Simulation/dforce problems on animations

nepenthessloth

Hi, my first post on here but pulling my hair out with simulation, I'm hoping some experienced users might be able to rescue me! I have set up several characters (on a transparent background) for a 1000 frame animation scene (sounds a lot but it's only about 30 secs). I switch off from the scene all the other characters and try and do the clothing simulation on one character at a time. I switch off everything but the body and the clothing (hair turned off too) so it's down to a minimum. In this case I'm using, on one character, the Daz dForce Wise Wizard HD Clothes for Genesis 8 Male(s) on the wise wizard character with no changes. It will simulate one frame no problem, works well. does it quickly, looks good. However when I run it for the animation length, it starts well and goes through the frames quite quickly at first but always grinds to a halt after about 200 frames (not always the same frame either). I test the frame it halts on and it renders fine and quickly as a single frame render. It just freezes up on simulation on an animation and won't even cancel ..time and time again and with the different characters and much the same thing always happens. It's making my planned animation video appear to not an option after days setting it all up as well as feeling very let down by Daz and dforce. Surely Daz should be able to animate for short films if the hardware is ok? I'm wondering if there is something in any daz or windows setting that might be causing this, some memory setting or the like, as it feels like it's that sort of issue, as it works fine frame by frame, just seems to run out of steam doing an animation. I really have great hardware; it's a Geforce RTX3090 on a Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-10900K CPU @ 3.70GHz with 32 Gb Ram ...it really shouldn't be a struggle! Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks - Steve

skinklizzard

If you're animating and using a dforce simulation you have to make extra sure that your figure never clips or intersects with itself or otherwise pinches the outfit, which is usually what causes that massive slowdown/freeze as the simulation tries and fails to solve where the cloth should be, when it is squeezed between two parts of the model. The result is generally a explosion of the outfit if Daz studio or dforce don't crash (when it eventually responds again that is).

nepenthessloth

Thank you fpr replying. I'm still learning much of this but although I had some explosions early on and reset poses, in these later cases there didn't appear to be any explosion. Maybe there was and it was just taking an age to draft it but normally you see the explosion pretty quick, this froze with nothing happening for an hour at least. I was just wondering if there was any setting to look out for regarding memory and/or a long simulaion can cause this issue. It very frustrating. It spends hours doing lots of frames and then just stops and I really can't work out why. At least if it explodes you know to change the pose. I used a simplier costume on my wizard, monk's robe, and I got a lot further but after about 600 frames the whole robe just disappeared, flew off! What is very frustrating is I wish I could save the simulation up to that point and then do a second simulation to add on to it, to carry it on. It's seems that is not possible, any new simulation clears the previous one; is that correct thinking, so I have to do the whole lot again. I know I could save that and do another scene from that new point on, but I have several interacting (shadows etc) characters and doing the same scene in lots of stages will be a confusing pain ...but it might be the most pragmatic option. What I find extremely frustrating is that a dforce outfit I buy fails on interaction with itself. Like the wizard, The top robe very early got intersected by the bottom robe and I had all the default settings. How do they sell a product that doesn't seem to pass the most basis simulation run?