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I got a single object made of multiple cubes with a cloth modifier applied. My goal is to delay freefall for every cube so for an example:

Green cube freefall will start at 30th frame. Pink cube freefall will start at 60th frame. Blue cube freefall will start at 90th frame. Yellow cube freefall will start at 120th frame.

Optionally, is it possible to change the location of a cube right before freefall? Example, blue cube will start freefall from the (approximate) location of the green one.

Is armature modifier the right direction, if yes I will invest more time into learning it.

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You can control when they fall by controlling pinning. You can animate pinning through the use of vertex group modifiers.

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  1. Create five vertex groups on the simulation mesh. Assign all verts at weight 0.0 to "pinning". Assign appropriate verts at 1.0 to groups "blue", "pink", "green", "yellow".

  2. Nominate "pinning" as your pinning group for your cloth physics.

  3. For each color group, create a vertex weight edit modifier, with a custom curve, where you set the curve to just be a straight line at the bottom of the curve, to remove all verts from that group. Then animate the global influence of each of these modifiers to 0 (when you want the group pinned) or to 1 (when you want the group unpinned.) There are probably other ways to do this, this is just what I do.

  4. For each color group, create a vertex weight mix modifier that adds the color to "pinning" group.

  5. Make sure your cloth modifier is being run at the bottom of this stack.

I'm sure you could do this with only the vertex weight mix modifiers, but I think the vertex weight edit modifiers demonstrate more of what can be done for further problems.

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  • $\begingroup$ This is it, thank you! Using only vertex weight mix modifiers is enough for my project. Not sure what advantage I get by using vertex weight edit too. $\endgroup$
    – Boris
    Jan 5, 2022 at 10:27
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first select your cube, TAB -> edit mode -> A (select all) -> P -> Loose parts.

Then change the start simulation frame for each cube as you want.

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Result:

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  • $\begingroup$ (Had to delete my first comment on this) At first I thought that was the solution but then I realized it made all the cubes as separate objects. I need to have all them as one object because the cloth modifier acts differently with separate objects and a single object. $\endgroup$
    – Boris
    Jan 4, 2022 at 17:29
  • $\begingroup$ Compare the green cube deformation in both animations for the difference. $\endgroup$
    – Boris
    Jan 4, 2022 at 17:40
  • $\begingroup$ @Boris Are they deforming different because they are separate objects or because the timing of falling and bumping into each other is different...? I mean, in the first animation the green one gets more squashed by the blue one because it's on the ground, while in the second animation it's back in the air... $\endgroup$
    – Gordon Brinkmann
    Jan 4, 2022 at 18:01
  • $\begingroup$ @Gordon Brinkmann In the case with separate objects, the green cube is not affected by the blue one at all. More details - blender.stackexchange.com/questions/248942/… $\endgroup$
    – Boris
    Jan 4, 2022 at 18:32
  • $\begingroup$ @Boris I'm sorry, I was thinking of soft body physics anyway, my mistake. $\endgroup$
    – Gordon Brinkmann
    Jan 5, 2022 at 7:01

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