Making a sail using nCloth

[Anonymous]

Hey Guys,
I’m currently working on a sailboat, and want to add sails to it.
I never really used nCloth before, so I watched some tutorials on how to do this on YouTube.

The way I did the sail on the first image is by adding a plane with 30x30 cuts and making it an nCloth object. I then added a row of objects to the top, and used the “point to surface” constraint, to constrain every third vertex to the objects. I did the same to the vertices in the two bottom corners. Either to an own object, or to the top object. When then adding some wind and noise, the sail looks pretty good.

I now have multiple things I want to add to this, to make it more realistic, but can’t find any videos/articles that explain something like that.

1. I want the bottom to corners to be connected to a curve/rope, which moves with the sail. I found some videos explaining how to make a curve dynamic, but I can’t figure out how to attach one end at the sail. See link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=023KGMFAoZ0

1. Some sails have some vertical lines on the sail. I don’t really know what these are, but I’m thinking that the sail is not that stretchy on these lines. I can’t find any setting where I can apply different values to different areas of one mesh.
2. The same goes with dynamic curves /nHair. I made some ropes with knots and loops on the end. I did not test it jet, but I believe I that when making the curve dynamic, I will destroy the knots. So maybe I need a setting to just make parts of the rope stretchy. I don’t know.
3. The sail is at the moment very flat and has not many folds. I smoothed the sail two time, because I thought it needs more topology, but that did not change much. Increasing the wind noise adds more noise to the sail, but not really realistic looking folds.
   
   If you have any solution to one or multiple problems, or know a good place/video that explains the whole thing more detailed, I would love to hear about that.
   
   
   

[DyllanCFX · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous ,

I made a video that attempts answer your questions.  Hope that helps or get you started.

https://youtu.be/XyFeGsK6bhs

[Anonymous]

Wow, that helped so so much. Thank you very much for this video. This was exactly what I needed. Thank You!

[Anonymous]

Do you know, If there is a setting to shorten the rope (reduce the length) when hitting play?

[DyllanCFX]

Yes, you can lower the "Rest Length Scale" in the hairSystem to shorten the curves.