Dynamic clothing question
michaelolson
Posts: 117
Hi. Is there a way to drape dynamic clothing on a pose without having to create an animation filmstrip at the bottom?
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Are you working in Poser or DAZ Studio? In Poser, in the Cloth Room, there is a "drape" function which just drapes the fabric on the object without having to create an animation.
Hi. I'm working in Daz studio.
Have a look here for one possible method:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewreply/784948/
and further down that same thread you can find some examples.
Erik
It depends on the clothing, and if you are using it on the figure it was made for - most, though not all , clothing can be fitted to the figure it was made for and have a static drape run (though there are often good reasons to run an animated drape anyway).
The so-called "animation" is really just a series of still poses which allows the clothing to gradually ease into the desired pose. If your desired pose is pretty close to the T-pose you could do a static drape, but it would really limit your possibilities if you don't come to grips with the animation process.
Animated draping also makes it possible t handle situations where you need to clothes to fall in particular ways, such as when sitting on a chair. As Cayman says, it isn't necessary to have a realistic animation - just to get to the final pose from the zero pose, perhaps tweaking a bit en route to get the draping to look the way you want.
Edited to fix a typo
I've had very limited success with animated drapes. When I adjust poses in the final frame... it backpropogates and changes the initial pose, which ... defeats the purpose of the whole mess.
(Sorry, I'm a bit frustrated at how difficult it is to get this to work when I've spent $50+)
You just need to freeze the animation after you have run it, that way the dynamic clothing will stay as it was drapped even should you move the figure around.
Dynamic clothing takes a bit of getting used to, but once mastered is really not that hard, and animated drapes run relatively quickly (at least they do on my machine). Dynamic clothing looks so much better, even on close fitting clothing like jeans. It also fits any figure, I have fitted items for figures for whom it was not built for.
I finally uncovered the problem I had... which was that I had been attempting to add dynamic clothing to already posed scenes, and animating from that point back to zero pose was not working very well.
Going forward and designing with that in MIND should go way more smoothly.
When in frame zero of the animation sequence, make sure all of Genesis 2 is neatly inside the roughly T-shaped dynamic garment.
V4 and M4's T-poses are not exactly the same as for Genesis, so unless you adjust them the legs and arms will stick out a bit, which can (and will) cause problems during the drape.
Also with long sleeves make sure the hands are well out of the cuffs, or you risk having the fingers catch the cloth with ugly consequences.
If necessary you can do this by making the underarms a bit longer by scaling them in frame zero, and then undo that in your last animation frame.
Good luck with it : )
Erik
One important thing I forgot to mention:
Make sure your Genesis 2 figure is in SubDiv level 1.
If, for the sake of those nice HD features, your figure is at a higher SubDiv level when starting the drape, the cloth will fall through it.
OptiTex cloth simulation will fail if the mesh it must collide with is too sparse, but also if it is too dense!
After freezing the draped cloth you can safely return Genesis back to as high a SubDiv level you think is necessary.
Cheers!
Erik
Animated what now?
Richard, Richard, Richard! Of all the typos in all the world, you had to walk into that one!
Animated what now?
Richard, Richard, Richard! Of all the typos in all the world, you had to walk into that one!
What's worse, I'd noticed and corrected the same error in an earlier post. Fixed now.
What's worse, I'd noticed and corrected the same error in an earlier post. Fixed now.
Lol, want to remove my posts to delete all evidence?
Funny thing is I only spotted this thread because I have taken an interest in dynamics, but I seriously wish we could do our own rather than be stuck with Optitex stuff. DS is making leaps and bounds in terms of usability and it just seems such a hindrance to be limited like this. I'm sure there are various reasons for it, contractually and such, but I just wanted to get my daily whinge out of the way!
Also, unselect EVERYTHING the cloth will never touch. The drape code can't handle colliding with lots of stuff.
Heh, I think people know that - despite proof reading* - I let a lot of mistakes through.
* You do NOT want to see the "before" versions of my posts.
