Hugely useful and interesting tutorial! I've dabbled a bit and nerfed various settinsg to try and get an idea of what they do. I have it in the back of my mind to give the layer setting a go to see if it means what I think it means!
thanks sapat, Musicplayer, and SimonJM. More to come.
Glad you got some of it to work SereneNight. Did DS start crashing after you loaded a particular item? I've found that if something causes a crash the only option is to delete it and use an alternative. Many things that crash do so very quickly but I've also found items that simulate but at some point stop moving and crash due to some interaction with itself or another object in the scene.
1.One thing I’ve noticed with the clothes draping on furniture is there can be poke through of the furniture (in the image series below, it's the red color of the chair showing through the green shirt). There are several ways to remove or minimize poke through.
a. Make SMALL changes in X, Y, and Z. Small means 0.1 to 0.3 units. For this image, the t-shirt was raised by +0.3 on the Y axis and -0.1 on the X axis. This typically does not remove all the poke through but will take care of much of it. Sometime you can hide most of it on the side opposite from the camera. You don’t need or want to make big changes as it can make the draping look off.
Before with poke through:
After X and Y changes:
b. Change the pose, again by small increments. The clothes have bones that you can bend, twist, or move side-by-side. This is harder than changing XYZ position as its trial and error and you may not find the right combination that helps.
c. a.Counter-intuitively, use Good instead of Best or Better Collision Mode. (I don’t know how often this helps, but with Best you see a sharper crease in the clothing against the chair edges and that’s where poke through most often occurs).
d. Change the Collision Iterations to 10 (with Best Collission Mode). This parameter affects self-collision but also helped with the chair collision, possibly by changing how the shirt interacts with itself.
e. Change the Collision Offset. The default value is 0.2 which gives the poke through shown in the first image of step 9.a. The image below shows Collision Offset set to 0.5 which causes less poke through:
At Collision Offset of 0.75 there is very little poke through but now the t-shirt does not fully hang down. Longer Stabilization Times do not get it to lie flat. See image at right.
At Collision Offset of 1.0, the shirt falls completely off the top of the chair (not shown).
f. If you can’t hide the poke through by doing any of the above, you can add a push modifier. I won’t go into details here as they are covered in another of my tutorials (How to Use a Push Modifier) but push modifiers can be added to an object after it’s been simulated. I used a map value of 0.5 to minimize how much offset was being added. I also painted the least amount of push I could get away with.
Push Modifier weight map I used:
Top View with Push Modifier applied:
Front View without Push Modifier:
Front View with Push Modifier:
As you can see, the poke through on the upper left chair corner is gone and there is little difference in the overall draping.
I was quite successful doing the blanket render. So I progressed to draping clothing. I am a huge fan of using laundry props in scenes and have a big library of premades I use, so your tutorial made me quite happy, so thank you for posting about it. I was successful at that too. I found the outfits and clothing did look better when layed sideways rather than how they load by default
I decided my blanket needed more fine tuning, but studio refused to allow more. I even made a new blanket, but it got funny in someway. It gave me the 'errror perparing' error.
Eventually, I was rather disappointed with the blanket and I deleted it. I wanted more wrinkles than it was going to make.
I am afraid I chose a bed that really only is one surface. So my attempts to apply dforce to its various bits were unsuccessful. I also tried the pillow which came with the bed, but it flew up in the air and distorted itself. So I resigned myself to failure on the bed in question.
I am afraid I chose a bed that really only is one surface. So my attempts to apply dforce to its various bits were unsuccessful. I also tried the pillow which came with the bed, but it flew up in the air and distorted itself. So I resigned myself to failure on the bed in question.
I've seen things fly away too. Strange behavior - antigravity for SciFi scenes???
Not only taking the time to show the results of all your detailed testing but also compiling it into a handy PDF. Much appreciated. I followed your older tut to make draped blankets the old fashioned way and can't wait to try out dForce based on your settings. Thanks again!
I used dforce here. The socks (which came attached), two underwear and blue-knit comforter were all dforced. Sadly, nothing else could be dforced because of crashing.
Serene Night ,Question could you save it as a scene subset ,close DS the reload the scene ,and drape more stuff? or would you have to re-drape everything?
Serene Night ,Question could you save it as a scene subset ,close DS the reload the scene ,and drape more stuff? or would you have to re-drape everything?
I'm not sure. Will attempt this. I have all the laundry props turned off for further dforcing.... So will try adding even more laundry and see whether it will let me. I really wanted to dforce the bed and the pillows but those props didn't work well. I may try further clothing items.
