How to Make Realistic Curtains in Blender (Tutorial)

thanks to some recent improvements to the cloth simulator in blender you can now create some really nice looking curtains relatively quickly in blender so in this video we'll start by making a simple ruffled curtain then adding in some pinch pleats for a more nicer interior aesthetic then we'll go over some quick variations like making the curtain drag along the floor tying it up against a wall and then finish with some texturing and adding translucency to the shader and everything else for that nice final look so let's get started with a brand new scene open we are going to delete everything and replace it with a plane which will become our curtain so first of all we want to be vertical so hit r then x and then just type in 90 and it'll be 90 degrees so the cloth simulator will work off of the geometry that you have available and currently four vertices is not enough so we're going to right click it and say subdivide and that's not enough either so we're going to change this little option here where my head is and change the number of cuts to be 100 and this i've generally found is perfect for a curtain so uh with that done if we went to the physics panel here and then just enabled cloth just click it with the default settings hit spacebar you would see that it is actually cloth that is simulating it's not doing anything particularly interesting it's just falling so the first thing we need to do is make sure that it is hanging from the rail that doesn't have to physically be an object that is a rail you can just select part of your mesh and make that the pinned part down here so underneath shape you've got some pin option a pin group which we don't have set up so you need to go to the object data properties and then underneath vertex group we're going to click the plus button right there so now in edit mode we want to select the part of the mesh which should be pinned so i'm going to select this top edge here by holding down alt and then just left clicking on that edge there and i also just realized if you i don't know if it's a new thing in two point what is it eight three but you can like double click it now and it'll select like the whole boundary i don't know maybe i've missed that before but i thought that was cool anyway select that edge there and then we're just going to hit a sign and what this means is that if you went to the weight paint group you could visualize it but everything else is blue and then there's a little bit at the top there's red which means that that is the entire group so now cloth panel we should see from the drop down we should see the group appear and now if we hit spacebar you'll see even less interesting things happen um it is actually simulating the base of it's moving air it's basically like stretching just like a little bit um but that's good it's doing what it should it's just it's hanging there it's hanging there so now now's the fun bit uh we get to uh animate that top rail there collapsing and when we do that because the rest of the mesh here is basically just driven entirely by the cloth simulator it will be forced to collapse and create the look of the curtain it's actually really clever it's like you only have to really worry about the top rail and then provided you do that well and you let the cloth sim do its cloth sim thing um it'll look like a curtain so that's really cool so what we want to do is we want to animate this collapsing in um and the way we're going to do that is uh down here under the same object data panel we're going to create a shape key now a shape key if you've never used them before don't worry they're typically used a lot in animation um essentially what it enables you to do is uh the first shape key you create becomes your sort of base your base object and then every shape key you add after that becomes a variation of that base shape key so the basis and then you've got key one or whatever you want to call it now if i went into edit mode for example let's just don't copy me but let's just as an example i just made that like that now this value here this zero value or this one there um it now changes uh sorry from the zero value is the base mesh and then the one value is the new variant of that mesh so what that means is that you can create keyframes within here like if you wanted like a speaker to be like you know it's a very easy way to do that you could just create a shape key and then like you know drop in keyframes move along add another keyframe etc so we're going to do this but um obviously not that variant we're going to create another variant and all we're going to do is we're just going to collapse that now if we were to uh scale this in like this it would scale it in in the center like both sides would collapse inwards which isn't what we want i just want it to collapse on one uh going to one edge basically so up here select the top left hand corner and i'm going to hit shift s and then go cursor to select it now selecting that edge there i'm going to change the pivot point to be the 3d cursor which means now when i scale it is scaling directly to that 3d cursor okay and i'm just going to holding down control as i scale to 0.5 exactly that's it i'll just do that so back into object mode you'll see that we're only seeing the original mesh there and that's because the key 1 is set to zero when i turn this all the way up to one you can see that that line there i mean you won't be able to see it because uh edit mode will only show you like the it doesn't show you the value it shows you what that key looks like so if i was in the basis this is the basis this is the key anyways point is is here zero is the curtain is like fully open and then one is it's uh collapsed in so that's