Indeed valuable advise!
However, the amount of stuff it can handle is quite impressive, it just takes forever on an ordinary computer to finish calculating the collisions. You'll have to be very, very patient if you do something like the image below.
In this one I had that leather DAZ-OptiTex Trinity coat collide with the ditto dynamic Body Suit under it (frozen, and at SubDiv level 0), Victoria 6 herself at SubDiv level 1, those two subdivided cubes, and a plane. And it worked!
As long as I can do stunts like this with DAZ-OptiTex stuff you won't hear me complain about Studio's cloth simulation!
Cheers!
Erik
ps. I forgot to mention that this too was a single frame drape, so no animation sequence was used.
For layered clothing in a complex pose like this animated draping is far from ideal in my experience, the alternative method definitely works better in these cases.
erik leeman, lucky. I've had stuff refuse to stay put unless I did limit things it collided with. It just kept falling out the bottom of the world. threw the figure, shoes, floor, and just kept going. The cloth dose not need to be set to collide to the lights, etc, The code has a limit, lol.
When you load an item, it is set by default to collide with EVERYTHING.
Lucky? Nah, a long history of lots and lots of trial and equally lots of error : )
Could be that the number of collision items it can handle is limited, but it does not appear to be the amount of geometry that makes it fail.
There is one thing that I don't particularly like with these cloth simulations (all of them), and that is the cloth being paper thin and single sided. Thickness, bulk, is the one thing that conforming clothing is much better at. Of course with enough resources and determination this can be overcome, but it is a pity that you have to spend even more time fixing stuff.
Here's an example of that same Trinity Coat where I've given it some thickness and a red lining using 3D Coat (and new UV's because they get lost in the process).
Cheers!
Erik
edit: typo
Image removed
Erik..we came up with a two-sided ShaderMixer network a couple of years back just to do stuff like that.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/15484/
Of course playing with it and making it two independent displaceable, tiled surfaces did up its complexity somewhat...
Hi MJC, thanks for the tip.
I just had a quick look through that thread, but all I could see was references to 3Delight shader presets, and I never use 3Delight.
Maybe there's a way to make Octane (or Iray) only render the front face of surfaces, and leave the back faces completely transparent.
Then I could duplicate the cloth mesh, flip the normals of the duplicate, and give it a different texture for the lining.
Interference artifacts could spoil things, but maybe it is possible.
The garment still wouldn't have any true thickness though, and that's what I would like to see most of all.
Because of the numerous and super-complex self-intersections in those meshes it is as good as impossible to simply offset them in let's say ZBrush, and give them thickness that way. At least I haven't been successful doing it. Turning them into Voxels in 3D Coat, and then back to double-walled mesh works great, but is quite time consuming because UV's and textures have to be reconstructed.
Oh well, you can't have it all.
Erik
Erik, would you care to share any tips?
I have not seen anything like what you posted with that long coat.
Sure, but what do you want to know?
I already shared tips in this thread as well as in the thread I linked to some posts up.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewreply/788903/
Again, here's a link to that other thread with info about two alternative methods for draping old V4/M4 OptiTex dynamic clothing on Genesis 2
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewreply/785759/
Erik
I find the best solution for good drapes is to make 3 keyframes (bookends on each side of your desired frame) to prevent weird overshoots from splining. Also definitely select the minimum collision targets. Too many make the cloth collide with nothing at best, and crashes DS at the worst.
Is there any easy way to duplicate dynamic clothing?
I'd like to duplicate a copy that's not frozen, but it seems like the only thing to do is apply another copy of the same clothing item.
I never tried to "export" the thing as an OBJ, tho I suspect it will defunct the drape, the instant the figure it is on, is removed from the scene.
Tho, a freeze, then remove everything except the item, may do the trick.
I'll point out that I've gotten AMAZING use out of dynamic sheets. I probably use it, alone, way more than anything else... since dropping cloth over stuff can double for so much (skin, stretchy walls, tents, cobwebs...)