Does dforce suck?
Illidanstorm
Posts: 655
in The Commons
While I'm happy about dforce, it feels like a beta feature compared to other simulating solutions like the one in marvelous designer.
It is rather slow (even with a 2080 ti) and the results are often unpredictable, like things exploding into weird shapes.
Is it planned to improve dforce?
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Daz seem to have put it to one side and forgotten about it. The "perparing" typo is a good indication of their interest in it.
I think personally, given it's included in a free app is amazing and some thing I would have loved back when I was getting into the hobby. I'm sure development will continue and it will become more efficient, but it's all a matter of investment and resources. Only Daz know the roadmap, but I think it's safe to assume that yes, plans are there to continue to improve dForce as and when the resources allow.
For clarity, that's me speaking as an outsider, I'm not on the dev team.
....
I completely agree. After all, would you rather not have dForce at all?
and here I was expecting a thread about how to make it suck like a vacuum
as well as blow
Does the first iteration of a feature included in a free program work as well as 8th version of a commercial program based on an even more expansive solution aimed at the fashion industry? No, but is that really surprising? That doesn't mean that it sucks, or that it won't be improved later....
I do wish it worked a little better. It's always a disappointment when an old item that seemed "dForcable" explodes.
But then I remember that the whole thing is for free, and wonky dForce is still better than no dForce.
And it does work on several older items, not to mention all the new stuff that are actually made for dForce.
Then use marvelous designer. Seriously, there are many more apps on the market that do many things better than DS, so you have options.
There is always the dynamic option, I use it still as much as dforce.
If I look at all the things you can already do with dForce, and the ongoing thread about dForce solutions, I think it's not that bad. Besides, Marvelous Designer simulation works within very constricted limitations of how the mesh is set up, and other issues that regularly drive dForce simulations canoodle. Sure, improvements are always welcome, but I'm glad that it's running pretty stable in the 4.11 BETA that I'm using.
dforce works great for me so far but I've been only playing with it for a short while. It does take some time to finish if used in an already heavy scene.
If I know this is going to be a problem then I simulate in an empty scene and save/import/merge it. Does anyone else do this?
The public beta for DS 4.11 has a number of improvements to dForce over DS 4.10 Release. There are a significant number of other changes as well. The private build, which will be part of the next beta, (there have been four public betas, so far, for 4.11,) is currently sitting at 4.11.0.285. While they haven't made any listed changes to dForce since 4.11.0.221, there's no way for us to know how much of the work since then is necessary for future work on dForce.
@Hylas, While many of us have had varying success with older content and dForce, Daz makes no promises about content that isn't dForce Compliant.
@fred9803, You need to hide anything in the scene that isn't affecting the item being simulated. Are you familiar with groups? I like to put scene objects in groups like "Set", "Sydney" (or whatever the character's name is,) and so on. It's a lot faster to hide sections of the scene when it's divided into relevant groups.
a free ap ? my content is nearing 400 items not including the 100s of poser items i use in it and scores of items from renderosity- i would not consider daz free
Yeh I group all the time. But if the slowness issue is related to scene volume taxing GPU, then hiding elements won't affect overall GPU demand because the textures and objects are already loaded into GPU memory. Removing scene elements benefits render times but it won't reduce total GPU demand. And........... I may be completely wrong about all this as I'm only working on intuition.
But if you had bought an alternative program yu would still have needed to buy content I would hate to try working out how much I have spent on content from here and other stores and I don't use DS, do use three Commercial programs,
I love to make it do things it's not supposed to do, draping dresses is boring
I'd love a dStroy tool
What L'Adair says surely helps but I'm with you there, its much faster to have a good result, and if it explodes its not the whole scene gone awry. plus one might have a good use of the saved item later on
If an item explodes it may be due to the way the msh was built, but one thing to try is increasing the number of iterations - that will give the simulation more time to diffuse the energy geenrated by flexing the "springs" in a more controlled manner. That is aprticularly true if there's a big difference between start pose and final, as that requires more movement in each frame of the simulation and so puts more energy into the cloth.
i was with poser for years but look who won
Good morning, Michael. By "dynamic option," do you mean Optitex, Poser dynamic, or something else?
Hi L'Adair, when you put items in groups, are you able to hide the RGB-coloured marker so it won't show up in Iray view mode?
dForce works at least as well as stuff I've spent a bunch of money on, and it's free. It doesn't suck.
This is a loaded question. Yes it sucks sometimes when things don't work out as planned (i.e. the outfit explodes, or pours off of the model like paint). Yes it sucks because there's a learning curve to it.
On the other hand - it doesn't suck because it's free (I'm broke, so free is my first favorite 'F' word followed closely by Food LOL) and it's a building block to a lot of cool possibilities that are being developed (like dForce hair .. which IMHO, is going to really add some realism to our artwork). Plus there are a TON of tutorials and dforce pioneers who'll be happy to answer questions or offer tutorials on how they achieved a particular outcome.
OH .. and it doesn't suck because a lot of the dforce outfits already come with settings you can pre-load, so it's very close to the auto conform, load and "TADA!" we're use to with content!
On one hand, I agree that it's a free program and thus we should be happy when we get what we've paid for.
On the other hand, it's not really in Daz's interest to degrade their brand by presenting software with half finished features. Half finished features are really best offered in software versions clearly labeled as beta.
It’s okay. Dforce clothing doesn’t look as good as conforming to me for menswear because it lacks thicknessand details. It also can take time to simulate and the results are difficult to predict. If I simulate a dforce ready outfit and it takes 20 minutes I really don’t want to error out or shrink wrap the chest in weird ways, because I still need to render it, and the added time to simulate is time I can’t use my machine,
that says I think it’s useful for props like discarded clothing I just think for outfits it’s not there yet.
I would like to know more about dForce. I've played with it, but it's about 50/50 if it works or not. I don't understand the settings and I know absolutely nothing about the animatioin timeline, so I usually just push the Simulate button and see what happens. Often legs will poke through the clothing if they're sitting down. I really like the whole idea of making clothing and other things drap realistically, but I'm a total airhead about how it works. I think, if I knew more about it, it's a great feature, and especially since it's free.
Didn't mean to imply that they did. I just brought up using dForce on older content because that's where dForce frustrates me most often.
melanie: My advice is to start with a dForce-compatible item, so you can focus on just how dForce works generally when everything should be functioning properly.
Then you can tweak settings, and then eventually learn more detail about what meshes do to the simulation.
I would also recommend checking this thread, where there are a lot of examples of how to use dForce for various things: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/208141/how-to-use-dforce-creating-a-blanket-draping-clothes-on-furniture-and-much-more-commercial/p1
For a tool that's designed to simulate cloth created by a wide variety of content creators some of which was created years before cloth simulation was even a consideration, I think it does pretty well. There could be some improvements sure. Like I would love it if it could examine the geometry of an item and make some recommendations for simulation settings (iterations, stabilizing time, etc.). But most of the time when it has issues for me I can find why and resolve them. And maybe it could detect when the explosion happens and help us figure out why? Like it would know what collisions were running or something when the vertices suddenly went all wonky?