great we've done it we've done the hard bit now all we need to do is uh create a keyframe at zero at frame one okay and then we need to just sort of pull out to about enough time for the cloth simulator to you know figure out what it's doing which would be 50 frames seems to work okay i'm going to set this to 1 and then add another keyframe so now if we were to play this back we should see magic happen assuming we've done everything correctly which it has so that's it basically that's the basics of how you make a curtain there's a few things we will change to improve it but uh you can see that that's the desired effect like or i mean you could imagine if you had to sculpt this by hand be a lot of work a lot of fooling around but you know provided you do this top part correctly and it collapses the way a curtain should collapse then everything else the cloth is forced to follow that shape and um it's pretty cool so um okay one big thing to note is that if you were to zoom in you might see it uh i don't know if you can actually but uh the cloth can overlap itself currently and that is because underneath collisions self collisions is turned off by default so we want to keep that on and the distance it's really it's a big margin by default um yeah i like to go like .002 or 0.001 if you can get away with it and also the simulation quality of the collisions we're going to do a little bit more with collisions later on i find a higher quality leads to less sort of like stuttering or problems that might occur and it doesn't add that much extra to the cloth sim so now that you've done that if you were to play it back um you should see that the cloth would actually interact i don't think there is much interaction at this point i mean it's only it's collapsing the mesh to like half of what it was before but uh but yeah any area that was overlapping before will no longer be um which is nice yeah that's pretty good a couple of things that could improve the overall look so the vertex mass is uh the number of vertices on your plane multiplied by that 300 grams so we've got like 10 000 so this is one heavy curtain essentially um we don't want it to be like um what the real world weight is because the simulator is not that accurate but i just want to reduce it by three to like point one so it's still a heavy curtain but not as heavy the other setting is the compression which is kind of like compression is you know whether the the curtain can do what it's doing right now so with a higher amount it will kind of create like bold like larger billowy folds or kind of thing that can kind of like wrap around i don't know kind of like a like a cardboard right like a stiff cardboard that could kind of like bend like that um anyways we want to set that to be lower so i don't know if you went all the way to one it'd be kind of like cloth but i wanted to be like a little bit of uh compression to it um and the final one is that bending amount there that's point five um yeah that's really the biggest effect over most cloth simulations i generally find like same with the couch if you watch the couch tutorial like most of these settings don't do a lot but the bending one does do a lot um and it really depends on what sort of curtain you want to go for if you want something that's like really flimsy like a piece of what what's something that's flips a tissue right if you want it to look as like detailed as a tissue then yeah go like extremely low but i want it to look like somewhat stiff fabric not like starchy fabric but like somewhere in between so the default actually does look fairly good okay one big thing that will make a big difference to how your curtain looks is the top the pleating so what we have right now is we just have the vertices sort of like mushing together and it's forcing the mesh to create those folds there but um for interiors generally the fancier the interior the more likely it is that there would be pleats which is like this so i found this little reference diagram on pinterest um there's believe it or not there's more curtains than just hey i'll have a curtain thanks it's what sort of pleat would you like in your curtain and yeah believe it or not interior design they really do care about this i posted my first version on twitter and then someone said but yes but can you achieve a pleat effect and i was like and i was like i tried all these different methods to like i was like i was dedicated to trying to figure it out um and then i realized it's actually a lot easier than i was doing anyways so so the current version is kind of like like a rod pocket maybe it's kind of like ruffled it's like like a like a lace underlay of a curtain that's sort of like in the background where it doesn't matter this sort of thing would be totally fine but for something that's going to look nice and presentable for an interior we want to go for something that looks a little better like a pinch pleat there's also yeah there's double pleat curtains and then there's triple pleats so this one here is the triple pleat cause it's got triple folds um we don't want to go that fancy i think the double plate is actually more common than the triple plate i could be wrong but anyways we're just going to go with the double plate so the way that we go about achieving this is actually quite easy and the way we do it is uh is again just with this single row of vertices um it just controls basically the entire simulation so it's currently in a straight line but if you think about what is a what is a pinch pleat it's essentially that line is it's adding in sort of a zigzag folded pattern so if we model that then the rest of the fabric will be forced to follow it so the way we do this is uh this line here we want to keep but everything else we don't need