Blender Cloth Simulations: Fixing Simulation Problems

Here I go over a few tips that can hopefully help you resolve issues you may be having with your cloth simulations in Blender. A couple of the tips are more reminders to double check your work while others are more technical.
#blender #blender3d #blenderanimation

[@danialsoozani]

thanks for the great short and straight on the point tutorial!

[@edgeloop]

Thanks for the kind words. I hope it helped you in some way. :)

[@eximusr4175]

oh my goodness i fliped around the modifiers and it actually worked thank you so much

[@eximusr4175]

nope nvm its still not working

[@ShotgunScream]

Saved my sim! Thanks so much for this.

[@alan112223]

Thank you!

[@edgeloop]

You're welcome!

[@sederato]

wow! solved my issue in a minute!

[@edgeloop]

Glad I could help!

[@cleanvisuals]

Thank you it helped 🙏

[@straightshota6794]

Thanks for a video

[@bentontramell]

Bless you 🙏

[@edgeloop]

Thank you for the comment. I really hope it helped you solve any problems you were having. :)

[@davidedwardsme]

Hi! Any suggestions on how to prevent the vertices from dancing around? i can see this in your shorts close to the top rim, and something im currently struggling to remove. Ideally we need to have this completely in a settled state. Also another issue i just noticed in my project, if i enable both a skirt and tshirt at the same time, it gets strange results, but if i sim them independently they seem to work as expected, even though there's no contact between them.

[@Puychan]

Thanks for the video! I have a question: When I simulate my cloth with collisions, animation ans self collision it just dont stop moving. Like a noise, and it just horrible. I can't find what's wrong

[@McHaven07]

godsend!

[@KingsNJenssons]

Any ideas on fixing cloth sims that like to move even the character is still

[@anjuro]

So here's my number one cloth sim blender question. How do you make a posable cloth sim? I.e. let's say you're making a super hero landing and you want to pose the cape on frame 1 and let it fall down, alternatively, lets say you are doing a walk and you want the cape to assume a specific shape on certain keyframes and have some cloth sim on top of that motion (i.e. the mesh is cloth simulating the interpolation between the poses). Basically as far as I can tell the problem is that the way blender does things is the motion of an object is either simulated or animated, it can't be both. The only way I can think of doing the first example is to disable the cloth sim, pose my cape with an armature or a shape key, then enable the cloth sim. This is not an efficient solution, if you wanted to do 10 different poses you would have to do a lot of work. The second example I straight up don't know how to do other that trying to do some surface deform trickery.

[@edgeloop]

Yeah, your first solution is what came to mind for me which is a pain. I'm wondering if you could actually keyframe vertex group weights somehow .I just took a quick look and it looks like the animall plugin allows vertex group animation (not sure exactly what you can animate though). Theoretically at keyframe 1, you could have the cape all be weighted to not use the simulation... then keyframe 2 and beyond, you can invert the vertex group values. Just an idea though, not sure if it'll play out nicely with animall! :)

[@anjuro]

@@edgeloop Thanks for the suggestion, I will definitely have a look as well. Wouldn't mind a video either if you make any discoveries ;)

[@MagicSwordFilms]

I'm getting hung up on the scale part. I tested this out recently and got fantastic and easy sims at a x5 scale, but I'm doing an animation with multiple characters holding props interacting with an environment. Changing the scale fixes the cloth but breaks everything else, like hair and props, how do we bring the scale back to real world settings with the cloth all ready to go?

[@TheBigQQ69420]

Not an expert, but if you don't need to resimulate the cloth you could bake the simulation into the mesh (obviously keep the upscaled version as a backup or if you need to make changes), and scale the duplicate down to what it was. With the simulation finalized into a mesh, the collision distances would no longer matter.

[@AlmazWorks]

Nice tutorial! My question: how do you pull the cape hiding the bottle to the side so the bottle doesn't go through the fabric? Thank you!

[@edgeloop]

Hello, Are you referring to something specific in my video? I don't recall there being anything about a bottle. :P In any case, it sounds like you have cloth hiding a bottle. I assume at this point you have enabled collision on the bottle (so the cloth is on top of it). If the cape is attached to something, you can just animate the position of whatever it's attached to. Since the bottle has collision enabled, the cloth shouldn't go through the bottle.

[@AlmazWorks]

@@edgeloop Hello, Thank you for your reply. You understood my question correctly. When trying to remove the cape from the bottle, there is a constant burst of fabric in the neck area of the bottle. I would like to find a solution to this problem.

[@callmedisappointment7374]

I'm having issues with some cloth that I attached to a rigged model. The cloth simulation is fine but once I add collision to parts of her body, the cloth freaks out, Im not sure it might be because the cloth is too close to the armature/mesh or its something with the collision I have to fix. Not sure if this is a specific problem I'm having or if its too common

[@edgeloop]

That happens all the time to me. A lot of the Blender simulations require debugging. If I was you, I think I'd try a few things. 1. Make the cloth far away (I mean make it stupidly far away just to see if the proximity of the cloth to the mesh is the problem). 2. Check the collision distances on the body and the cloth. I always start with the minimum which iirc is .01 (maybe .001)? 3. The collisions with the body may cause the cloth self-collision to freak out (if you have self-collision enabled). 4. I know my video states this, but double check the modifier stacks and visible items. It's usually one of these two that screw it up for me.

