Via the sim mechanisms and via the cloth parameters, the real world is sneaking into our comfortable and manageable virtual Poser environment. This implies that understanding the real world enhances our abilities to handle Cloth Room, and vice versa, handling Cloth Room requires the understanding of the real world. Which brings the high school books on geometry and mechanics on our desk.
I like that, I got my MSc in that arena (a very long time ago). You might not, no apologies needed. Just pick up the clues, the results, and skip the intermediate steps. I’ll mark them as clear as possible. You might like it, to some extent, but you may consider to skip the advanced parts. No apologies needed for that too. I’ll mark the advanced steps as clear as possible as well. When there are a lot of them, I’ll put them in separate chapters but sometimes I don’t. Simply because it’s a bit annoying to scatter a single subject all over the tutorial.
A word of warning on all the details. In the previous chapter Cloth parameters – the Sim Side I’ve discussed that
- It’s not the values themselves but the ratios between them that make the difference, especially when considering Density, the Dampings and the Resistances.
- When the values hamper a decent progress of the calculations or hamper the creating of a good result, then change them (while keeping the ratios if possible). Some cloth may look like leather and drape like leather and behave like leather, but that’s only relevant when the sim comes to an end in due time and shows a decent result by itself.
- So, the real world values are mainly of help to obtain reasonable parameter sets for cloth materials. Nothing less, nothing more.
And on top of that, the cloth sim itself resembles some workings from nature, following the laws of physics. Understanding of that can help to understand the sim, and hence might be valuable to make the changes where we need them to get the desired results. And to make them more efficiently and effectively, without endless trials and errors.
In the meantime, in might be profitable to understand more about cloth in general. Just cotton will do, I guess. Two Wikipedia articles might open, or close, your eyes:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile_manufacturing on the process from cotton to textile
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Units_of_textile_measurement on Denier, tex, diameters and more
while another article might give a nice overview or insight in textile properties:
- http://na1.northsails.com/North_Cloth/fiber_properties.html as seen by a high-performance sail maker