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There's actually a bit of truth in this — remember, when dForce was first introduced, we were told this was only the first run of feature sets, and there was a lot more in the planning stage to be introduced in later updates. Can't remember everything that was mentioned, but one I'm looking forward to is proper dynamic hair (currently dForcing normal conforming hair models works on a hit or miss basis... with the misses outnumbering the hits).
Could it use more features: Yes.
The beta tracker details what has been added; I forget the link.
But it works great on items designed for it; a little care and it works great on items not designed for it.
... Sometimes, sadly, getting it to work on an item can be frustrating. That is because said item wasn't modelled with dynamics in mind.
It's a tool; it takes practice and patience to learn how to use.
I haven't had any luck applying dForce to any non-dForce items, but for long dresses designed for dForce, it makes all the difference in the world. You'll never want to go back to the 'tube' bending of non-dForce dresses once you've seen a dForce one, even with the default settings.
I think I misunderstood your comment. I thought you were saying it takes some time to finish simulating "if used in an already heavy scene." As for rendering, it shouldn't make any difference to the length of the render whether an object is simulated or not. At least, that has been my experience.
I was referring to hiding things not used during dForce Simulation. I don't simulate in Nvidia Iray draw mode. For this use, groups work just fine.
However, I have had issues with items in hidden groups not showing in the viewport except when in Nvidia Iray draw mode. When that is the case, I have to unhide the group, hide the individual items in the group, and then hide the group again. I'd love it if Daz could fix that behavior.
LOL… I can so relate to that!
I also have a dForce page, though not as innovative as RGcincy's. Or as extensive. I do think it may help you get a handle on dForce though. I was going to recommend it along with Rich's thread, (but Leana beat me to that link.) Here's my dForce, dWeight and dWardrobe thread.
You don't have to hide them, you can keep them visible but tell dForce to ignore them for purposes of calculation. This is controlled by the property Visible in Simulation under Simulation under Display. Probably the biggest mistake DAZ made in the implementation of dForce is having it On by default for all objects and requiring the user to manually turn items off for simulation (the opposite of every other cloth simulation I have seen from other software). To set everything in the scene to off you can select all scene items, click on All in the Properties, in the filter type in Simulation, and flip the setting to Off. Then manually set just the items you want as dForce items to On. I believe there is a freebie script that does this as well. I find this a better approach than the eyeball so you can check to see if the dForced items are clipping through non-interesting items as well as see the whole composition without having to toggle the eye on and off all the time.
It doesn't suck. It is great at some things, not great at others.
For example, I'll compare it to the Virtual Worlds Dynamic plugin available at that other place. When you sim, it sends over a duplicate of the mesh and triangulates it (yet somehow keeps UVs) and then sims it. It has many cool features that dForce lacks (for exmaple, the ability to grab the garment during the sim to pull it away from areas it was poking through or where it's bunching up, that sort of thing) BUT what you get back is a static OBJ. It's not longer conforming and it no longer has a quad topology. dForce lets you keep the same mesh, sim it, repose, sim again, etc. The both crash occasionally, maybe a little more with dForce now but never really studied it. But dForce is free and VWD and Marvelous Designer aren't.
When dForce first came out, I stuck with VWD most of the time but slowly I begain to play with dFoce because it's so convenient. When you learn things like weight maps, it gets more useful because then you can simulate just parts of an object, like the skirt of a dress or a single lock of hair. Experiment, use what works for you.
Regarding the mentioned "other dynamic options," does anyone have experience with Dynamic Clothing Control and/or VWD Cloth and Hair? How does speed compare between those various options and dForce?
There is so much to learn in general, it'd be helpful to know what things to avoid digging into when there are quicker alternatives available. Thanks!!
... Well, maybe grinch2901's comment above partially answers that.
Are you sure the gpu is set up right for dforce? How long are you getting on simluations? i got a 1060, and some I have done take only around 5 minutes or so. I have had one that took around 10 minutes. I get the explosions, that happens sometimes.
I've used VWD and Optitex Dynamic stuff (and spent a bunch of money!)
Pros/cons:
VWD has tweaking during sim, which is nice. On the other hand, you essentially get pulled into a separate window/space to do the simming; if you want to have clothing interact with other stuff, you have to explicitly add it to the sim. You can't (last I used it) save settings, so often I would have to go through and set a bunch of stuff each time if the sim went badly. Also, the settings didn't make sense to me so there's a bit of a learning curve. The fact that it saves stuff as a new object is one of those good/bad things; it does make it easier to sim further, like have some other objects interact sometimes and other objects interact later, but then the object is fixed and will not follow the figure.
VWD is a little bit more forgiving of body intersections than dForce is. Installing VWD is a little more involved than using dForce (which is easiest, since it's part of Daz Studio) or Optitex (which is an official plugin you can fairly easily use).
