As an environment artist, I need to learn cloth animation WITHOUT apex

Development Character & Animation
1

Sup, keeping this short’n sweet, I have a few questions coming from someone with practically zero experience in animation:

  1. Using Maya, what’s the quickest and easiest way for me to ‘get my feet wet’ in animating simple objects like a flag pole?

  2. What methods of animation (eg blendshapes, baked, non-baked) should realistically be used for anything cloth related? (tent/banner/clothesline/etc)

  3. Are there any good general tips for problems I will likely encounter?

This is a big challenge for me; when it comes to environment animation, the internet doesn’t offer much help.

2

You should probably wait for 4.16 since it’s getting new clothing tools where you basically vertex paint the mesh in editor to indicate which parts are clothes.

3

Wow that sounds amazingly intuitive for artists. I’ll research into what it can do, thanks

4

You could simulate the cloth moving in Maya/3Ds/Blender, and bake it. Or you can use a moving material that fakes a moving cloth, perhaps with some tesselation also.
Or just use Nvcloth/apex