SPATIAL CONSTRUCTS- 1984- Experimenting with nCloth

I needed to develop the bed in my scene a little and felt that it needed a duvet. I started by creating a plane with plenty of sub-divisions and used soft select to push and pull the polys around in an attempt to create life-like folds. This technique however did not produce the desired result and I started to look into other options.

I had seen tools in Maya regarding 'nCloth' but had never looked into exactly what it was or how it could be applied. After a little research and experimentation I discovered that nCloth can provide exceptionally powerful cloth simulation that would be perfect for creating a natural looking folded duvet.

 

I started by creating a high poly plane that I converted into an nCloth object. This was then positioned on the bed as a duvet would normally be found and primitives were placed around it. These primitives were converted to 'Passive Colliders' so that the cloth would collide against them and I could therefore use these primitives to deform the plane how I wished.

 

I hid these planes so that I could see the scene a little better and set up a simple animation. The primitive on the right was rotated in such a way as to mimic someone using their arm to move the duvet aside as they get out of bed. This allowed the plane to deform and bend in a very natural way.

 

Further deformation can be seen. Settings such as friction and gravity had to be carefully tweaked in order to achieve the desired result.

 

An example of the finished animation. When the cloth is in a desired position I simply went into the outliner and deleted all references to nCloth settings and exported the mesh as the final deformed polygons. This could then be dropped into the final scene and is ready for a games engine.