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On windows 10 it's pretty easy.
Open the start menu and type "About your PC" then press enter. This will show you what CPU is installed and how fast it is.
...software by subscription is the rub as in the end it ends up costing more than a perpetual licence over the years. The perpetual Personal licence for ver. 9 was 490$, the subscription licence for ver. 10 only offers a month by month plan at the price of 39$ which comes to 468$ for just one year. So the old perpetual licence was only 32$ more and if I would skip an upgrade or two, Clo used to give fairly nice discounts for upgrading that were applicable to the previous 2 - 3 versions. (upgrading every say three years given the old discounts, which I believe were something like 33 or 40%, made it a lot less expensive per year than the current subscription price). The bare minimum requirements also warn of possible instabilities and inconsistencies using less than the recommended hardware/OS.
I was all fired up for Octane 4 until they dumped the perpetual licence model and went subscription as well, and there you need to be online during work and render sessions (only the Enterprise version allows for working while offline via a special dongle that costs extra). During my work sessions I go offline as I put my AV into silent mode to conserve processing resources (older hardware).
Earlier, I asserted that it wasn't so much that dForce sucks, but rather Daz Studio's modeling tools that suck. Before, it was the boolean modifier that allowed dForce to do its job, and just today it was proportional editing, which DS users will recognize as the Magnet Tool, or something similar.
I had a character wearing a long gown, and I wanted her sitting Indian style. But of course, when I simulated from an A pose transitioning to the sitting pose, the fabric couldn't stretch enough, so her knees pushed through the fabric of the dress, and the dress exploded.
It took literally 5 seconds to find the edge loop of the dress around where her knees were, select it with alt-LMB, o for proportional editing, scale it out with S shift-Z, and two tries to see how much I needed to expand the dress so her knees didn't penetrate. Then it sim'ed perfectly. Here it is in Blender.
Blender and Daz Studio were made for each other.
..very nice. Was that rendered in Blender or Daz?
Thank you. It's Blender Cycles.
...ah, not into converting materials over, particularly with a node based system as it reminds me of a plate of spaghetti that was dropped on the floor (dyslexic here with "old eyes" that makes it very difficult to follow all the connecting "wires").
Diffeomorphic has gotten so good that I rarely have to open the node editor. I think I only opened it once to add some SSS to the cheese.
...so does it preserve custom morphs and skins made with vendor resoruce content? I know that some morphs and skins do not carry over into Carrara. For example my Leela character looked rather different in Carrara than in Daz.
I wrote Sagan to utilize Diffeo's excellent material conversion, so Iray materials are converted quite well, particularly skin, and because it's Alembic, morphs look exactly the same as they do in Daz Studio.
...I tend to use Zev0's Skin Builder3 & 8 a lot as well as Slosh's UHT2 hair shader utility which is why I am concerned about how what I create with it would translate over. Too many G3 skins seem to appear too orange and even supposedly fair skinned characters tend to be darker than they should. Adjusting the lighting or tonemapping in the Iray render settings doesn't really help as it also affects the lighting for the rest of the scene.
Never liked Deforce. Its okay for working on getting characters to sit with certain clothing. But Marvelous Designer still makes it easier to drape clothes within seconds. Not 10 min. Deforce is even slower simulating clothes with memorized pose on. It only works slightly faster with it turned off. But the minute you turn on memorized pose, I swear it takes up to 16 minutes or longer just to simulate anything. And my GPU is a 3060
dForce isn't a fluid simulation engine.
I use it with Poser products all the time
some I need to weld the obj found in geometries in Ultimate Unwrap 3D because that preserves the UV mapping
but otherwise most work better for me than the Genesis 3 and 8 stuff!!
Marvelous Designer is built from the ground up for simulating cloth and nothing else, so it's no wonder that it works better.
...just wish they hadn't gone subscription.
Unfortunately, MD is one of the apps for which there is simply nothing else even close. I don't like the subscription model, but I'd rather pay it than go without it.
I have Marvelous Designer 8 (pre-subscription version) sitting idle on my Desktop PC and a bunch of paid-for tutorials which are also resting undistrubed. I do know that MD will simulate in a fraction of the time takes dForce but I wonder about the faff of getting the posed character out of DAZ Studio and into MD and then back again. So far I have not bothered with that faff but I have to say that I have a really powerful GPU (RTX 3090) which seems to have made minimal difference to the simulation time of dForce whereas MD8, using only CPU, is orders of magnitude quicker.
I had a chat with an artist on DevArt who is a Poser user who uses MD7 to drape his clothing for every scene (he, like me, creates stories in a series of scenes). He maintains that it is quicker and more accurate to do it in MD. I'm not so sure, given all the back-and-forth, whether it is worth the effort in DAZ Studio. Perhaps someone can suggest an expidited workflow because I'm probably not using the most efficient method in my trial runs.
By the way, a typical drape time for me is about 6 minutes, not 16, but that is still painfully slow.
Marble you have a faster machine with more memory than I. I have a 2070 super I also have a huge library of D force items all basically useless.
The time it takes to simulate and then the inevitable explosions. Has **#@! me off.
20 minutes it has taken with some simulations only to crash and burn in Daz .
Yet I can have a genesis 8 character in MD. Import a pose morph, drape, rearrange a garment and import it back into daz before daz has hardly got off the starting block !!
I really had high hopes for Dforce as poser did a half-decent job of draping what little dynamic cloth there was back in the day.
Marble go for it I have used poser for and age, late 90s and since iray was introduced Daz , I had MD before Deforce and let my MD licence laps thinking that Dforce word be a game-changer for me. But alas no and have bought a new MD subscription :( and slowly learning how to get the best out MD . Plus now you can use Adobe substance painter in MD. Painter was a present for my 65th birthday.
