake and then re-bake it okay so keep that in mind so now i think i've covered the very basics of cloth in blender just one more thing i will get into here before we go into the next stuff it's just under your cloth as well one thing i didn't mention you're gonna see over here if i just quickly delete the bake you're gonna go up to the very top you're gonna see something called the quality steps the higher you set that the better quality your simulation will be once again that is going to be make it more processor intensive so more time just keep that in mind and also the exact same thing if you come here to the collisions you can set the quality up here as well for the how it interacts with itself and with objects in the scene but that once again that's also going to take more um computing power so just keep those things in mind um so now we have that out of the way i'm going to start touching the next things here and by the way i know i've been going really slow kind of emphasizing some of the same points but this is targeted towards beginners with cloths i really want you to understand anything that's know what that's why i'm not rushing through this i'm just taking my time so let's go back to the first frame again now i'm going to show you how to pin things because maybe just maybe you don't want the whole clip to um cluster four you just want one side of it to be pinned so let's go into edit mode and i'm on my first frame here we need to go to our object data properties over here so click on this tab here and you're going to see something called vertex groups now this is super simple simply select the vertex by clicking on it or you can hold and shift and select multiple vertices so for example i might select one here here and then if you guys shift alt i might even select a whole edge here and then just hit c and hold in my middle mouse button and deselect some parts whatever just just for example psych just select a few random verts just for an example and once you have those verts selected you can go over here to this vertex group and hit plus it's going to create a group and then you're going to click on assign and now it's going to assign those to the group in fact if you hit a a twice to deselect everything and you click on this group and you click select you can test it and you can see those all appear now so now all we simply have to do is tab out of edit mode we have a group we can work with in fact let's just double click on it and call it pin so we know it's going to be our pinned groups let's go over back to our cloth simulation here we have a cloth selected and all we simply have to do is come down here to the shape so if you come down here to the shape just drop that down and you're going to see something called pin grip so just click on this and there you can see our pin grip so just select it there now if you're on frame one and you hit the space bar you're going to see that all the cloth is falling except those ones that you've selected to be pinned how cool is that and at any time you can simply come in here select any vertex you want or meant how many ever you want just go over to your object data properties and assign them and maybe there's some you want to get rid of so you could just select those ones and you can just hit remove and remove them and now they're all gone so now if we go out of edit mode go back to frame one and we hit the space bar we can see that's all changed it's such a cool non-destructive way of working so now that i've taught you that really basic thing let's get into the next really awesome thing and this is how you actually control your pinned groups not only can you pin groups but you can attach those pin groups to an object so you can actually control your your cloth itself this could be super useful if you're doing like maybe a soldier waving a flag in a battle or just anything where there needs to be movement of a fabric against an object so let's go over to frame one tab into edit mode i'm going to hit a to deselect to select everything here so we want everything selected and i'm going to go and remove it from this pin group so now nothing is assigned and i'm going to go shift alt i'm just going to click on this edge over here so if you go into your front view just this edge here loop select this edge shift alt and click on the edge it'll loop select this whole row of verts and with that pin group selected we're just going to hit assign and now all of these edges here are assigned but before we go into object mode i'm going to go hit f3 and over here we're going to type hook so just type in hook super simple and then i'm going to go hook two new objects it's gonna be the first result here just click on it and now you're gonna see an empty appears here so let's tab out of edit mode and we now select this empty and we hit g and we move it you can see those vertices are connected to that so now if we hit the space bar from frame one we can see if we hit g and we move this we can actually control the cloth but nothing is happening at the moment and that is because we need to actually select the cloth and our modifier stack arrangement is super important so just go to your modifier and we always want to make sure that whenever we're going to hook cloth and we want to simulate it to always grab the hook modifier and drag it above our cloth modifier and that hierarchy there is super important so now let's go back to frame one hit the space bar and now if we actually move this you can see in real time i'm actually moving my cloth around i can actually control the cloth so i could literally animate this guy going back and forth in some sort of cool animation in fact let's quickly do that um so just to make it look like it's not holding on to thin air i'm just going to quickly go shift a i'm just adding in a super simple cylinder going to my front view by hitting 1 and an s to scale this down hit z and go to your wireframe and then just with this cylinder selected i'm going to go g and move it over to the edge here or to where that empty is and then i'm just going to go r x 9 0 and hit enter and then s y and i'm gonna scale that along the y just to create a bar like that okay so now it actually looks like it's attached to something so on frame one i'm gonna select the cylinder holding and shift i'm gonna select empty and i'm gonna go control p so control p or command p and object keep transform so now this bar is parented to the empty and i'm also going to select the bar itself here and i'm just going to go to my cloth settings here i'm just going to give it a collision as well so now let's run the simulation from frame one and now it actually looks like that bar is like what it's holding onto and that looks really cool and we can once again grab the empty here and just move it around in real time and have a look at that you can even rotate it look at that real time things going on there but let's quickly animate it so we've just empty selected let's go to frame one hit i and insert the location keyframe then move over to frame 30 then i'm going to go g x and we're going to move it over don't worry if the cloth doesn't follow along move it over to here and then g z and move it down a bit and then we're going to go i and insert a location keyframe okay and then we're going to go over to frame 60 and we're going to go g z and move it all the way up to here and then g x move it forward you can move it anywhere it doesn't really matter and then you hit i and insert a location keyframe so now we're going to have this okay if you go to frame one and you hit the spacebar you're gonna see this so now you can see we have this pole here that's dragging our flag or our cloth around on the surfaces and it's all interacting and let's quickly just give this a cache i'm going to quickly in fact i might just increase the end value here to 90. and i'm just going to go select my cloth i'm going to go back to my cloth settings i'm just going to quickly go back down to the case again and this time because i've updated the end value here i'm also going to make the end value of the case 90. all that is saying from frame 1 to frame 90 which is this these values here we're going to cache that data into the blend file so let's quickly hit bake and it should happen relatively quickly it depends on your computer as well and what your settings are and the quality but it should do it relatively quickly just case it into your blend file and once that's done obviously just go file and make sure to save it always save when you've cached now if we go to frame one and we hit the space bar we can see we have this guy here pulling that cloth around so that is how you um control the cloth you can add multiple hooks to an object so i hope that i have covered kind of like the very basic questions you might have had about cloth and blender like i said this isn't a beginner's blender tutorial it's just a beginner's cloth tutorial so if you're new to blender and you always understand most of the modeling and interface this is just showing you how to get started with cloth if you've never touched it you don't really know what the different things do these are the main four or five things that i've covered here that are going to do 90 of the stuff you want to do with cloth in blender so i'm going to be making an example file available on my patreon you can check that in the description below but i hope this has been useful to you and it kind of just gives you something to work with i'll see you guys next time for another tutorial and stay safe out there guys

Channel: PIXXO 3D

Views: 46,579

Rating: 4.986711 out of 5

Keywords: Blender, Blender 2.83, Blender 2.9, Blender 2.91, Blender 2.92, Blender tutorials for beginners, Blender Guru, Blender art, Blender Animations, Blender software, Cloth for beginners, Blender absolute beginners 2021, Blender 2.92 cloth simulation for beginners, easy cloth tutorial Blender, Blenber physics, blender physics, Physics in Blender

Id: 252qhBFl2UM

Length: 19min 31sec (1171 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 20 2021