Depth of Options
This product really only does one thing: it simulates moving fabric. However, it does it extremely well, and with a minimal amount of hassle. There are a ton of keyframeable parameters, such as wind speed and direction, weight of the fabric, and light reflexivity. However, these really don’t need any adjustment to create a realistic effect, although I guess it’s nice to know they’re available in case you need to match some background footage, like inserting a flag onto a pre-shot flagpole, or compositing an opening theater curtain onto a shot of a stage.
In the Drape module, you can also choose where the fabric is anchored: pinned to any or all corners, free-falling, or locked to one side of the screen. For example, if you have it pinned to the top left and bottom left corners, it’ll look like a flag billowing in the wind, with the right side flapping around, and the middle of the left side getting pulled inwards. If you have it pinned to the top side, it’ll look like a drape, moving on the bottom, but not at all on the top. If you let it free-fall, it’ll just float around randomly, depending on how you set the wind speed, wind direction, and gravity parameters. You can also set the fabric to look like a piece of melted glass, with your video footage being reflected off of it.
Performance
The plugin performs mostly as expected, although I did see some glitches in the rendering of the fabric. Sometimes, when it overlaps itself it seems to break apart, even when the “self-intersection” setting is checked. This isn’t noticeable at all when played at regular speed, except in the Tableau module, where the fabric gets huge tears all the way down it as if it’s bunched closer together.
It’s also nice that they included various rendering modes, although I didn’t really see any difference between some of them. The “phong” mode looked the best to me, even though it takes a long time to render (about 2 seconds per frame on my AMD XP 3200+ 1GB RAM machine). Unfortunately, you really need to use this hi-res mode to accurately figure out your color and texture settings. But the lower “wire” and “line” modes increased the rendering speed greatly, making them useful for working out the motion characteristics of the fabric.
Value
Did I mention that it only costs $64?! If you’re an indie filmmaker and you ever need some simulated fabric to composite into a shot, be it a flag or curtain or whatever, then this is a no-brainer. I’m pretty sure that if you ever really have a need for this, the price is going to seem trivial; anyone who needs it will probably really need it to fix a shot that they messed up or couldn’t afford to accomplish during shooting. Everyone else will probably just see this as another way to create some cool new background loops for less money than it costs to buy another set of JumpBack DVDs.
Final Comments
If you ever need to create realistic fabric simulations, then Curtains is the plugin for you. It’s cheap, relatively easy to use, and quickly produces great results. Aside from some minor rendering glitches, this is a nice piece of software that does exactly what it claims to do, and does it well.
Ease
of Use
9.0
Depth
of Options
6.0
Performance
7.0
Value
10.0
Overall
Score
8.0
Ryan Graham is the director of Livelihood, a critically acclaimed ultra-low budget zombie comedy. He also runs 37.5 Productions, a post production company specializing in giving a Hollywood sheen to independent films. In his spare time he is the lead guitarist for The Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad.
