Setting Softcloth Weight with a Weight Map

In the Using Soft Cloth from the Library section, you can use the soft cloth templates with arrow dummies to animate softcloths, such as attaching them to other objects, folding them, or expanding them.

However, you can also determine the fixed and soft parts of the soft cloth by editing a special type of texture, the Weight Map.
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The Basic Concept of Using Weight Maps

The basic usage for this method is to utilize a simple gray scale image. The black part is taken as the fixed area, which means the area does not have any soft cloth effect. The white area, on the other hand, will be completely influenced by the soft cloth settings, including the mass, stiffness, damping...etc.

As for the areas that are covered with gray, they will be partially influenced by the settings in accordance with the level of the grayness.

If you set a plane with soft cloth physics, it will simply just fall to the ground.

A soft cloth is imported into the scene

Simulation result (falls on the ground)

This is because the soft cloth is influenced by the settings in the Property, Collision and Wind Settings sections.

Apply a gray scale image as its Weight Map. The result will be as shown in the right cell of the table below.

Only the area covered with white will be influenced by the settings in the three sections listed above.

As for the areas that are covered with gray, the influences from the three sections will be multiplied according to the gradient levels.