[@juanvirgala6600]

Sometimes we scale objects in object mode and that can cause a scale problem to fix that, you have to apply thee scale, in the object mode and in the object menu you can find that option

[@ricoferico9213]

Loved the video, but how to scale down the mesh after baking the simulation?

[@edgeloop]

Thanks for the comment! To be honest I haven't thought that hard about reverting to the old scale as I just worked in the new scale afterwards. Of course the down side is that blender works best with real life scale. With that said I think you might be able to create an empty (or just some random invisible object). Parent that to the armature that the cloth is tied to. Then you can control the scale(just apply an inverse scale) through the invisible parent. Let me know if that works! Another workaround for cloth getting stuck is to make your cloth vertices more sparse.

[@ricoferico9213]

@@edgeloop sadly it doesn't work, maybe I did something wrong, it did scale down on the first frame, but when I played the animation, the cloth returned back to its bigger size I did two simulations, one with real life scale, and the other one is a 4x real life scale, and I found out that the bigger size made a nicer simulation in my case, which has a small amount of jitter, while on the real life scale, there is a lot of jitters, I tried changing the setting, but it doesn't make any noticeable different I haven't tried to make the vertices more sparse, so I'll do that, Thank you

[@edgeloop]

@@ricoferico9213 Ah yeah I figured it might not work. :( Your situation is exactly the problem I struggled with which is why I made that section of the video. It's really annoying that the minimum collision distance is .001. If we could make it lower, we wouldn't have to resort to goofy hacks to work around it. Making the vertices more sparse is the more "correct" solution imo, but harder to demonstrate. :)

[@Omnivoid22]

Hello. Buddy. I have a question. I have shoulder pads on my character. I want them to collide with the arm is moving up and shoulder . Do I do the same thing here. Do I have to add a bone to it. I can't really find a video that helps with this kinda thing.

[@edgeloop]

I've thought about this kind of animation before but never really did it myself. You probably don't want to simulate shoulder pads with a cloth simulation because it won't be able to maintain the volume of the pad. You can do the typical weight painting and use bones to control the shoulder pad as the arm/shoulder move. The one thing I've thought about trying is making the shoulder pad a rigid body but I've had so many problems with rigid bodies in blender (crashing and generally not working). The cool thing about it being a rigid body is that it would 100% maintain volume and keep its shape if that's what you're looking for.

[@Omnivoid22]

@@edgeloop I did figure it out. I just use weight painting. Only the shoulder controls it.

[@koimetaverse3d]

Please could you do a tutorial on simulating clothes to a still pose? Not an animation? I’m struggling with realism with clothes in my renders because I don’t know how to do this, for example the sleeves or shorts falling correctly with the pose.

[@Frigus3D-Art]

My tip is getting actual seweing patterns. There are a ton aviable for free. This prevents you from having weird bulges and other weird behavior. Just smack them on a character in tpose, give it a couple of frames to settle and make a transition animation to the actual pose. Hope this helps

[@oxicemusic]

You mean scaling the scene, as in making the character rig and all assets bigger? Thats it?

[@Radhaun]

I'm not sure I'm describing this correctly, but when I run a render, the cloth scrunches in on itself, like someone balling up a handkerchief, I can't get it to just lay flat against the model. I followed the steps from a different tutorial but where his just falls to the ground, mine doesn't fall, it just scrunches up in a ball around whatever the central point of that piece was.

[@edgeloop]

Does it scrunch on itself when it collides with the model or does it scrunch immediately? My guess is that your cloth has vertices too close to one another or there are other things (perhaps invisible) causing collisions with the cloth.

[@Radhaun]

@@edgeloop It scrunches immediately when I render. I have tried checking the vertices, and they aren't any closer together than the clothing I import. Another person noted it may be because I'm using a base VRM model and apparently they don't play well with fabric?

[@edgeloop]

@@Radhaun Without seeing what your models are it's difficult to diagnose. I'd try to disable self-collision on the cloth and see what happens. Try to make collision distances (both self and external) the minimum and see if that makes it better (this can introduce other problems though). Then disable collision on model and see what happens. Remove the VRM model and just see if your cloth collides correctly with a low poly UV sphere. Save to a different file and remove everything but the cloth and the thing it'll collide against.

[@user-jg8hc4lk6l]

2:05 i dont have the same tabs, i have collision, particle, softboy& cloth. could someone help me pls?

[@edgeloop]

Definitely check your Blender version and ensure you're selecting the exact same type of object. I don't remember which version of Blender I was using on this video though. In any case, just get the latest Blender.

[@villaindota4700]

what is your cpu?

[@edgeloop]

The cpu used here was a 5900x.

[@hiru92]

my cloth just fall down after 1st frame lol 😆

[@edgeloop]

Yep... that always happens to me too.

[@TheHimmus]

Volume is a touch quiet.

[@edgeloop]

Thanks for the feedback! Audio level is something I always fight with. :)

[@dmitr6926]

Thanks~! Hmm.. wonder if Damping at max or so and single sided enabled fixes last thing too.. similar to problem had that it fixed hmm.. then again feels different..? I will find out when make pants/shorts guess! Lovely char'gal ya got~! (´▽`ʃ♡ƪ)

[@namito3958]

hello im trying to make an outfit with the cloth simulations but the croptop keeps clipping through her bra

[@AntoineVanGeyseghem]

:0