# Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Simple Cloth Animation

|previous=Soft Body Animation
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In this tutorial, we will be making a simple skirt, and using the cloth
physics system to make it fall in realistic-looking folds.

## Making the Skirt Mesh

1.  Open Blender and delete the default cube, if you aren\'t looking
    down on the scene, press .

2.      → *Add → Mesh → Circle*

3.  The circle will be created, and in the Tool Shelf on the left you
    should see a panel appear for adjusting its settings. Set the number
    of vertices to about 12.

4.  Switch to Edit Mode with . All the
    circle's vertices should be initially selected; if not, use
     to select them all.

5.  Press  to extrude a second copy of the
    vertices; press 
     to scale the extruded vertices
    in the X and Y directions. These will make up the hem of the skirt;
    scale it out to as large as you like. Note that this is positioning
    the skirt out flat horizontally, instead of hanging down as you
    would expect; Blender's cloth animation system will take care of
    that, and this positioning gives maximum opportunity for the skirt
    to fall in dramatic folds.

6.  Now we will need to subdivide the mesh. The physics can only act on
    actual vertices, so the more of these we have, the more realistic
    the cloth effect will be. Select all vertices in the skirt, press
     and select the "Subdivide" option. A
    panel will appear in the Tool Shelf for controlling the settings for
    the subdivision operation; set the number of cuts to, say, 4.

7.  While you're at it, switch to OBJECT mode and look in the Tool Shelf
    for a pair of "Shading" buttons titled "Smooth" and "Flat"
    ![](Blender263ShadingButtons.png "Blender263ShadingButtons.png"),
    and click on "Smooth".

## Creating the Vertex Group

1.  Now we have to specify that the waist of the skirt will stay fixed
    in place as it falls: deselect all vertices, and select the
    innermost ring of vertices. The quickest way to do this is to hold
    down  and click with
     on one of the edges bordering the
    hole in the middle. With the entire ring of vertices selected, go to
    the Mesh Object Data context
    ![](Blender_2.78_Mesh_Object_Data_Button.png "Blender_2.78_Mesh_Object_Data_Button.png")
    in the Properties window, find the "Vertex Groups" panel, and click
    the **+** sign to create a new group. This will initially be called
    "Group"; perhaps give it a more meaningful name (like "Waist"), and
    click "Assign" to put the selected vertices into the new group.

## Animating the Skirt

1.  Tab out of Edit Mode into Object Mode. The skirt should still be
    selected.
2.  Go to the Physics tab
    ![](Blender255PhysicsContextButton.png "Blender255PhysicsContextButton.png")
    in the Properties window (last icon in the row at the top). This
    will just show a few buttons to begin with
    ![](Blender263InitialPhysicsTab.png "Blender263InitialPhysicsTab.png").
3.  Click the "Cloth" button; a whole lot of other settings should
    appear, most of which can be left at their default values (make sure
    the checkbox at the top of the "Cloth Collision" panel is checked).
    However, check the box titled "Pinning"; now you can click in the
    field just below it to bring up a popup menu of all the vertex
    groups in the mesh; this should just contain the one entry named
    "Waist" you created earlier, so select that.
4.  Now the magic happens \... rotate the view to an oblique one to give
    yourself a good view of the process, and hit
    . You should now see the skirt
    fall from its horizontal position to a more natural vertical one,
    developing some folds in the process.
5.  After the animation has run through at least one complete cycle, hit
     to stop it.

## Prior to Keeping the Folds

Before doing the next step, we need to enable one of the standard addons
that come with Blender. This will let us make a copy of any stage of the
physics simulation into a separate object.

Go into the User Preferences window and bring up the "Addons" tab. Look
for the "Animation Corrective shape keys" addon (typing "shape k" into
the search box should be enough to find it).

Enable it. Now back to the 3D view\...

## Keeping the Folds

1.  Use the left- and right- arrow keys to step through the animation
    one frame at a time, until you find a position for the skirt that
    you like.
2.  When the 3D view is showing a nice shape for the skirt, go to the
    mesh data tab in the Properties window, and look for the "Shape
    Keys" panel. Click with **LMB** on the down-arrow just below the
    **+** and **-** signs, and in the menu that appears, you should see
    the item "Create duplicate for editing"
    ![](Blender263SaveAsShapeKey.png "Blender263SaveAsShapeKey.png").
    Select that.
3.  It looks like nothing has happened, but in fact you now have a
    second copy of the skirt mesh, "baked" into the position
    corresponding to the current frame of the animation. Try using the
    arrow keys to move through the animation, and you will see the baked
    copy remain in the chosen position.
4.  At this point, you can delete the original animated skirt mesh (or
    move it to another layer for future reuse), leaving the
    nicely-folded copy.

![](BlenderSimpleSkirt.png "BlenderSimpleSkirt.png")

## Extra Practice

1.  You will notice at some points during the animation, the folds of
    cloth pass right *through* each other, which is of course impossible
    with real cloth. To prevent this, you could go to the "Cloth
    Collision" panel in the Physics tab, and click the "Self Collision"
    checkbox. Rerun the animation ()
    to see the difference; what other effects does it have?
2.  Maybe the folds don't look realistic enough. Go back to the original
    mesh, bring up "Subdivide" again and subdivide it by a couple more
    levels. Rerun the animation (). It
    should take a bit longer for the first cycle, but do the results
    look better?
3.  This YouTube tutorial might also help:
    <http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=mgYhZ3hWwTQ> happy animating!

