Tutorial: Creating Newspaper using Cloth in XSI

 

In this short tutorial I will explain how to create a newspaper held by two (virtual) hands and manipulated. I will do so using softimage xsi cloth simulator and I will demonstrate using cluster center animation to drive cloth objects.

 

Needless to say this method applys on any paper/cloth like object you want to drive by nailing points on its surface and animating these points position.

 

 

First create your model. I used a simple grid:

 

 

 

The next step is to create two clusters with center of the points held by the character’s hands. Note that we create two different clusters. Use EDIT > Create Cluster With Center.

 

To illustrate:

Do so for the other side as well (not shown)

 

 

 

Now we have two clusters with centers. The centers has null objects we can manipulate later:

 

In the next step, we select the whole geometry and create a cloth from the selection.

You can also apply the cloth paper preset (or any other…):

 

 

Now lets create the nail clusters. We do so by selecting the point clusters we created earlier individually and apply a Local Cloth Cluster on them:

 

Toggle the Nail check box to indicate the this is a nail point so when we move the center null, the newspaper will move with it. But make sure you set the correct preset (paper for me) on the cluster before toggling it:

 

That’s it… now you can animate the center nulls. Only thing I encounted is that the simulation is not automatically refreshed when animating the nulls, so what I did is changed the iterations in the simulation after I animated the nulls, just to let the simulator refresh.

 

Here is the final result of what I did here: Capture.avi (500kb~)

 

I hope this tutorial was helpful.

 

Itay L. (xsinister from www.xsibase.com)