that it's just going to obstruct this next step so hitting ctrl i to invert it and then just hit h to hide it so that we can just focus on this line here and what we want to do now is uh is create a pleat so and we want to create a whole string of them along it so uh if you think of uh you know what is a plate it's got uh one bit that's that's straight out then it goes in then it goes out then it goes in again then there's a big long sort of gap before the next pinch starts so that is what we want to emulate so this end point here this is the end of the curtain sort of it's like it's against the railing um there's going to be a pinch plate to start so i'm going to deselect that one vertice there and then with the rest of this uh edge selected if i just move this up to be almost vertical but not quite you know because it's going to be like a sort of a zigzag accordion effect um until i've got that and i want it to be roughly the same distance as from here to here as from here to here um and i'll show you why that's important a little later on but anyways so the whole edge selected then i just deselect this and then i go and bring that all back and then i deselect this and then i bring the entire thing forward deselect it one more time and then i bring that to there now there needs to be a gap before the next pinch starts so deselect deselect deselect how big of a gap do you want how many pinches do you want in your curtain is really the question look at some reference and maybe count the pinches i don't know if you want to go that detail every curtain's different like there's bigger curtains then there's thinner curtains so i mean anyway it's up to you but i'm just gonna leave a gap of um that many so okay so i deselect that and then i go one two three vertices gap and then i'm gonna add another pinch right here so deselect that bring that in to there like so okay now we could continue that all the way along but i want to test the theory to show uh to see if it actually works because i think that's actually a good idea for all of you following along by the way um what i just did then was i went into object mode whilst i was on frame 130. now this is a very annoying uh feature maybe it's called not a bug it's a feature but it's frozen and the reason it's frozen is that it is now trying to simulate all frame 130 all the changes that i just made what do you think would happen to the cloth simulator obviously mayhem so it's now just gonna like spider out a whole bunch of things it's very annoying but okay i i i shift uh left arrow and so it went back to frame one we didn't see it but anyways it's very annoying basically the point is is when you make an edit to your mesh make sure that you're on frame one before you go back to object mode otherwise it'll try to simulate up to that and blender will freeze it's annoying okay anyways now that i've done that let's hit play and let's see what we get um so it's about right here so yeah essentially we didn't even have to make uh you know make a new shape key or anything like that we just we just went with what is already there and of course it's now forcing it to do some pleats so let's zoom in here so that we can actually see what's going on so right there we can see we've got like sort of an accordion effect happening with our mesh and it's doing it's doing some sort of like weird thing along the edge there which isn't too bad but uh if we go into shade smooth it can actually be a little bit easier to understand but the theory should work okay now you might have problems sometimes if let's go make sure we're on frame one if there is a bigger gap oh i guess i should hide the rest of it control i hide there if you ever have a bigger gap like here like if this was like out here for example what that's going to do is it's like it's stretching the mesh beyond what is possible the only reason that this pin group is and like we're allowed to move these vertices wherever we want outside of the simulation is because it's part of the pinned group and we've got our own little animation happening to it but the rest of the mesh has to follow this so my point is is that if uh if any of these edges like the distance between there and there if it's bigger than the distance between here and here um or even smaller um things can go ory essentially so we want to make sure that the same distance from here to here is the same as the distance from roughly from here to here so i'm looking at sort of this grid line there you could sort of see right and i'm just trying to get it to uh to sort of match there to there as from there there so that's what i'm going to try to aim for so now that we've done that the the rest of it is essentially um it's it's repeating this process one two three and then doing this now unfortunately you can't use an array or a repeat action or anything that we would normally use because we're doing something with the shape key you can't like you know delete the rest of the mesh and then recreate like one part of the pinch pleat and then duplicate it just doesn't work like that you have to actually physically change uh i mean this is one of like the few times in blender where yeah you really can't like utilize the fact that you're working with something digitally to uh to do the work for you you have to actually manually do the work as if this was real fabric or something but yeah it's not hard it's not hard it's just time consuming to go along here so i'm going to speed this up and while that's going on did you know that there is a library of over 1 000 public domain museum artifact bottles that you can download for free well you would if you join my newsletter every week i collect the most interesting 3d tutorials models videos or news articles and send them to