Overview of cloth tools - Blender Tutorial

Before we dive into working Blender's cloth tools in any kind of meaningful way. It would probably be good to spend just a few minutes in this video, taking a look around the various areas of the Blender user interface, that we will be working with in this course. Doing so, we'll hopefully negate any chance of our getting lost in the UI as we talk about. And demonstrate, the various cloth tools and options that are available in Blender. We have here a bench test scenario that really has been designed to provide setting in which we can test, and observe the effect, on both cloth behavior and motion of Blender's cloth tools. It also, at this moment in time, gives us the opportunity to show just how we go about turning geometry, such as these planes into an actual cloth object. In Blender, this is done by adding a modifier to the geometry, which is why we would most likely want to jump into the Modifier tab. Which can be found over in the Properties panel. From here, with one of our plane objects selected of course, we can access the Modifier drop down and then just add a Cloth modifier to the geometry. Now, unfortunately, other than having the ability to either apply apply a shape key here. The modifier tab is not the section of the Blender UI in which we will find the actual settings for the cloth modifier. These, as blender tells us here, can be found inside the Physics tab, which resides on the far right-hand side of our tab controls. Now, if like me, your Physics tab isn't showing, you can simply middle mouse click on the tab controls, and then drag to the left in order to reveal any hidden options. You could also come to the left-hand edge of the Properties panel itself, click and simply drag to the left to enlarge it. Again, making sure that all of the tab UIs can clearly be seen. Or, we could use the Jump To function found to the right of the Modifier controls, which will take us straight there. In the Physics tab, we have if I just close the roll outs up for now. A number of sections available each of which houses a different set of Blender cloth controls. So, we see basic cloth parameters. We see cloth caching, cloth collisions, stiffness scaling, sewing springs and finally, cloth field ways. All nicely collected together, into one easy to use section of the application's UI. Truth to tell then, we could actually have skipped going into the modifier tab completely just a moment or two ago and instead, come straight here in order to turn our geometry into cloth. If I just come up and remove the cloth modifier we have applied, by hitting the X here, you can see that we can just as easily apply the cloth modifier to an active object from here inside the Physics panel. Which of course is extremely handy seeing, as this is the section of the blender UI in which the majority of our time will be spent. We will of course be using other tools and areas of the Blender user interface, the layer controls for instance, will definitely feature. As will the animation timeline itself, and very importantly, the playback controls found here. Which are in fact, the means by which we stop, start and cache our cloth simulations in Blender. Having taken a very quick look at these areas of the Blender UI then, I would highly recommend that you spend a little bit of time looking around, and becoming familiar with them, before working through the remainder of this chapter. If you have already done that, or if of course you already know your way around the blender user interface, then we are ready to move on to our next video. And take a look at how we can benefit our cloth simulation work by gaining at least a basic understanding of the real world physics, on which Blender cloth tools are based.