Case Study: Covering Up (05 Pin and Move I)

Now I’m going to have fun with some animation. First, in Pose Room, I set the time slider to frame 1, and hide the cloth (properties, check Visible OFF). Then I select the car, move the slider to frame 30 and I move the car 6 to 7 meters in Z direction. I don’t care about rolling the wheels, that’s for later refinement when I’m up to it. Back to frame 1, and I unhide the cloth again.

After ensuring that the Cloth over Car morph dial is set to 1, I switch to Cloth Room and click [Edit Choreographed Group…] in panel 3. This opens the Group Editor, and I pick a few vertices from the cloth. The editor can be closed with the (red crossed) close button in the upper right corner.

The vertices we’ve just selected will be excluded from the cloth sim calculations, but will follow the preset movements of the cloth itself. If the cloth was animated like the car, those vertices would follow that animation (hence the name: choreographed). At the moment however I’ve not animated the cloth, and therefore the vertices in the Choreographed group will stay put while the car drives forward, underneath the cloth. I only have to [Calculate Simulation…] to make it happen. And wait a while, as most frames seem to take about 10 sec each, and I’ve got 90 of them (that makes say 15 mins, depending on your computer speed).

To view the result properly I’ve got to switch to Pose Room and set the Cloth over Car morph to 0. At frame 30 the result is like:

And that one spot seems glued to the ground.

So the cloth stretches a lot and then contracts while slipping off the car. I also see the Fold Resistance is 50.
So I set Fold Resistance to 500 to make the thick cloth with the fat folds, and I raise Stretch Resistance to 900. Another way is to reduce the Friction parameters to make the cloth slide easier over the car. I [Clear Simulation], I ensure that the Cloth over car morph reads 1 again, and I [Calculate Simulation…] again. When done, I set Cloth over Car morph to 0 (Pose Room), select frame 20 as it shows a fun result and render. This is it:

and you see that the cloth stretches far less, and sort of jumps from the car. When you want, you can enhance the scene by putting a pylon, or a high heeled girl, right onto the glued spot as if that object or figure is nailing the cloth down while the car drives away.
By using menu Object > Spawn Morph Target and menu Figure > Create Full Body Morph at say frame 90 you can freeze the sim result again.

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