I HATE curtains!

V-Ray V-Ray Common Off-topic
1

Does anybody have a link to a good video tutorial for some curtains? I’ve got ‘ok’ results for smart curtains that just hang straight down by using a loft with a different squiggle shape at the top and bottom and then just interpolate between the two. These are allright from a distance - certainly not perfect as they don’t interact or bunch/crumple like real fabric curtains.

Now I need to have some tied-back curtains. I’ve looked at countless tutorials online but never found anything that gives me decent, predictable results. The cloth calculations always take an age too! I’m not sure if it has something to do with our max units (we always use meters), but curtains always tend to splay out very unnaturally, even setting the cloth type to something like ‘satin’.

Any tips/links would be hugely appreciated.

2

Try marvelous designer? Overkill for curtains but perhaps it’s worth a look…

3

I did run a demo of that for a couple of months and found it to be pretty good, but I still struggled with curtains. Cushions were quite good though :wink:

I’m having slightly better look with setting the curtain fabric to ‘heavy leather’ (nice!) and creating them in a scene where the units are set to com rather than meters. Fingers crossed.

4

They are reasonably simple to simulate using Maya Qcloth plugin. I would suggest doing that rather than max sim.

5

Have you seen this tutorial?

http://viscorbel.com/cloth-modifier-curtains-3ds-max-tutorial/

6

There are quite a few on turbosquid which are believable and will save you the hassle of modelling/simulating

7

thanks… nice tut…

8

I really like chaosgroup simcloth. Within max this still is for me the most robust solution.
Here´s a screengrab of a curtain I made with it. Notice the spline/curtain rail animation at the beginning.
The spline was extracted from the curtain and every second segment shifted a little to fit through the holes.
Than I animated it simply by scaling it in one axis. It´s not the most beautiful curtain especial the upper part
but it´s a quick and dirty setup.
http://sorceress.netfrag.org/optix/s\_curtain.mp4

9

Now if Vlado would give simcloth some love it would be happy days :slight_smile:

10

Yep - tried this several months ago and I really don’t like the results. It takes soooooooo long to calculate and the end result looks quite messy - not really elegant.

11

Kind of the same as the tutorial you already did.. but I would say give cloth an other try.. could be really nice

12

i usually do the same as with furniture - buy ready made ones rather than waste time doing it myself. I think there are some on design connected, like Chris said loads on turbosquid, and try 3dsky.org, they may even have free models.

13

I think the best results in terms of speed-quality is mcloth in max. Don’t foget to set up proper system units scale. It all depends on this. About qualoth - don’t like it. It can make very good cloth, but intersections are quite not that good to me…

14

Not sure how did u get any intersections but I did simmulate 5000 frames and had 0 intersections. Literally I could not find a single one intersection. Make sure you are not using simple method and u have 10 subset. That will get it nice.

15

I did very large and complex curtains, with all the bells and whistles, and qualoth wan’t that good, ass mcloth. I was surpised. I even tried garment maker’s mesh for this and still, mcloth was better.

16

That’s strange. Can you send me the model, I’d like to test it.