paper sheet in the wind

[super gnu]

ive been asked by a client to animate a sheet of paper being blown about by the wind.


my first thought was to use mcloth, but in reading a more detailed brief, the paper needs to have quite specific start and end points, and be quite art directed (needs to get temporarily stuck under a stone, needs to blow in through a specific window etc..) .


since i dont imagine it will be easy to get the desired result with a proper sim, im left with the option of animating the paper along a spline and keyframing the deformation and rotation manually.

however this also sounds like a pain in the arse. and hard to get nice believable motion.


any suggestions or nice tutorials around? id imagine this kinda stuff is needed all the time for film work.

[thablanch]

For a 'similar' thing, I did with Mass FX,

Using winds to push, a 'tunnel' (a pipe, not renderable, in which the leaf was traveling) and an animated object that was blocking the tunnel at some point in time, when the leaf was getting stuck, and moving away to let the leaf continue...
So, a long tube with multiple winds in them. really not to hard, and quite 'precise', simulation was really fast.

Hope it helps