Question could you save it as a scene subset ,close DS the reload the scene ,and drape more stuff? or would you have to re-drape everything?
When you save a scene, it will open as you left it, with any items saved in simulated form opening in simulated form. You can add more items, but to avoid re-simulating existing objects that are finished, you need to go to the Scene pane, select the object, open the Simulation tab, and turn Freeze Simulation to ON for any items you want to preserve. Also, don't hit the Clear button on the Simulation Settings pane as it will reset everything to it's starting shape.
To answer your question, saving as a scene subset did help the bug of me not being able to dforce more items. I successfully added a hat a tie, and a pair o pants and another pair of boxer shorts to the render.
I have a question incase some one has figure this out.
Simulating objects... Right now as a test I wanted to see if I could do the bowling ball on a matress thing. and I am close.
I was able to stop the matress from colapsing by setting density to 0 (it will slowly colapse if the simulation is 2 long), and the object i am droping on it has a density of 1000. if i set the simulation to "good" it actualy kind of works. but anything other then that, the ball plumits right through, then the matress "explodes" when the ball reaches whats under it.
I have messed around with damping and strengths and either it does nothing, or it errors, or explodes. I understand this is not what dforce was created for. I just really want nice "dips" on couches, beds, etc when people are sitting on them, any one try this at all yet?
yeah, I am thinking maybe it will require furnature made specificly for dforce, things like unseen polygons and surfaces inside the furniture to help hold its shape.
I don't know if this works for all pillows but does for the pillows in Modern Room Bedroom.
10. Getting a Figure’s Head to Sink into a Pillow.
When I did the blanket at the beginning, I did not bother with the pillows. The pillows with the Modern Room Bedroom already have a slight depression built in. I also had added a Push Modifier in a previous tutorial and that was still in effect in all the bed images I've shown. In this section I discuss how to simulate these pillows so the figure sinks into them.
a. Here’s what the pillows look like as loaded into Daz Studio:
b. If you simulate with default gravity (+1.0), the pillows flatten out as they collapse like a burst balloon:
c .If you simulate with negative gravity (-1.0), the pillows plump up:
d. To get the pillows to plump when the figure collides with them, use a negative value like -0.5:
Be sure to have the figure’s upper chest, arm and head slightly raised from the mattress, otherwise the simulation will drive the pillow down into the mattress.
e. I thought the pillow didn’t plump up enough just under the figure’s arm pit and arm. You can puff up the pillow a bit more by setting the surface parameter Contraction-Expansion Ratio to 105% (default is 100%). I found at 110% the mesh blew up.
f. You can also add sub-division. It helps give a bit more complexity to the pillow but adds significantly to the simulation time (you can export the pillow with subD on and reimport as an obj to speed things up). Here is the result and you can see there’s not much difference:
g. Using the 105% setting for Contraction-Expansion Ratio and adding back the blanket, here is the finished blanket and pillow combo. If I were to do anything else, I’d add a Push Modifer and paint some slight puffing around the arm:
Simulating objects... Right now as a test I wanted to see if I could do the bowling ball on a mattress thing. and I am close.
I gave it a try and came up with this, using the same negative gravity effect I used on the pillow. This was a primitive cube on a plane with a primitive sphere embedded in it. I've just started to look at the weight maps which could help control what parts of the mattress expand. Only the cube has a dForce modifier on it.
This one is even better. I raised the sphere compared to the previous version. Got those nice diagonal pulls you would find from something heavy on something soft. Gravity was -0.1
The ball doesn't have any dForce modifier on it, only the cube (mattress) does. The negative gravity causes the mattress mesh to expand out instead of collapsing in on itself, so it's wrapping itself around the sphere when they collide. The negative gravity doesn't appear to act like antigravity in that objects don't fly away (although I've seen clothing fly off even with positive gravity!).
Can Simulations be continued? I had an idea, that was harder to do then I thought, basicly i turned a plane into a scarf/towel.
at first I tried using wind, that didn't work, it tried to push it through the neck then it exploded. then i thought, well maybe i lay down and have gravity do it, that doesnt work because you cant continue (that i know of) a simulation.
what I ended up doing was having it slide down another plane. came out nice, but it would be nice to either continue a simulation, or save as a morph and resimulate.
Comments
Hugely useful and interesting tutorial! I've dabbled a bit and nerfed various settinsg to try and get an idea of what they do. I have it in the back of my mind to give the layer setting a go to see if it means what I think it means!
thanks sapat, Musicplayer, and SimonJM. More to come.