subscribers of my newsletter so to make sure you don't miss the next freebie that i find click the link in the description to join my free newsletter and there we go we have a repeating pleat going across everything so making sure i'm on frame one before i go into object mode and then now let's play back our animation and see how we did da da now um in this case by the way i pre-cased that it that was not simulating in real time it's definitely a it's faster now but it's not as fast as that anyways what happened before i evidently screwed up the case by moving the frames around um it was all sort of like just sort of mashing in there and the reason for that is that when we created this accordion effect um because we were uh yeah basically moving each of these points closer and closer together this distance here has has shrunk so originally it was like up to that blue line it was exactly like it was shrinking the curtain like 50 it's now stronger to like 25 so all that fabric is being compressed into such a tight area it doesn't fit right so uh yeah i'm just gonna scale that up to be roughly where it was before and uh now let's see how that looks uh now okay so now it's uh it's a lot better right it's not it's not mashing in there there is some weirdness happening at the top here and this might be one of those cases where some of these vertices are moving more than what is plausible but also it's the end of the curtain and even in real curtains real reference the end of the curtain um i mean just because of the way fabric fabric works if the points are sort of pointed in like this the rest of the fabric is gradually going to sort of like taper out so you can see this edge here sort of goes out in this direction this edge here goes out in that direction a little bit so yeah the the ends of the curtain generally will look a little bit different to the the middle part but there's something about this that just looks a little weird so frame one i'm just gonna come in here and just make sure that uh none of these points look wildly out of place like if one of this was like out there that would be a case of like okay there's gonna be some serious stretching happening there or something like that but um you know maybe i'll uh i'll move that in a little closer maybe that in a little closer i don't know if that'll make much of a difference at all one other thing you can do is actually increase the quality steps so if you followed the couch tutorial series you know the quality steps is basically it's like it's subdividing the frame right so if the fabric was moving from here to here in one frame well if there was something in between there um it would now be clipping through it or doing some weird like mash-up thing right so by subdividing the frame it's now uh like basically simulating the the cloth like five five times right for the number five between each frame um which means you're going to get less problems so five you'd think it'd be enough but no uh 10 is generally what i find to be uh better and as well as that you'd also remember that the cloth sim uh collision i'm trying to scroll down whilst it's simulating i set the quality there to five and i believe that's a similar situation to uh to the subdividing thing but specifically for collision could be wrong but you know i think that's that's that's what it's doing so there we go now this looks um it looks a lot better i'm going to wait till it gets to frame 50. something else you can try by the way like um i picked 50 as the end point for our keyframe of the the animation um but if you find like that the cloth is moving like really quick and like there's a big lag on the cloth that's sort of like going behind it and it's creating some sort of like problems there then you can just like move the keyframe out like maybe make the keyframe end at frame 80 or something like that um you can also play with these settings here um i actually oh what do you know i think while i paused the recording i was playing with some settings trying to get some bigger or smaller folds um but uh you know some of these i mean honestly like bending is probably going to make the biggest difference for how your curtain is going to look um but you know i don't know i generally find most of the defaults for fabric work pretty well the big changes really come in uh that bending amount but also the animation and other things that are going on with it like the number of vertices you've got um etc so uh keep that in mind but anyways um i'm gonna give this one final sim and let's see how that looks and there we go so uh roughly at around a frame 100 um the curtain has sort of stabilized it's doing its thing and it looks pretty good if you enable shade smooth it is much easier to understand the detail and then as well as that you could also add a subsurf modifier after it because there's really not enough geometry going on at the top here to understand the shape of the mesh so subsurf will smooth that out and it'll look uh it'll look a lot nicer you could also use a simple sub surf if you wanted to to not sort of round out those edges there uh i don't really know what i'm doing in that case when it comes to like simple catmull i don't know which would actually be better maybe you should use an edge a crease instead i don't know anyways but that looks that looks fine so brief pause here before we continue some of you may want to know how to make the curtain drag on the floor so i thought i'd just quickly share that uh you just make a plane with a collision physic enabled and then you just animate that plane sliding underneath it pretty simple and if you want the curtain to be tied back cool variation you could play with you start with a taurus cut it in half extrude those pieces out enable collision