Optitex is cool because it has a nice library of dynamic outfits... but you can ONLY use specifically optitex enabled outfits. That's one of my biggest annoyances with it. It's a bit sensitive to mesh density, and you can easily yell at your screen because clothing just fell through the floor. And fingers, oh dear lord, Optitex dynamic really can't deal with fingers. The sim also feels slower than the other options. That said, the parameters all make some sort of sense. Also there are presets specific to various materials (though mesh design will always have a big impact).
dForce, I _love_ the ability to save information on sim as part of a surface. This makes it so much more integrated into Daz Studio than the other two and really speeds up managing a sim. The explosions thing happens a bit more than similar explosions in VWD, but overall I would say that my experience is that 'problem sims' are not noticeably more frequent in any of the three programs. I would say dForce and VWD are faster than Optitex. The parameters in dForce are a little more confusing/unclear than Optitex, but more clear than VWD. dForce is also _free_, which is a big advantage over the other two systems.
Personally, the only things that I mildly dislike about dForce is lack of tweaking during sim, and ability to sim in series rather than every sim starting over. That said, the advantages are HUGE.
If you look at this thread https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/304546/coming-soon-dforce-magnet-commercial, you will see a new product is coming, that should make dragging stuff around a bit easier. Maybe not like VWD, but still more convienent than some other methods.
dforce is the best thing to happen to DS in years. But it definitely needs work. What we really need is a way to weld vertices inside of DS. A great example is this buttondown shirt that has an "open" modifier where all the buttons are undone. I immediately thought this would be perfect for dforce so I weight mapped it and tried it out.
Apparently the button hole strip is only attached at the ends so it sags really weirdly.
Dforce is pretty good when it works - between some minor Blender work and Dforce, I've been able to get a lot of older clothing resources looking pretty fantastic on newer figures, particularly stuff where auto-fit and auto-follow would normally crumple up the fabric unrealistically. (For example, using G2 resources on some of RawArt's various aliens and creatures, where the extreme morphs can distort clothing).
The downside of course is when it explodes. A particularly annoying recent example was when I tried to use it to make a headphone cable hang/lie realistically in order to save time over trying to perfectly pose the entire chain manually - put it in about the right place, simulate, done... unfortunately, it persistently resulted in a trampoline effect where the cable dropped down, then slingshotted off into orbit; Trying to turn up the damping settings to avoid that just caused crashes. Eventually, a long time had to be spent posing it manually.
I think dforce is pretty awesome. It's the lack of an actual manual explaining all the parameters that makes it feel beta to me.
moot point for me since my gcard doesn't do openCL anyway (nor is it actually even taken notice of at all by DS, as i figured out recently, yay :/ ) -
but while i would also be slightly frustrated to have items i'd like to drape fly all over the place in unsightly bunches of polygons, i would really love a dStroy tool too! i reckon i had that kinda feature in my short use of.. what was it, cine4D or 3ds max... splittering windows ftw! ^^
Thanks Oso3D. In the interest of time, it looks like starting with dForce is the smartest way to go, for me at least. DForce Master should help, as well, I think. Thanks very much for your perspective!
I use VWD; it is great, and has features I hope come to Studio. For example, being able to grab the cloth as it's draping with the mouse and adjust it is a time-saver. The downside is exporting and importing, but it deals very well with all meshes; it does take practice to use.
On a more serious note, as others have said, very useful but can be improved:) I've had it do everything from wrecking cities to making fit morphs for old clothing items
I might have to retract my previous assumption that simulation (not rendering) is slowed by existing GPU load.
I just did a simple simulation is a scene had lots of other stuff in it and it didn't appear to be much slower than if I had done it in an empty scene. I had assumed that if your GPU was alread loaded with lots of textures and stuff then it would simulate slower. But that doesn't appear to be the case.
And thank you RobotHeadArt for the tip about turning off simultion per object. I didn't now that.
you can turn it off on bones too like all your fingers and toes
And shader surfaces too;
i woud never have thought of using dforce on anything like a building, lmao... looking forward to a new system where i can
and, incidentally, also use it for clothes ^^
dForce is brilliant when it works. Then again, I don't use it very often (if at all).
It could be worse. Daz could've brought back and reinforced DRM tech... ;)
when a poster starts a thread then never returns to clarify exactly what sucks it's hard to tell if its a user error or dforce engine shortfall.
Mine have all proven to be user error, it's actually very powerful and stable if used right, free documentation could be better but that could be said for all documentation
DForce is perfect and it always goes perfectly, it never ever makes any mistakes, because it's perfect in its perfection:
Ah yes, things are either perfect, or useless, and there is no in between. Thanks for the reminder.
This thread has gotten me wondering about using a wind node with negative values, may have to try that out this weekend. Don't suppose anyone else has already tried it?
I am very happy with dForce and get great results and here is to hoping it will get even better.
And do not forget , this is all free :)
Pet
Laughing. Yes, I tried it on a character. "Help me, I'm melting!"
"Car Ranger" exploded like pop-corn. : /
hopefully it will suck
7.5 on the richter:D Actually should have done this properly, but was a bit impatient, tried simulating the whole US2 in one session... may have another go at it later...
also thinking Jumbo Jet crash site
Poor thing!
Cars are fun:)
Occationally I use it as supposed to:)
Uh, if this was an answer to my post, then something got lost between my keybord and your screen. I enjoy DForce a lot! I posted the picture because I thought it was funny, and we were talking before about using DForce on older items and it blowing up in our faces.