I have been so used to the daz universe and the ease of its use, Then there is the money I have spent I have been reluctant like a druggy to leave daz comfort zone .
So to reiterate Marble dust off your training vids and open up MD try a couple of simple garments and I think you just surprise yourself on the ease of simple garment making.
Thanks for your advice and yes, I do feel bad about having a marvelous tool sitting idle while I suffer the tedious wait for dForce simulations. I also have a large library of dForce clothes and I don't want to start over making my own (most likely inferior) versions. Ideally I could use MD8 to drape my dForce (or conforming) clothes on a posed G8 avatar in MD. I know this is possible because I have tried it but, as I said, there is probably a more effitcient workflow. Most of the tutorials deal with making clothes from scratch rather than importing ready made clothing from DAZ Studio. I still have the option of upgrading to MD 11 with a 60% discount but I don't want to spend another $200 just to have it languishing unused on my PC.
Ahh, yes, my 3090 GPU was also a birthday present (at least I was gifted the difference between the price of a 3070 and a 3090). Thank goodness for family. I'm 70 by the way. As for Substance Painter - nice that you have it but I am reluctant to spend any money with Adobe and I just hate subscriptions.
....I have a very old version (v.3.0) that has long since been out of the upgrade track. Couldn't keep up even with the upgrade discount as prices increased while finances became pretty tight afterwards. Would love to have MD 9 which was the last version to offer a perpetual licence, but again, lack of finances (I was on SS Disability by then) pretty much put the kibosh on that idea.
For 13 months of subscription (@ 39$/month) I could have an MD 9 perpetual licence totally paid for.
Subscription plans are a bad deal, so it means being stuck with 15 - 30 min dForce sims on my old hardware. I've actually stopped purchasing new dForce clothing and hair as it just bogs down the workflow too much.
You just have to find how to dForce the scene. Timeline is the best way and sometimes a hand might go through the clothes turning it to goo but you can move the arm so it doesn't happen
I feel like they should sell a dForce Super extention with hair and cloth versions if it helps focus on making improvements to simulating hair and cloth
I would rather have it than not, and while I kind of agree it feels a bit beta, and it's a bit... random, it does the job, and there is an awful lot of help out there on getting it going.
I've been using dForce for a while now, but it hasn't been but in the last couple of months that I've started a deep dive into working with it. I've been making poses usually with a prop or an environment in mind, but lately I've started adding outfits into my repertoire simply because I know that dForce can be intimidating and a bit of a PITA to work with, especially for people new to using it. I figured if I could at least take the brunt of the work off customers when trying to pose with an outfit by making adjustments along the timeline so as to avoid meshes colliding in a way that is undesireable, it might make it easier to use. But I don't know. I'm still in the beginning stages of doing this, and I have no idea if customers would even be interested. (Note: even if the poses were designed for a specific dForce outfit, you can easily substitute in a different dForce outfit which would work just fine, or maybe require minor adjustments.)
Would this be of value? I'm genuinely curious.
No.
dforce is great. Not perfect but still great. It takes a bit of time to learn and a lot of time to master (I have definatly not mastered it yet), but I would be stuck without it.
I find it easier to Dforce standing figures one at a time zero poes 0 to pose 30 seconds and save them as a scene sub-set. Sitting poses Towards the end I have a chair slide under them that works well with dresses. Kneeling poses are a challenge but can be done.
I've long thought that the best strategy is to use DS for character design, and to master the process of getting DS content into an app that is infinitely better than DS at whatever it is you are trying to do at that point in your workflow.
Along those lines, I am very excited about one of the 2022 Blender Strategic Goals in particular: In order to support the latest Blender Studio move, Project Heist, whose purpose is to spur the development of technologies to enable photorealistic movies in Blender, the Blender devs are completely redoing the simulation subsystem and bringing it up to the '20s state of the art. They are saying that they are currently surveying the research literature in order to develop simulator engines that operate basically in realtime. In realtime, folks.
I think that in several ways, dForce is better than Blender's current cloth sim, but by the end of the year, dForce will be one of the most outdated features in DS.
I agree but it is one of those things that requires discipline. I have characters in a scene and jumping in and out of my scene to pose and simulate individual characters in a scene subset is a chore. Having said that, it does help with the other great complaint I have which is not directly aimed at dForce: the timeline method of simulation. I quite often decide to animte my characters in the scene but having a dForce animation already on the timeline screws with my character animation. What is needed is a way to clear the timeline (you'd think that would be a simple, single-click option, but no) and/or a way to save a scene (or a frame from the timeline) without including the rest of the animation. Another welcome addition would be some kind of Non-Linear timeline which allows for independent animation tracks for different selections (clothes, characters, arms, legs, etc.). I know that Blender has that as do other "serious" animation utilities.
it's the lack of a baked animation that is the issue, Optitex has a freeze simulation function that bakes keyframes and you can actually save that as an animated properties preset or pose, I have also created animation groups in Carrara using Virtual World Dynamics keyframes and looped and reversed them because I can.
Would in D|S but sadly the bridge send to DAZ studio crashes it the last year on all versions both my computers.
Dforce on the other hand has no keyframes.
I am always confused when users post those long dforce times - e.g. 20 mins on a RTX 2070 Super GPU?
Here is a quick test scene I made for another user to show the "Start Bones From Memorized Pose" option. Simulation went from default standing pose to the final sitting pose (I took the screenshot a few seconds before the sim finished). Machine is a notebook with a RTX 2070 non super, DS is 4.20 beta.
But, what I don't like about dforce is, that it seems to not conterbalance the weight mapping very well in some cases. E.g. if a PA put a strong hip weight on a skirt, it seems to bend with the hip during the simulation while a real skirt would not. The result is not very realistic in those cases.