Glad you got some of it to work SereneNight. Did DS start crashing after you loaded a particular item? I've found that if something causes a crash the only option is to delete it and use an alternative. Many things that crash do so very quickly but I've also found items that simulate but at some point stop moving and crash due to some interaction with itself or another object in the scene.
9. Various Methods to Correct Poke Through.
1.One thing I’ve noticed with the clothes draping on furniture is there can be poke through of the furniture (in the image series below, it's the red color of the chair showing through the green shirt). There are several ways to remove or minimize poke through.
a. Make SMALL changes in X, Y, and Z. Small means 0.1 to 0.3 units. For this image, the t-shirt was raised by +0.3 on the Y axis and -0.1 on the X axis. This typically does not remove all the poke through but will take care of much of it. Sometime you can hide most of it on the side opposite from the camera. You don’t need or want to make big changes as it can make the draping look off.
Before with poke through:
After X and Y changes:
b. Change the pose, again by small increments. The clothes have bones that you can bend, twist, or move side-by-side. This is harder than changing XYZ position as its trial and error and you may not find the right combination that helps.
c. a.Counter-intuitively, use Good instead of Best or Better Collision Mode. (I don’t know how often this helps, but with Best you see a sharper crease in the clothing against the chair edges and that’s where poke through most often occurs).
d. Change the Collision Iterations to 10 (with Best Collission Mode). This parameter affects self-collision but also helped with the chair collision, possibly by changing how the shirt interacts with itself.
e. Change the Collision Offset. The default value is 0.2 which gives the poke through shown in the first image of step 9.a. The image below shows Collision Offset set to 0.5 which causes less poke through:
At Collision Offset of 0.75 there is very little poke through but now the t-shirt does not fully hang down. Longer Stabilization Times do not get it to lie flat. See image at right.
At Collision Offset of 1.0, the shirt falls completely off the top of the chair (not shown).
f. If you can’t hide the poke through by doing any of the above, you can add a push modifier. I won’t go into details here as they are covered in another of my tutorials (How to Use a Push Modifier) but push modifiers can be added to an object after it’s been simulated. I used a map value of 0.5 to minimize how much offset was being added. I also painted the least amount of push I could get away with.
Push Modifier weight map I used:
Top View with Push Modifier applied:
Front View without Push Modifier:
Front View with Push Modifier:
As you can see, the poke through on the upper left chair corner is gone and there is little difference in the overall draping.
I was quite successful doing the blanket render. So I progressed to draping clothing. I am a huge fan of using laundry props in scenes and have a big library of premades I use, so your tutorial made me quite happy, so thank you for posting about it. I was successful at that too. I found the outfits and clothing did look better when layed sideways rather than how they load by default
I decided my blanket needed more fine tuning, but studio refused to allow more. I even made a new blanket, but it got funny in someway. It gave me the 'errror perparing' error.
Eventually, I was rather disappointed with the blanket and I deleted it. I wanted more wrinkles than it was going to make.
I am afraid I chose a bed that really only is one surface. So my attempts to apply dforce to its various bits were unsuccessful. I also tried the pillow which came with the bed, but it flew up in the air and distorted itself. So I resigned myself to failure on the bed in question.
I've seen things fly away too. Strange behavior - antigravity for SciFi scenes???
This is great stuff !
Not only taking the time to show the results of all your detailed testing but also compiling it into a handy PDF. Much appreciated. I followed your older tut to make draped blankets the old fashioned way and can't wait to try out dForce based on your settings. Thanks again!
I used dforce here. The socks (which came attached), two underwear and blue-knit comforter were all dforced. Sadly, nothing else could be dforced because of crashing.
Serene Night ,Question could you save it as a scene subset ,close DS the reload the scene ,and drape more stuff? or would you have to re-drape everything?
Looks good! thanks for showing us
I'm not sure. Will attempt this. I have all the laundry props turned off for further dforcing.... So will try adding even more laundry and see whether it will let me. I really wanted to dforce the bed and the pillows but those props didn't work well. I may try further clothing items.
This is absolutely AWESOME!!!! Thank you so much!
Scott
When you save a scene, it will open as you left it, with any items saved in simulated form opening in simulated form. You can add more items, but to avoid re-simulating existing objects that are finished, you need to go to the Scene pane, select the object, open the Simulation tab, and turn Freeze Simulation to ON for any items you want to preserve. Also, don't hit the Clear button on the Simulation Settings pane as it will reset everything to it's starting shape.
