Create & Attach Dynamic Cloth Cape To Character - Blender Tutorial

a few months ago someone asked me if i knew how to hook a cape like a cloth to a character and then have that uh cloth look like it's actually attached to the character and then velvet to react dynamically to the movements of the character and the wind and so forth well at the time i mean this is essentially what i'm talking about at the time i didn't know exactly how to do it but and since then this person obviously figured out how to do it because it's been several months and i hadn't even thought much about it until like a couple days ago but i thought i'd go ahead and figure it out and then make a tutorial on it since it's obviously got to be something that more than one person was looking for all right now i've still got a little bit of a cough so if i'm start coughing i apologize now i'm using blender 2.9 and i'm going to go ahead and hide this the light and the camera just to get them out of the way i'm going to press 3 to go into side view and uh i'm going to just go ahead and add a monkey head add mesh and then monkey now i'm going to subdivide this monkey to make him a little bit smoother go over to to the modifiers tab add modifier subdivision surface i'm going to change both the two make sure both shows two and then you don't have to do this and then i'm going to click apply now i'm just doing that because it looks better in my opinion now i'm going to go ahead and press 5 to go into orthographic view and i'm going to add a plane add mesh and plane now this will be the cape i'm going to press g for grab and then i'm just going to move this to about the point where i want to attach the cape it doesn't have to be exact just somewhat close now i'm going to press 7 to go on the top side view and then i'm going to press tab to go into edit mode because i'm going to change the basic shape of this cape for one thing most capes are not square so obviously we need to change it a little bit i'm going to stick this on edge select and then i'm going to select this edge right here and then i'm going to press g for grab and then y for the y-axis and then just drag it to about right here now i'm going to make this a little bit wider at this end so i'm just going to press s for scale and then just scale it up to about right there now what we need to do at this point we need to add some subdivisions to this so that it can you know move like cloth because cloth has to have a lot of subdivisions but being that this is irregular in size meaning that it's longer than it is wide i'm going to go ahead and use loop cut instead instead of the subdivision surface or subdivision tool up here i'll go to loop cut and then i'm going to add let me actually select it all right i'm going to add a loop cut right here and then your loop cut tool open up right here and i'm going to set this to 30. all right i'm going to go ahead and put this in wireframe so you can actually see it better and then i'm gonna add another loop cut going this direction left click to apply and then i'm gonna set this to 25. all right now what we need to do at this point is we need to create a vertex group now this vertex group is going to be what will actually be uh it's going to represent the edge that's attached to the monkey head it's the part that's actually attached to the character all right i'm going to click put this on vertice vertex and then i'm going to press a once or twice until nothing is selected well let me back up a little bit we need to do one more thing before we do that i need to go ahead and select this vertices right here and then shift select this vertices right here and the reason why i'm going to do this is because like if we go to press one to go on the front side view the cape is just flat we want to wrap the front part of this cape around this monkey head to a degree so what we want to do with those two vertices selected which if we go back in top side view it's the one at the ends we want to turn on proportional editing up here and then set this to sharp now if we press g for grab and then z for the z axis now you may need to adjust the size this circle with your scroll wheel on your mouse and then just you know kind of bring it down like this so it's kind of following the contour of the monkey head that looks about right and then left click to apply and then we need to bring these two ends inward so all we need to do is press s for scale and then scale it in would it doesn't have to be perfect you can see essentially essentially what we've done here i mean you could spend more time to get it more closer if you want i'm not going to for this tutorial all right now i'm going to go back into wireframe now we need to select all of these uh vertices on this end that will represent the part that's actually connected to the monkey and we need to create a vertex group so with all of these selected which i press b for box select like let me unselect all of them and if i press b box select comes up then left click to drag and then select the entire front edge all right now let's turn those into a vertex group over here click on the vertex icon and then where it says vertex groups click plus and now let's rename this to cape you can name it whatever you want all right and now we need to assign these vertices to this group so with all these selected just click assign all right now let's press tab to exit edit mode and with this cape selected i'll go ahead and rename it to cape alright we need to come over here to the physics tab click on cloth so now this is has become a cloth and we need to come down here to shape and then where it says pin group we need to add the name of that that basically the vertex group that we just created which i named