dforce: Can I set a material to collide with multiple surfaces?

dlm4001

Still reading the documentation ("Start Here thread") and watching videos.

Does dforce handle collisions with multiple surfaces?  Example:  If I have an outfit with mutiple pieces, shirt, chest armor, & cape.  Can I set the cape material to collide with GF8, the shirt, and the chest armor?

Richard Haseltine

A dForce dynamic surface will collide with everything that is set to be Visible to Simulation (which is the default state). You can use Collision Layer to stack dynamic surfaces (higher is further out).

dlm4001

That is great!  Thanks for the answer,

marble

Conversely, is it recommended to make everything else in the scene invisible? I'm thinking of busy scenes with maybe two or three characters and lots of props. Doing so could be time consuming but probably not as time consuming as having to exit the scene and do the simulation in a separate scene, save it and merge it with the original scene (if, indeed, that is possible).

Richard Haseltine

Yes, hiding unneeded stuff in a busy scene is probably a good diea - invisible items will not be used for collisions. You can also set items to be invisible to simulation, which doesn't affect rendering or viewing, so if there's something that will never interact use that option once and continue without any more fiddling (there's also a similar option in Surfaces, which woudl be handy for things like handles on older skirts and dresses).

marble

Richard Haseltine said:

Yes, hiding unneeded stuff in a busy scene is probably a good diea - invisible items will not be used for collisions. You can also set items to be invisible to simulation, which doesn't affect rendering or viewing, so if there's something that will never interact use that option once and continue without any more fiddling (there's also a similar option in Surfaces, which woudl be handy for things like handles on older skirts and dresses).

Thanks Richard. That's a very useful tip.

shiba_toma

"Collision Layer" being where in the menu structure?

Richard Haseltine

shiba_toma said:

"Collision Layer" being where in the menu structure?

It's a Surface property, but although ti can be set per-surace it is applied (as far as I know, unless there's been a chnage) to the whole model - so make sure you use the same value on all surfaces.

shiba_toma

Thanks :) ! I will investigate further.

I feal like "collision layers" would be a great pane to add to the simulation window - a list of items/layer that we can drag-and-drop or otherwise populate so we can see the heirarcy in one place rather than spread acrose multiple items/surfaces.Even if we have to set tem individually, having a pane that collects that daya from all of them and dispalys it as a single list would be a huge help in keeping track that we're setting our shots up correctly.