A bit of experimenting outside the box

Now the room is starting to look a little more lived in with all the books, candles and glass containers, how to make it that bit more lived in? well he needs to clean the place right? all that stuff doesnt stay sterile by itself, and im sure the experiments arent all safe enough to hold in your hands, so rags are needed, it would be the final touch on my objects, plus im a wee bit eager to start the dark world of 3D simulation/animation etc.

Theres a few ways to do this i found, but the way i did it was the easiest by far, so yeah im a slacker, and i likely did it wrong, but it was a whim and experiment that worked out in my favor.
I created a simple plane. and added a cloth modifier, played about with the settings, mainly the active/inactive/collision options.
I ended up choosing active cloth, and made it cotton, however i choose differently the first few times just to see how 3D Max would react, i highly recommend playing about with these options, its quite funny if you are as easily amused as me.
I then added an object, the table to be exact (originally i didnt add the table and the cloth decided it was a ghost and could float not just through the table but through the floor alos, so yeah, making a collision object is important.
Once the table was added and made into a collision object it was all very simple, thread count and material wise, the only thing tht took time was rendering out the cloth, every time i pressed play it took forever to get to 100 frames so i could see the end result, and it was quite annoying since i had to move it several times before i got the right crumpled and hanging off the table end result, which means i had to sit and watch it render several times, as interesting as watching grass grow i must say.

regardles, i highly recommend adding a little something to your own projects environment, and i will defiantly try to make a point in animating some objects of a scene to get them to fall naturally. Like the books i couldve made the cloth and set it in place manually but the finished result wouldnt have looked as professional. I think it adds to the other objects and makes the scene look much more natural, hard to believe such a little characteristic can change a room so much but it can.