minecape and this is essentially telling the physics engine that this edge is pinned and if i was to press play right now it just falls and it's that edge is pinned now it has nothing to do with the monkey head i could move the uh i can move the monkey head out here and if i press play it's still doing the same thing because it's not attached to the monkey head yet let me put this back in place here that's close enough all right now what we need to do we need to attach that edge to the monkey so go ahead and select the cloth i'm going to press 7 to go on the top side view and with the cloth selected press tab to go into edit mode and now we need to press ctrl h ctrl h and it brings up this menu and choose hook to new object now what this essentially done if you look it cre excuse me it created an empty and it essentially parented it if you look what it essentially done it created this new object which is an empty and you can see it up here and it parented those vertices to that empty all right now if we press tab to exit edit mode and i will go ahead and uh select this empty now if i was to now don't do this i'm just doing this to show you as an example if i was to press i want to go ahead and go to side view if i was to press play the cloth falls but if i was to grab this uh empty you can see it's not doing right it's just stretching now the reason why it's doing that is because whenever blender generates the modifiers for the cloth for some reason it puts them in backwards i don't really understand why maybe there's another reason i don't know any anyway you have to put the hook before the cloth so basically just drag this up above the cloth now if i was to select the empty and then press play and if i was to grab the empty now the cloth is obviously being dragged by the empty all right now we need to get back to the actual tutorial all right now let's attach this empty to this monkey that way whenever this monkey moves the cloth moves or the cape moves so select this empty and then shift select the monkey and then press ctrl p and essentially and then choose object and essentially what we've done we parented this empty to this monkey head the vertex group is parent of the cloth is parented to the empty and then the empty is parented to the monkey head now with the monkey head selected if i press play then i grabbed the monkey head i don't know what's going on right there oh i know what's going on that's a a cash cash issue let me go back to the uh cloth settings and i'm going to change this to the quality steps to six just to clear the cache and down here i'm going to turn on uh i'll go to the cache settings make sure that's turned on now normally you would save the project file then disk cache now i'm not going to bother doing that because i'm not saving this project and where's my collisions here it is i'm going to turn on collisions turn on self-collision that way the cloth will can hit itself essentially and i'm going to turn the quality steps up to three now if i was to do the same thing press play grab the monkey head you can see it's following on but now you see the glitch the cloth is going through the monkey head now what we need to do to fix that issue is we need to turn this monkey head which would be your character into a collision object so choose the monkey head and then click on the physics tab and then choose collision now i like doing this where it says uh dampening i like turning this up quite a bit because i mean does cloth really bounce off stuff very much not much at all so i'm going to turn this up to at least 0.5 now if i was to go ahead and just click play the cloth should fall and see it's draped over the edge of the monkey head now i'm going to just for fun here with this monkey head select i'm going to press in to bring out this side panel and i'm going to keyframe the location of this monkey head right here then i'm going to go to frame 60. and then i'm going to grab the monkey head and bring it to about right here and then press i to keyframe now i'm going to go back to frame let's say 130 and then grab the monkey head bring it to about right here and then keyframe it and then i'm going to go to uh let's say one frame 180 and press g for grab and then move the monkey head to about the same location to start it off at and then keyframe it again and essentially the monkey head is going to move up here then back here and then back to its original location now if i press play that's what you'll see happen but the cape is attached and the cape is following let me go ahead put this in solid view now if you want that cape to look a little bit better with the cake selected now i'm going to press pause go back to the beginning select escape and then click on object shade smooth now the cape's going to look smoother simple enough right and just remember the basic concept of this is extremely simple you just create your cape create a vertex group and then you need to hook that vertex group to a new object and then that new object which is the empty you parent that to your character and then of course you turn your character into a collision object so that the cloth can actually impact it and make sure your cloth the self collision is turned on and essentially that's all you really need to do but if you have any questions on how to go about doing this let me know and i will do my best to help you i guess that's it later people [Music] you

Channel: Blender Rookie

Views: 4,505

Keywords: Physics, Blender, Blender 3D, Freeware, Animation, CGI, VFX, Simulation, Computer Generated, Rigid Body, Tutorial, How To, Cyberlink, PowerDirector, Video Editor, BlenderRookie

Id: 2SFeBQ9iubo

Length: 16min 24sec (984 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 18 2021