Cloth

Drape, fold, and flutter any mesh in real time — flags, capes, banners, tablecloths — pinned where you want it and colliding with the rest of your scene.

The Cloth Sim node turns an input mesh into fabric. The solver treats every edge of the mesh as a stretch constraint and every pair of neighbouring faces as a bend constraint, so the surface keeps its shape while still folding and rippling naturally. It runs entirely on the GPU and plays back live.

Feeding it a mesh

Wire any mesh into Cloth Sim. The resolution of that mesh is your cloth resolution — a denser mesh folds into finer wrinkles but costs more to cook, while a coarse mesh gives you big, loose folds cheaply.

Like every simulation, Cloth lives inside a time-driven loop and only advances while playback is running. Scrubbing the timeline re-simulates from the start, so what you see is always a true result rather than a guess.

Start coarse. Get the drape and timing right with a low-resolution mesh, then raise the resolution once the motion feels good. Re-cooking a heavy cloth on every tweak is the slowest way to work.

Stretch and bend

Two forces shape the fabric:

Together these two dials cover most fabrics. Push gravity and damping to dial in weight and how quickly motion settles.

Pinning

Most cloth needs to be held somewhere — a flag on its pole, a curtain on its rail, a cape at the shoulders. Pinned points are locked in place and the rest of the cloth hangs and swings from them.

You pin by giving the held points zero mass. The simplest way is to select the points you want to anchor upstream (for example with a bounding region or an Expression) and set their mass to zero before the cloth node. Everything else falls under gravity.

A flag is just a grid pinned along one edge. A hanging banner is pinned along the top. A trampoline is pinned all the way around the border.

Colliding with the scene

Cloth collides against colliders in your scene — the rigid bodies, the ground plane, soft bodies, and the other cloth around it. It also collides with itself, so folds stack instead of passing through each other.

Add static collision shapes with the Physics Collider node, or wire a Distance Field in as a collider for arbitrary shapes. Anti-tunnelling is always on, so fast-moving cloth won't shoot through thin objects.

Pushing it around

Anything that moves particles moves cloth:

See also