CLOTH SIMULATION

by Bianca Lai.

Cloth sim. Oh, cloth sim. As I have said for the duration of the production, "It's a waiting game".

It's great when it works, and it's immensely time consuming when it doesn't. It took me about 3 months of trial and errors before I finally got a better grasp of the settings needed for the protagonist's hoodie and curtains to work properly.

Both the hoodie and curtains gave me a fair share of issues. The curtains seemed simple enough in the beginning, but it's difficult to control a draping piece of cloth once I add wind noise to the scene. I also wasn't able to edit the cached cloth sim around freely, so it was a series of re-caching the scene over and over again until it's well enough to work with.

The hoodie was particularly troubling. It has easier control since it's just wrapped around the character, but because it's a complex piece of clothing, it clips through the mesh easily whenever the protagonist make any dynamic movement. It also takes a much longer time than the curtain for the hoodie's cloth sim to calculate, so it really is a "waiting game" through and through.