Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 5
Getting Flexible with Soft Bodies and Cloth
In nature, materials exhibit different properties of rigidity and structural responsiveness to the forces on them.
Many materials are flexible and deform when acted upon by forces such as gravity and friction. Blender's soft
body simulation enables you to easily represent the behavior of a wide variety of flexible materials. Depending
on the parameter settings you use, you can use soft body simulations to animate materials as varied as gelatin,
sheet metal, and cloth.
In this chapter, you will learn to
• Control the behavior of soft body objects
• Work with force fields, collision objects, and modifiers
• Work with cloth and clothing
The Hard Facts on Soft Bodies
One of the basic aspects of animating with meshes is mesh deformation. In Blender, there are many ways to
deform a mesh. You can use shape keys, hooks, and modifiers such as armatures, lattices, curves, displacement,
waves, and others. Each of these methods enables different kinds of deformations, and the combination of them
yields a considerable amount of control for animators. Nevertheless, some kinds of deformations are still diffi-
cult orimpossible toachieve convincingly without adedicated simulation. Softbodyphysicsisagoodexample
of this kind of deformation.
Soft body dynamics
refers to the way that flexible materials deform in response to the forces on them. In
real life, many things we deal with all the time exhibit soft body behavior: cloth, rubber, paper—even metal,
when under the right kinds of stress. These objects bounce, crumple, and jiggle in ways that would often not be
practical to animate by hand. By setting up a soft body simulator, you can get Blender to do the work for you.
Soft body simulation is one of Blender's physics simulation functions, which are found in the Physics prop-
erties area shown in
Figure 5-1
,
when an appropriate object is selected in the 3D viewport.
