Bake your first simulation
Drop a cloth onto an object and bake a short test. This checks the whole pipeline before you work on a real shot.
A short cached bake of a cloth falling onto an obstacle, playing back in the timeline.
- A passing solver health check (lesson 1).
- A new, empty Blender scene.
Step by step
- Create the cloth
Add a plane, subdivide it a few times so it can fold, and move it above the origin.
- Create the obstacle
Add a simple mesh such as a cube or sphere below the plane.
- Apply the scale
Apply the scale of both objects (Ctrl+A, Scale) so the simulation uses real sizes.
- Assign the roles
Turn on Cloth neXt for both in the Physics tab. Set Object Type to Cloth for the plane and to Collider for the obstacle.
- Choose a material
On the cloth, pick the Material Preset closest to your fabric. Leave the other values alone for now.
- Set the cache folder
Click Set Cache Directory (Set Dir on the viewport toolbar) and choose a folder on a drive with free space. The result is written there.
- Keep it short
Set Bake Start to 1 and Bake End to around 40. A 20 to 50 frame test is enough.
- Check the scene
Click Run Scene Health Check and fix anything it reports.
- Bake
Click Bake (BAKE on the toolbar). The bake runs in the Cloth neXt Bake Window. When it finishes, play the timeline.
The cloth falls, touches the obstacle without passing through, and settles. Playback runs from the cache.
If something goes wrong
- The cloth passes through the obstacle
- Check that the obstacle has the Collider role and that both objects have applied scale.
- Bake is not available
- Run Scene Health Check; it lists what is missing, such as the cache folder.
- The test fails
- Fix the setup first. Do not try to repair a broken setup by changing material values at random.