Totally disappointed with dForce
cherpenbeck
Posts: 1,413
When dForce was introduced, I was excited. There war the means to make cloth fold and drape naturally. And it worked - for large sheets, for flowing dresses. But, and that is a very big but, it doesn#t really work for tube-like clothing in form of pants and shirts and blouses. dForce is too sleek. It lacks all the lovely tiny crinkles which make the cloth look real. And with dForce, the majority of clothing now comes as tubes. Nothing more. This clothing doesn't look worn. It doesn't look used. Sometimes it doesn't look like fabric at all, more like plastic. So I'm going back to the old conforming clothing for my renders.
How about you? Did any of you find a way to make a real believable simulation with dForce for these arm and leg tubes?
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They come as tube, paper thin, with not seam details or thickness at the edges. Because they are paper thin they don't move like the cloth they are meant to be - so jeans float around like silk. And like you say there are no folds, or they are painted on unrealistically. I can see a place for dforce with sheets, cloaks and flouncy dresses, but generally it hasn't lived up to the expectations
Anything that is rather close to the body (like a jeans) I prefer non-dforce clothing with some morphs, quicker applied, less challenging on the system and looks good with details
The lack of wrinkling issue isn't dforce per se. That's a lack of geometry in the clothing, along with improper settings.
But the disappointment for me lies in the fact that dforce has gradually required more resources over time. dforce'ing a hair or clothing object on an old 970 used to take 2-3 mnutes. These days, on a 1070ti dedicated to dforce, the same items take over 12 minutes. Something's changed (it's probably to do with stabilisation tbh) but if things like VWD or C4D's antiquated Cloth simulation can provide fast(er), stable, dynamics then I struggle to understand why dforce has issues. Maybe it's held back by Qt and Daz 5.0 will bring much needed fixes - I hope but will not be holding my breath :)
I try to avoid dForce for many of the reasons mentioned above. On my system, speed, or lack thereof, is a big issue. I'd rather spend some time fiddling with morphs than the time needed to get dForce to settle down, only to have it explode.
There have been quite a few outfits I would have been interested in buying (here and at Rendo) but the obvious lack of shaping morphs shows that the PA is depending on dForce and everything else is just an afterthought at best. I got burned with a couple of these and now avoid them.
A lot of times this is due to improper dForce settings. I know it's not a good answer, because when you buy a product, you should be able to expect it to work correctly, but most often it's worth it to tweak around with the settings and even adjust the dForce weight mapping.
Thinness doesn't make them move like thin cloth, that is down to settings which can cotrnol stiffness, whether it buckles or folds, and weight. Stiffer settings geneally seem to require adjustment to the default Simulation Settings. Mesh resolution is also a factor.
The issue of dynamic clothing not being what many have wanted has been around for a long time.. One has to look at Poser's Cloth Room, it also had its issues and pretty much all the clothing for it is much the same as what we have now with dforce..
Which is interesting as Poser dynamic clothing works rather well with dforce, I also think that Poser's dynamic clothing implementation is more robust.. One because it has been around for a very long time so has a lot of support, and two Poser's dynamic clothing system uses the CPU.. Although dforce can use the CPU as well, setting it up to do so can create headaches..
One other thing to keep pressure so to speak off your GPU, you can use your CPU if you can find the right drivers for it so dforce will recognize your CPU..
I think you have to be a bit choosy about which vendors you buy from. The suit on the right from IH Kang dforce's pretty well in my estimation with folds, wrinkles, etc.
IH Kang's clothing is always spectacular, but his implementation of dForce is basically a conforming item with some room for dForce to add details. If you look at the weight maps, there's a lot that's not being simulated, which should be an indication that something is not quite right when denying dForce the freedom to simulate the whole outfit gives results that are undisputably so much better than otherwise.
Also, asides from the adequacy or otherwise of dForce as a physics solution, there's the matter that Daz doesn't offer the best way to work with it. I wonder how hard would it be to implement a solution to check for mesh intersections along the timeline before doing a simulation, for instance.
I hate dforce men's clothing . It takes so long to dforce, only to drape like thin fabric. Dforce clothing usually has no detail, and I see no reason to dforce tight outfits like jeans and a shirt. Further, it limits what I can do with a figure and the poses I can use. The reliance on dforce these days produces clothing like was released with Fred yesterday which drapes like a table cloth look awful. I find myself returning to genesis 3 and older genesis 8 outfits which conform to avoid using dforce. Dforce is also being used as substitution for fit. If you use a non standard character is is also harder to dforce.
dForce is great for some thing, less so for others. I'd love dForce developments that allow it to drape like stiffer fabric.
I like dForce when it's used like on IH Kang or Meshitup sets. When it plays with existing morphs only adding the final touch. A good example is also Sickleyield's dForce Roman Clothing. All these only use dForce for the things that can't be achieved otherwise. All models are also usable without dForce.
Some clothes like long flowing silk dresses and robes (like a few ones available in the other stores) are fine being made with dForce only, but these are very specific cases. Not everything is long flowing silk dress.