physics and then animate that being pulled back it'll probably get glitchy though so just uncheck single sided in the collision physics and it should animate fine and with that out of the way onto the rest of the tutorial what we want to do is uh we want to apply our cloth sim but keep in mind that once you apply it you can't go back i mean you can undo it but if you've ran out of undues you understand why that would be a problem so if you want to keep a copy of this what you should do before you apply it is let's just turn off my subsurf so that doesn't screw up i'm going to hit shift d on this current frame here and you can see i've now got a screwed up mesh because it always does that when you duplicate it then i'm going to right click to cancel so that it should just place it well no shift d but cancel the placement of it so it should just put it where it where i dropped it um but evidently it's just like frozen blender it's one of those annoying things i i yeah there we go you know it always does this spider thing like why can't blender just go like okay obviously the middle of the frame i shouldn't be simulating everything that came before it to get this spider effect and make the user wait anyways point is is now i've got a duplicate of this before i do anything i'm going to select my uh the one that i want to keep the one that i want to preserve um or sorry it's freeze i want to freeze i'm going to apply my cloth sim oh this message says you can't apply it because you've got shape keys so go to your shape keys thing here and just delete these two shape keys then apply your cloth sim don't apply your sub surf because you want to be able to control that yourself later on and now your crazy weird uh freaky cousin we can now move that to its own collection and we'll just call this new collection hide you can call it archive hide whatever sometimes i call it unapply whatever but it's just hidden there so if i ever wanted the original cloth sim for whatever reason i could uh i could use it there but look at that we now have a curtain which is uh is pretty good but some of you may notice if you are interior designers yourself you might be thinking like hey okay the pleat looks okay but it doesn't look like the top of a curtain because the top of a curtain essentially all we've done is we've created the pleat up to sort of like right here right but the top of the curtain it's not just like pinched in but then it also comes out as it goes towards the top you couldn't really do that very well with the cloth sim i mean i i don't know if you could try it it would sort of like flop over and just be annoying so instead what we're going to do is uh alt h bring in the rest of the mesh we're just going to do that manually so i'm going to select this this edge loop here and i'm going to extrude that up along the z axes like so to be you know that top bit however long that top bit is somewhere around there and then that's that's already pretty good it already looks better uh but something else you could do if you really wanted to be known for your your detail um is it it sort of goes out and it kind of pulls out a little bit like that so if you select those two pieces like that and then hit s then x oh bounding box s x it should now create uh that kind of look right so i'm going to do that for all of these one by one i mean it doesn't take that long if you go into uh edit sorry edge select mode by just hitting the number two then you can just select the edges a lot faster and i'll also show you next just a couple of things to uh tighten up some of the shapes around here tighten up the graphics you know graphics are getting sloppy never forget that advert just gonna tighten up the graphics if you haven't seen that video look up on youtube tighten up the graphics it's like one of those early uh college gaming degree things it's basically a scam but anyways i think it's not even the first time i've mentioned that in a tutorial i can't help but bring it up tighten up the graphics anyways so that looks better looks much more like a curtain now we've got a rounded edge here which is not desirable so um yeah as i mentioned before i never noticed it before but you can now not only just select an edge by hitting alt and clicking on it but if you hit it twice it selects the entire boundary which is super cool i think it's something i was like bitching on about on twitter a few months ago i don't know it's cool that i don't know if it'll actually be applicable for that case but anyways now that i've done that if i hit shift e wait shifty yeah crease there we go and uh shift e and then just pull your mouse out and you can see top left-hand corner it'll say one or you can just type in the number one and now we'll have a tighter edge there and then you could also i believe i mean i'm just going to try this i'm going to add a crease here as well see if that does anything to that pleat effect yeah it kind of looks like there's like a rail behind it doesn't it that looks kind of cool i like it awesome so now all that's left to do is the material so since a curtain sits in front of a window that's going to play a big part in how it looks so i just set up a very basic room with a hole in it for the window and then i had some blue light coming in through the window i also set up a portal over the window just an area lamp check portal and that'll just speed up the interior rendering anyways so we have our lovely uh curtain here and it looks very very plain so this is where it's actually kind of fun it's the fun bit uh you get to choose the color and texture of the curtain and that really plays a big role in the interior design so um if you know what you're doing you could use one of the uh sort of bold uh you know splashy patterns like