quads actually give us better final deformations than would come from the triangulated mesh of modifiers such as ‘Garment Maker.’ The uniformity of the quads just seems to help the curtains fold in a more interesting manner. And finally we are using the Iray renderer in the scene so that lighting and sampling turn out at fairly decent quality levels without us having to worry about parameters and settings. Of course, the render times we get may well be longer than desired, especially if we follow a workflow that requires us to make a number of test renders throughout a project. As we will only be taking one or two renders here though, this set up should work out fine.
PRODUCT FOCUS
3ds Max 2012
With the set up out of the way, let’s make a start at creating our Cloth objects, working first with our curtain geometry. Figure 1: Project Folder button in Quick Start menu
OVERVIEW OF OUR START SCENE
TURNING THE CURTAIN INTO A CLOTH OBJECT
With the Project Folder correctly set up, we can now open up the 3ds Max scene file with which we will start our tutorial. To do that:
The first thing we will need to do, of course, is turn the curtain into something that 3ds Max can recognize as a cloth object for simulation. To do that, we:
• Come back up to the Quick Start toolbar and this time click on the ‘Open File’ icon. This will take us straight to the ‘scenes’ folder located inside the Project structure.
• With the GEO_Curtain object selected, come over to the Modify tab in the Command panel and from the modifier drop-down list apply a Cloth modifier.
• In here, left-click to open up the ‘Curtain_Start.max’ scene file. If you now scrub the time slider down at the bottom of the 3ds Max UI, you should be able to see that we currently have three animated boxes in the scene, each of which contracts along its own local X axes as time moves forward. These are the objects that we will eventually be using as ‘cloth driver’ objects that will essentially pull our curtains into place for us. We also have two simple geometry planes in the scene, one will serve as our curtain whilst the other will be used to create a pelmet that in real life would hide the rail or pole upon which the curtain hangs. Here we will use it to disguise the fact that we have no rail or pole geometry in the scene. You will also notice if you select each of them in turn that these planes have quite high polygon counts. This is by design as it will help us produce better deformations in the geometry once we start to simulate and fold the curtains. If you have used 3ds Max’s cloth tools before, perhaps having worked through a number of tutorials already, you may be wondering why we are keeping Quad subdivisions in the meshes rather than using the more often recommended Delaunay triangulation pattern. We are doing so in this instance because March 2014
This instantly makes a wealth of commands available to us in the Command panel—an extremely important one being the ‘Object Properties’ button. In order to access the controls that give us the ability to assign specific cloth properties to our geometry, we need to: • Click the ‘Object Properties’ button, which will open up the Object Properties panel. • From the ‘Objects in Simulation’ list on the left, we can select the GEO_Curtain object and then from the very top of the parameter section right-click the ‘Cloth’ radial button. This tells 3ds Max that we want to count this particular object in the simulation as Cloth. • From the ‘Cloth Properties’ presets list found in the dropdown just below, choose the ‘Cotton’ option and then lower the U&V Compress values to 50 (these should be linked by default) to help give us more realistic folds in the material. • We also want to add a little more density to the cloth to help it hang a little better, so let’s increase that parameter from 0.01 to 0.02.
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