Here’s a really cool method to add realism to your images by creating believable “Wind blowing over the Curtains” simulation using 3ds Max and VRay of course!
It’s really easy to implement and just takes few minutes of your time.
In this tutorial, we’ll be creating our curtain meshes, then animating them to get nice folds, and finally applying a wind force to them. To get started, we’ll need to create a plane object with a lot of segments. This plane object will serve as our curtain, therefore a high polycount will help in making it look organic. Before we can simulate this plane, we need to convert it into an editable poly.
Make sure the curtain mesh doesn’t intersect with any other object like the wall and ceiling. Otherwise, our simulation will not run properly.
Also, at the top of our curtain, I’ve placed a cylindrical rod to which our curtain will be attached in simulation. The rod needs to have a lot of length segments as well. Right now the curtain is completely flat without any folds. The rod will be the key to getting some nice folds on the curtain. For that we’ll animate the length of the rod. Turn on Auto Key, go the 100th keyframe and halve the length.
Now select the curtain mesh and apply the ‘Cloth‘ modifier to it. First of all, we need to input into the modifier all our collision objects. These are the objects with which our cloth simulation will interact and collide with. Go to ‘Object Properties’ in Object rollout of the Cloth modifier. Click on Add Objects and select the walls, ceiling, rod, floor and column. These will be set as Collision Object near the bottom of the right side of the dialog box. Also select the curtain from this list and set it as Cloth. Input these following values for the cloth object:
Furthermore, to make the curtain fold along with our rod, we need to attach some vertices at the top of the curtain to the rod. Expand the Cloth modifier in the stack and select Group. Select the vertices of the curtain where the hooks get attached to the rod. Click ‘Make Group’ and give it a name. Now select ‘Sticky Surf’ and click on the rod object. Our hook points are now going to follow the rod’s animation.
Finally, we need to add the WIND which will blow on our curtain. You’ll find it under Space Warps > Forces > Wind. Create the Wind force and set its orientation towards the curtain. Go to the Cloth panel again and open ‘Cloth Forces’, select your wind object. Just click on Simulate underneath and the simulation will commence.
In addition, you can adjust your curtains manually by using “Live Drag” option under Faces and “Simulate Local” functions. Even if you ruin your curtain look, you can always fix it by relaxing the folding with “Simulate” & “Simulate Local” functions.
Finally, add a turbosmooth modifier to make your folded curtain geometry smooth and seamless.
Post your comments below and share this with your friends 🙂
Thanks for watching,
Alex