some of these uh companies do you can do some fun stuff with it it could become like a focal element for a room or it could become just something that sort of like blends into the background like one of these you know something like that so that's what we're gonna do um you know it's up to you what style of curtain you go for um yeah you can get your textures from anywhere obviously i'm gonna be getting these ones from uh polygon we've got a whole range um if you haven't seen our video on what makes these specifically special you can click up there and see why i at least recommend you use um procedurally made fabric because it is just far far sharper than uh than photographed fabric but anyways so um i'm going to be using this one here fabric upholstered blended twill i'll put the link for this in the description it is a premium texture uh if you want to play along with a free one you just get a free account and you can get this one um it's got all the maps and everything there it's definitely a different style but you know some different visual movement with this pattern here um than this one but uh but yeah either one either one should be okay um now actually making it is fairly simple we don't need like all the maps we really just need a couple so um i'm setting up the i guess i should turn on this this little tool here so you can see what i'm pressing um whoops okay so all we want to do this is the uh what comes with the download i only needed a 1k um we're going to be tiling it so often that yeah 1k will be more than enough and it comes in three colors so with the download you'll get three different colors it's obviously up to you which one you use i'm just going to use the first one so just drag that in you can drag in image textures straight into blender and it just creates a node for you which is really handy okay so i just put it in right there now you can see that that's very low res we'll fix that um the other map we want to use is the normal map um the rest of them we don't really need like it's you could if you want to but it's it's really overkill for something that is like going to be so scaled as this really the bump and the color is where most of the detail is going to come from so normal map set it to non-color data and then we just need to add a normal map node to convert that to the right use all right and then finally to scale it so i just selected that node and hit control t which you can only do if you have the node wrangler enabled so make sure you enable that and then you can select it hit ctrl t then what you can do connect this to both of the maps so they're both scaled i'm just going to dragging down with my mouse there to select all three values i'm just going to type in 10 which as i zoom in there you can see looks much better so it's a lot more uh low res okay so the light is coming in from behind um and that's really the big feature of it so we want to use a subsurface uh scattering which you normally use for like characters right like getting the you know i don't know if you could see it in the video maybe but the light goes through the ear right like that kind of effect um it enables that but it also is the way to actually have any sort of translucency in objects the old method was to use like a translucent shader and like sort of mix it around but really the best way is to use subsurface scattering so if you increase this you will see almost nothing now the reason for this is that it needs thickness to your um to your to your object here we don't have any thickness it is one single plane so much like a uh if you're making a glass object it needs to have uh two planes as well it needs to be a solid object so anyways we're just going to add in a solidify modifier and look at that it is now being lit from behind um let me move this over here so that we can see both parts of it so you can see that where the this is where the wall is right behind it um and you can see that it's uh it's working now it's overkill at the moment and it's also got a red tint because by default the subsurface radius rgb values it puts more prominence to the red values so that it gets more blur like i guess it's designed like by default for characters so we want to drag down on those values and i'm going to type in .01 so much smaller in scale because this is now suited for for a curtain and that might actually be too small i'm not sure exactly why maybe the light is not as strong as in my previous example but let me try a different value let's go point point one okay point one will work and then i can dial back basically this value here and this value they sort of work in tandem that's my sort of understanding of it um so you know you could go like uh uh 0.5 here and then dial this all the way back and it would be similar to if you went uh 0.1 here and then sort of dial this about that if that sort of makes sense anyway you just sort of get it to somewhere where it starts to sort of look okay now the light that's coming through there actually by default will be kind of a white color that's because it's going to use subsurface color so if we drag that and put that into there our color map now it will actually be using the the value of the color map as as we want now the actual color of your curtain it you know it comes in this sort of military gray perhaps you could call it that by the way i'm going to change my light not to be blue i'm just going to make it white because that will it's better for i mean yeah for realism you want to go for this the color of the sky which would be blue but in our case we're doing color work so yeah i should have just i should have just kept it white but anyways you can change the color of your textures very easily you don't have to you know pick a fabric that's like oh