Adjusting strength drop-off

Our transform constraints are working, but as you see, all of these vertices are being basically glued in place. What we want is a transition where there will be a great deal of strength to the constraint here at the corner that falls off, or diminishes with distance. I want to select the transform constraint, and open up the Attribute Editor, Control+A, if it's not already open. And you're looking for a section that says Strength Dropoff, and directly above that is the Dropoff Distance, and these two work in conjunction; you have to actually adjust both of them to get a result.

The Strength Dropoff is currently a flat line up here, meaning that there is no diminishment of strength over distance. What I need to do is click anywhere here in this little graph, and create a new point on that curve, and drag it down to the lower right-hand corner. And what this is doing is it's reducing the strength of the transform constraint. The left-hand side of the graph here corresponds to the position of the transform constraint icon, and the right-hand side of the graph is the strength at the Dropoff Distance.

What I'm saying here now is that at 50 centimeters away, we will have Strength of 0. Press Play, and see what happens. We are seeing a little bit of diminishment of intensity or strength to that transform constraint, and we can tell here because these vertices here are showing these little dashed lines, which are springs connecting the constraint to the cloth vertices. What I need to do here is reduce the Dropoff Distance. Basically, I want to figure out what this distance here from that transform constraint to the farthest vertex.

I'm going to estimate that to be about 15 centimeters. Rewind, and play back, and you see here that that fell completely off the pole. We can just give it a greater Dropoff Distance, and that will cause the overall strength to be greater. Of course, I could do other things, like change the dynamic properties of the cloth itself. That looks okay on that one, at least for a start. I'll go down here and select the other one. Once again, adjust the Strength Dropoff curve, so that it's falling off linearly from the position of the transform constraint to the Dropoff Distance here, and I'll set that to, let's try 15 on that one.

It doesn't need to be as strong; the lower constraint can be weaker. So we just have to adjust these values a little bit until we get that flag to stay where it's intended to be. I'll increase the Dropoff Distance on the top one a bit; let's give that a value of 30. Press Play, and see what I get. And I could adjust the shape of this curve too, if that were my intent, you know, I could give that a different shape. But I think the linear transition is easier for me to comprehend, so I am going to leave it at that.

Once I add wind in here, I might need to adjust those once again.