...I have a few dForce items (clothing that I wish would have been released years ago). I also have the dForce Helper script which I use as I'm not into setting up a whole bunch of parameters and the fact a single item in a scene can be selected with it. I've pretty much avoided dForce hair as it tends to take longer than cloth sims (particularly long hair styles). I will say that dForce clothing for G8 for the most part converts more reliably with the RSSY G8 to G3 clothing converters than G8 conforming clothes.
The one downside is items like buttons, rings, and such still deform badly requiring manual fixes.
Some areas are good for dForce, but it is definitely over-used as a replacement for good conforming clothing. There are many reasons why Genesis 8 Pro Bundles were less attractive for me (when Daz still put together such things), and dForce everything is one of those reasons where I saw less value in the Pro Bundles.
That being said, flowy drape-y dresses where the drama is increased by the cloth draping? Good. That's a good reason to use it. Capes, flowing cloth, all good.
Properly done (and not having to go through the transformation between generations), buttons are one area where the dForce era has been better. Properly rigid buttons that don't deform are awesome, especially fitting to fluffy bodies (such as Fred 8.1).
When buttons are hard followers & properly rigid, and you need to conform to a nonstandard body, that's the one area where dForce outfits have been better.
It's the dumb tube sleeves and pant legs that are infuriating. Sure, it's going to cut down design time, and increase your ability to sell through to Daz if you are a PA, but with ever increasing Daz bundle prices, delivering less value to customers (tube sleeves/pants) was just a bad thing overall. Frustrating.
...I have the dForce Mabel Outfit, and after first converting to G3F and then running dForce, a couple of the buttons would "stretch" horizontally. I actually had to use Zev0's Breast Control to adjust spacing between the character's breasts to fix it.
There is always a way with dForce you just need to find it. I have a dress set that includes bloomers and a petti and they help a lot. I made the petti stiff yet still flexible enough to spread out. The main skirt rides up from a sitting position tho which is annoying like in one part of the dforce it drapes but then once seated rides up
I also use fans to keep stuff in place on the second and third renders so here is one after with three fans, One for back, front above, and the hair tho all were set low. The second and third are the same settings but from different angles. The first image used no fans
Model is Hatsumomo with the high schooler setting applied from Growing Up with other characters dialed in and self collide is off
The dress was from Candy Magic Dream and uses Silk Shaders 01 and one pair of shoes is from the Tabina Outfit while the other is High Top Sneaker and Kinley hair which has my favorite hair shader system so far since it has so many coloring options
Petti setting:
Collision Layer: 3
Dynamic Strength: 93
Bend Stiffness: .29
Buckling Stiffness: 15%
Buckling Ratio: 50%
Density: 650
Velocity Smoothing: .25 I read on a tutorial this helps prevent fabric from bunching up too much
Velocity Smoothing Iterations: 1
Main Skirt setting:
Collision Layer: 6
Bend Stiffness: .16
Buckling Stiffness: 3%
Buckling Ratio: 82%
Density: 210
Velocity Smoothing: .50
Velocity Smoothing Iterations: 1
So dForce is good and has problems sometimes but there are so many ways to work through and overcome all obstacles
Yes, dForce is much better with draping fabric (as with loose-fitting skirts or capes) than it is with simulating the fit of items that are loosely conforming (like most sleeves or pant legs). For me, most of the time, the results of the simulation don't justify the long wait. But, you can usually use dForce items as conforming clothes.
I'd rather see Daz work on the problems of rigid parts (usually fasteners--buttons, belt buckles, etc.) and items of fixed size (non-expanding/non contracting--like decorative bows). These are problematic for both conforming and dynamic items. Improvements with these problems would be much more useful for me than improving cloth dynamics.
To be fair, it's clear that some of these problems are with users not knowing how to use the dForce settings--a user education issue. Daz's modus operandi is to introduce features but to not really do much to explain how that feature works. We're left with trial-and-error, YouTube videos ranging in quality from very good to useless, and some paid tutorials.
I don't have any G8.male characters so all of my G3M clothing is conforming. I have moved to G8F for my female characters and almost all of their clothing is dForce. I am confused about how slow dForce is even after my hardware upgrade with a new CPU and a powerful new 3090 GPU. I hardly see any difference in simulation time since the upgrade which doesn't make sense. I have Marvelous Designer (which I don't use nearly enough) and even without using the GPU it drapes so much faster (and better) than dForce. Plus MD has the essential benefit that allows cloth to br pulled around as it drapes, something dForce is sorely lacking. Even VWD can do that.
I don't know whether it is just a problem for dForce but mesh density and collision sensitivity are very limiting factors. It needs to be polygon heavy to look like real cloth when draped. The collision objects also need to have dense mesh otherwise the cloth will just pass through without colliding.
Folks I loved dForce although I could only use it with CPU on my MacBook Pro. That was until a bloody security update killed it altogether. No all I get is a "Cannot initialize dForce kernels" error. So don't be that disappointed once you can still use it.