Hanging Cloaks

Firstly, the cloaks are going to need something to hang from. Simple box modelling and one turbosmooth later...

As for the cloak, I initially started with a plane, but then realised creating the hood shape at the top would be difficult. Instead, I started with a sphere and removed the front and bottom faces, then scaled it to be taller. The lowest edges were then scaled out and eventually pulled down.

After a few miutes moving new edges around and making use of soft selection, I created this rough shape of a cloak.

I then positioned it like so over the hook ready for the cloth simulation. In order for the simulation to be effective, I increased the amount of faces by applying a turbosmooth to the cloak.

I then selected both the hook and the cloak, and applied a cloth modifier to them both simultaneously. In the parameters of the modifier, I then made the hook a collision object (and increased the friction and static so the cloak would cling to it better rather than sliding off or clipping through it) and the cloak into a 'satin' cloth object. Satin was just one of many premade cloth types available from the dropdown menu. It took a bit of trial and error to settle on satin. Others such as rubber made the cloak stretch ridiculously out of shape, and anything heavy clipped straight through the hook and fell into oblivion.

The result is...less than spectacular, but it is a quick method of creating a background object to liven the place up a bit. Using the cloth modifier is new to me, but was quite easy to get the hang of. In my next post I will be using it again.