Ever wanted to animate some curtains blowing in the wind animate some fabric in a scene? This I one way to do it. I used bones for this one. Warning: this one is a little tedious so be prepared to restart the file a couple of times before you get used to working with bones.

First thing I did was made a simple wall and window out of primitives.

Now I am going to make the bottom of the curtain with a spline (use the pen tool).

Okay now you will need to duplicate the spline once you have it where you like it. On the Windows box it's "Ctrl"+"D". On the Mac side it's "command"+"D". Your curtain should look something like this.

Now let's skin all of these spline together.

When it's all skinned it should look something like this.

After this I mirrored it. (I forgot to take a screen shot of mirroring, sorry). Now there are two curtain panels for the window.

Now select each curtain panel separately and convert them to meshes.

Now we get to add the bones. The trick is that the bones need to be all one chain. Pick you bone tool and from the front view start at the top center of the curtain panel and work your way down with about 4 bones. Once you are done with one side then go to the top bone and start there again and attach the next bone to the chain there and work your way down.

Now we get to attach the bones to the curtain. With the pointer tool select the bone chain you made. Now select the edit mode.

Now in the edit mode you will need to use the attach tool to attach the bones to the mesh. Pick a bone in the "Object Properties" dialogue box.

Now select the attach tool in the bones tool set.

With your attach tool selected and the "alt" or "command" key pressed, drag your curser from the highlighted bone to the mesh. YOU MUST HAVE the "alt" or "command" key pressed or only one bone will be attached to the mesh. Now it should look something like this.

Now all we need to do is assign all of the other bones to points in the mesh and set the direction the bones can bend.

Still in the edit mode select the bone tool with the little blue dot by it. When you select it it will highlight all the points that are associated with the bone you have select in the properties window. All you need to do to assign points to a bone is drag the this tool over the points you want associated with that bone. Go through the list of bones in the proprieties window and see what points are assigned to each bone.

Once the movement has been limited on all the bones you can use the rotate tool to move the bones. Make sure you are in the right or left hand view or the rotate tool wont work. All you need to do now is move your marker down the timeline and move your bones to make you curtain blow in the wind.

It should look something like this. Hope you liked this one I know it can be a real pain working with bones but keep it up they are pretty cool once you get the hang of it.