To answer your question, saving as a scene subset did help the bug of me not being able to dforce more items. I successfully added a hat a tie, and a pair o pants and another pair of boxer shorts to the render.
Cool
Thanks for the suggestion! =-) Now I know what to do if the scene gets haywire.
Thanks for all these, this has been helpful!
I have a question incase some one has figure this out.
Simulating objects... Right now as a test I wanted to see if I could do the bowling ball on a matress thing. and I am close.
I was able to stop the matress from colapsing by setting density to 0 (it will slowly colapse if the simulation is 2 long), and the object i am droping on it has a density of 1000. if i set the simulation to "good" it actualy kind of works. but anything other then that, the ball plumits right through, then the matress "explodes" when the ball reaches whats under it.
I have messed around with damping and strengths and either it does nothing, or it errors, or explodes. I understand this is not what dforce was created for. I just really want nice "dips" on couches, beds, etc when people are sitting on them, any one try this at all yet?
I am hoping for some dforce designed furniture to make this happen. So far I’ve had no luck with furniture at all but I haven’t tried much yet.
yeah, I am thinking maybe it will require furnature made specificly for dforce, things like unseen polygons and surfaces inside the furniture to help hold its shape.
I think if a cushion/pillow and mattress product was created you'd really cover most of the basics.
I don't know if this works for all pillows but does for the pillows in Modern Room Bedroom.
10. Getting a Figure’s Head to Sink into a Pillow.
When I did the blanket at the beginning, I did not bother with the pillows. The pillows with the Modern Room Bedroom already have a slight depression built in. I also had added a Push Modifier in a previous tutorial and that was still in effect in all the bed images I've shown. In this section I discuss how to simulate these pillows so the figure sinks into them.
a. Here’s what the pillows look like as loaded into Daz Studio:
b. If you simulate with default gravity (+1.0), the pillows flatten out as they collapse like a burst balloon:
c .If you simulate with negative gravity (-1.0), the pillows plump up:
d. To get the pillows to plump when the figure collides with them, use a negative value like -0.5:
Be sure to have the figure’s upper chest, arm and head slightly raised from the mattress, otherwise the simulation will drive the pillow down into the mattress.
e. I thought the pillow didn’t plump up enough just under the figure’s arm pit and arm. You can puff up the pillow a bit more by setting the surface parameter Contraction-Expansion Ratio to 105% (default is 100%). I found at 110% the mesh blew up.
f. You can also add sub-division. It helps give a bit more complexity to the pillow but adds significantly to the simulation time (you can export the pillow with subD on and reimport as an obj to speed things up). Here is the result and you can see there’s not much difference:
g. Using the 105% setting for Contraction-Expansion Ratio and adding back the blanket, here is the finished blanket and pillow combo. If I were to do anything else, I’d add a Push Modifer and paint some slight puffing around the arm:
Neat! I like the pillow effect! LOOKS great.
Thanks! I'm a little surprised the negative gravity didn't make it fly up from the mattress but these at least stayed attached.
I gave it a try and came up with this, using the same negative gravity effect I used on the pillow. This was a primitive cube on a plane with a primitive sphere embedded in it. I've just started to look at the weight maps which could help control what parts of the mattress expand. Only the cube has a dForce modifier on it.
That looks good. It would be good for a footstool too.
This one is even better. I raised the sphere compared to the previous version. Got those nice diagonal pulls you would find from something heavy on something soft. Gravity was -0.1
nice. thats about what I got if i used the "good" collision and 0 density.
how does the negative gravity work? wouldn't the ball fly up instead of down?
The ball doesn't have any dForce modifier on it, only the cube (mattress) does. The negative gravity causes the mattress mesh to expand out instead of collapsing in on itself, so it's wrapping itself around the sphere when they collide. The negative gravity doesn't appear to act like antigravity in that objects don't fly away (although I've seen clothing fly off even with positive gravity!).
Can Simulations be continued? I had an idea, that was harder to do then I thought, basicly i turned a plane into a scarf/towel.
at first I tried using wind, that didn't work, it tried to push it through the neck then it exploded. then i thought, well maybe i lay down and have gravity do it, that doesnt work because you cant continue (that i know of) a simulation.
what I ended up doing was having it slide down another plane. came out nice, but it would be nice to either continue a simulation, or save as a morph and resimulate.
ok, so your not using the "simulation" to bring the ball down, your animating it. makes since.
their is actualy a nice little bounce when you simulate it.
I did another "bed" test.