nCloth curtains

For the short animation with Melvin the cat, there are some curtains. I have decided to use nCloth because they will be near the open french doors in the scene so wind will be able to affect them. The cat will also be able to interact with the curtains if we use nCloth for them.

I found some tutorials about nCloth online to start off with. It showed me the basics about how to assign the nCloth to the mesh and how the different constraints will effect the usability of the curtain. I made a basic curtain and used the sine deformer to create the wavy curtain effect.



This was a great start but I wanted smaller curtains and on both sides. I applied the same methods to create the single curtain to create a set and changed some of the settings so that there was more fiction on the curtain rail. I made the curtains slightly thicker and more stretch resistant and well as tweaking some other attributes like stickiness and rigidity to adjust them so they looked more natural. I did another test of the curtains drawing and being pushed back again just to see how they reacted.



These curtains were still movie around slightly at the beginning but I put that down to the wind attribute being set up so there was some slight movement as if wind was affecting them. When I was happy with them I decided to take this test further. I have only tested collisions when I was using nCloth for the emperor but had never tested it with an object going through them. I used the Melvin cat rig to interact with the curtains to see how it would look if Melvin was to pass through them or try to climb underneath them. To do this, I made his mesh into a collision and then animated him as normal.



I liked the way the curtain reacted and thought it could make a nice shot if the angle was correct. I played around with camera angles to see if I could get a better one and made some minor setting adjustments to rigidity and stickiness. The test that I created will not make it into any animation or film which is why I did not render it out properly but it shows how the cat could react if they do want the cat to go through the curtain in the animation.