Decimate for dForce?

marble

I have a few dForce clothing items which are very polygon-heavy and take a long time to simulate. Is it possible to decimate and save the reduced-poly item without losing whatever rigging, fitting, JCMs, etc? I do have the Decimator plugin.

crosswind

Yes, technically it's doable. I tested the process of decimating and here're the key points and results:

1. With decimator, you have to turn off Smoothing Modifier otherwise there'll be a distortion;

2. Do not decimate the clothing after simulation. You have to reset the clothing to the initial state;

3. I used the skirt in Hann Mei Outfit to test it. It took 22 seconds to complete the simuation. With 30% decimated skirt, it took 18 seconds. It's not a big different. FYI...

4. The riggings were not affected. But since there's no smoothing modifier, you have to reshape the skirt or use Mesh Grabber to make some tweaking.

5. The render result of the decimated skirt has no significant difference from the non-decimated one. Pls take a loook at the attached images.

marble

windreaver0118 said:

Yes, technically it's doable. I tested the process of decimating and here're the key points and results:

1. With decimator, you have to turn off Smoothing Modifier otherwise there'll be a distortion;

2. Do not decimate the clothing after simulation. You have to reset the clothing to the initial state;

3. I used the skirt in Hann Mei Outfit to test it. It took 22 seconds to complete the simuation. With 30% decimated skirt, it took 18 seconds. It's not a big different. FYI...

4. The riggings were not affected. But since there's no smoothing modifier, you have to reshape the skirt or use Mesh Grabber to make some tweaking.

5. The render result of the decimated skirt has no significant difference from the non-decimated one. Pls take a loook at the attached images.

Thanks for the advice. I can already see a couple of things that I did not try when I attempted to do this. I didn't turn of smoothing so that's a biggie.I also decimated at 30% and it made a big difference in simulation time. Perhaps that's the polygon count - FYI the dress I am trying is Sincerity by Lyoness. My problem was that it came out all distorted after the simulation which may be due to the fact that I didn't turn off smoothing. I will try again but I think the point is moot because I tend to rely on smoothing a great deal so I'm not sure how useful it would be to have this working.

crosswind

Marble, I tried this Sincerity clothing and found no smoothing modifier distortion when decimating. It seems some clothing have such problem some don't. Decimating really help with saving the simulation time, at least 1/2 even 2/3.

I think your solution is really working!

marble

windreaver0118 said:

Marble, I tried this Sincerity clothing and found no smoothing modifier distortion when decimating. It seems some clothing have such problem some don't. Decimating really help with saving the simulation time, at least 1/2 even 2/3.

I think your solution is really working!

The I need to try it the way you advised or figure out what else I was doing wrong. I will give it a try when I have some free time on my DAZ Studio PC. Do you know if it is possible to save a decimated version of the dress? 

crosswind

marble said:

windreaver0118 said:

Marble, I tried this Sincerity clothing and found no smoothing modifier distortion when decimating. It seems some clothing have such problem some don't. Decimating really help with saving the simulation time, at least 1/2 even 2/3.

I think your solution is really working!

The I need to try it the way you advised or figure out what else I was doing wrong. I will give it a try when I have some free time on my DAZ Studio PC. Do you know if it is possible to save a decimated version of the dress? 

I'm afraid the decimated result could be only saved within the scene. No matter you save it as wearable preset or figure asset, when you apply it to a new character, decimated resolution will be gone. The only way is to export the decimated clothing as obj then import it to the scene, then use Transfer Utility to convert it as a Figure but all rigging option and dForce will be gone. You have to do them yourself. So I I think we have to use decimator each time when we need it in the scene...