i want a specific like purple color uh you know i have to find one that's purple by default it's very easy to change the color you just add in a hue saturation value node drop that in here and then your hue value you just change that until you get the desired color that you want it's really that simple so i'm going to go for like a blue color so i'm going to go all the way there and i could like increase the saturation to get more of a blue i could dial back the value which is sort of the darkness of it to make it sort of a more muted color and there you go so you can see we've now got translucency right which we can uh drag up or down there's no right value for a curtain because you'll know that there are blackout curtains and then there are uh like the the thin sort of uh wispier ones right these sort of like lace yeah kind of like lace curtains which are designed to almost to just sort of uh in fact that's probably what they're for to sort of filter the light coming in through the room almost like a light box right like it just adds like softness to the room so actually in my example i actually created two curtains like this um and the one at the background was just like a lace like just a light lace white thing and that way you don't have to model an exterior it allows you to uh to have an open window but just have a lace lace curtain there and it's white and so it's like yeah you can't see out the window because there's a curtain in the way um and that is basically it guys so one little tiny thing you can do which is just like just a little extra touch of realism um is to add in uh because the curtain itself like it's typically been folded over at the bottom and then also the edge here basically it'll be thicker right so there won't be as much light going through in that area but rather than folding it around on itself and making all this extra geometry um all you need to do is i'm in face select mode i'm holding down alt as i do this is just select the areas that you want to have that so all this area here all this area here and you just want to make a duplicate of your material oh i should have just gone on duplicate material plus okay so i've duplicated it and then i'm just going to set my subserve to zero like that and then i just hit assign and if done correctly today oh hang on a second hold the fort what did i do did i not have this set to blue oh that was weird was i not changing the color of it before you know i don't i'm very lost there but anyways now it's all blue um and then this one here yeah i mean there's no subserve for this one so it doesn't really matter but anyways they should be now it should look thicker at the bottom there right and that edge there as well and another slightly extra little thing at the top that's probably even more obvious you'll see some stretching there and the reason for that is that the plane by default will come uv unwrapped but because we added an extra edge and extruded that up that extra bit there at the top won't be uv unwrapped it's just going to be stretched so the solution the solution is to in uv edit mode select everything then click this little button at the top there uv sync selection and then if you just take that top edge there selected that you can see it's in the exact same spot as the one beneath it so you just drag that up to be roughly like that and then if you take a look at that i don't know why i clicked on material preview but anyways um yeah you can see that it's properly uv unwrapped um there you go and of course for your you know for extra realism you want to uh model a rail so i just did that with some cylinders and then i added in tauruses as rings to sort of go for every single pleat and then i added a smaller torus below it to connect to that pleat which is just an extra little tiny bit of detail and also if you followed my couch tutorial as well you'll know that um you could also use this texture from polygon which adds sort of like a very subtle wrinkle effect because every fabric unless it's perfectly ironed by a robot will have some form of little wrinkles even in a five-class five-star hotel you'll probably see wrinkles in the curtains so that can just add just a little touch of something to it um but yeah that's basically it so i hope you enjoyed this tutorial if you did please give it a thumbs up and if you want to see more like this go ahead and hit subscribe if you haven't watched the couch tutorial series i highly recommend it that goes fully into uh cloth and physics and all that kind of stuff but thank you for watching

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 225,685

Keywords: blender, tutorial, curtains, curtain, blender curtain tutorial, blender archviz, archviz

Id: h3PIlhh9ruw

Length: 40min 25sec (2425 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 20 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Tavneet22]

Oh hey, I didn't know you were active here. Huge fan of your tutorials man!

[u/zodiac9094]

Wow!

I was just about to make a quality shit post about how hard things are when you didn’t make a tutorial for them. I spent last week learning how to do curtains and then this!

Just want to say, big fan man, thank you so much for your tutorials.

[u/cooltoadsergeant]

table next pls so we can have a comfy living room with a couch a table with donuts and a chair and now curtains

[u/azatiroth]

wow the master himself

[u/extonlile]

Wait is that you?

[u/Calloftheoutrageous]

Waiting for the episode where he reveals his beard is actually a hair particle system.

[u/MinikinKay]

Amazing!
Thank you so much for sharing your tutorials - they helped me a lot in getting better at blender!

[u/ChasingCerts]

Halfway through my donut

[u/DI4Ss]

Ok thats cool and all but how do I make a donut?