Although I have previously worked with many of the physical effects Blender has to offer, I had only used the cloth effect to create a simple sheet of material. Because of this, I had not idea how the feature would effect differently shaped meshes, and decided to do a little bit of experimenting on how to use the effect to gain the best result I could.
Because my initial plan was to create a modern pop-up tent, the following experiments were used to try and recreate the above reference picture. Although my idea changed, the trials I describe in this post helped me to understand this specific modifier to a higher level.
During my experiments, I tried the following methods:
* Cylinder to cone
* Sphere
* Select pole vertices and make a face
* Plane
* Cast Modifier
Cone & Cylinder
When begging to experiment, I firstly wanted to see which mesh would be most appropriate to begin with. I initially thought a cone shape might be a good start, but although the cone is triangular, I wasn’t able to subdivide or loop cut to create detail in my cloth, so I opted to create a cone shape out of a cylinder. In my first few attempts, I began by trying to make each section with one large shape, but as I carried on it proved rather difficult to do so, so I often used the initial shape to model around the shape of the poles, then deleted the vertices I sins need until there was enough to fit one of the four sections of my tent.
I began by scaling the cylinder so that the top and bottom points matched the curvature of the tent poles. After this, I created loop cuts to add detail for when I apply the cloth simulation, then began to scale each section to again follow the curvature of the tent poles. Afterwards, I needed to scale and alter the whole dome until it encompassed each corner of the frame, and deleted faces so that I was left with just the right amount for one panel. After separating these faces by selection, I created a vertex group to add pins in the cloth simulation, and was left with this following result.
Sphere
As above, This was initially an attempt to create all four panels at once, deleting the bottom half of the sphere and working with the top half. Once I had scaled and altered the sphere to fit comfortably into the tent poles, I deleted faces so that only one panel was visible, in a hope to focus on this individually and duplicate it for the rest of the tent. As I began to refine the details, I found it difficult to get the mesh to move as I hoped when using proportional editing.
Create a face
Another method I attempted to use was to use the vertices from the poles to create a face and model that mesh. After selecting the points along two sides of the inner sides of the pole, I simply pressed [F] to make a face and copied the selection to form a new object. This then proved to be ineffective as I was unable to subdivide the face of this mesh, causing no movement when the cloth physics were enabled.
Plane
This method seemed to work most efficiently, an was the simplest to do. I simply created and subdivided a plane, rotated and scaled it to create a triangle that was the width and height of the frame of the tent, before using proportional editing to curve the mesh to fit the curvature of the frame. The initial proportional editing was effective, however I still needed to make alterations in order for it to look more natural. I struggled to fit the frame exactly, but with a bit more time and attention to detail, it could be achieved.
Cast Modifier
I found a rather helpful tutorial online that explained a way to create a modern tent precisely and with one mesh. This method proved easy to follow and introduced me to new features of blender I had not yet used yet. I did not follow this tutorial fully, but I gained a result I was very happy with. Had I chosen to create a modern tent with this shape, I would have used this method, however, would need to experiment with how to create detail on top of this mesh to make the model more realistic. For example, creating a zip and an open door would be difficult so I would need to consider using one of the other methods I have tried for this panel.
Cast Modifier Tutorial
Sources:
– Blender.stackexchange.com. (2017). How to model a Dome Tent?. [online] Available at: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/41982/how-to-model-a-dome-tent [Accessed 27 Mar. 2018].
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