Alternative ways of skinning the "clothes/breast" cat?
pjwhoopie@yandex.com
Posts: 793
I have a lot of different breast helpers to try to rid me of that static cling look, but none are as easy as are shown, nor do I get the same results it seems as the PA's who create those products.... Kind of like an "as seen on TV" situation.
Anywhoo... is there another way to skin the cat?
I was thinking (where the problems usually start)...
If I just had some sort of general morphable triangle/cube thingy I could stick over the breasts, and THEN have the clothes fit over that... It might be money!
This is what I am talking about...
This is just a cube primitive I created... but if there was some way to round off the ends, or change the angle of the triangle... so to speak, It might provide decent(er) results.
Would it work? How could I make it work?... point me in the right direction (or somebody beat me to it I don't care!)
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I am in the same boat as you. As a result I usually tend to create women with small breasts if they are wearing someting that's going to look odd. I've played with a lot of the same utilities as you probably have and have to agree they are not that much help. I was thinking of doing my own morph but the problem is that with that huge number of breast morphs and how they all handle moving the quads around, I doubt any single morph will actually work universally. However. This approach you got could work as geograph. We have to find all the right polys to replace with this type of thing. Now you ain't going to be showing any clevage with it. I've dabbled in graphs, so may take it to see if this can be done.
Thanks for chiming in charles...
If I could just get something that would work well for static images, I'd be 234% better off than I am now.
Mine above uses a rotated cube (I don't know how to create a triange), but a triangle placed the right way would help to give some cleavage... and while breasts themselves come in all different sizes, onced placed in a bra, I think you probably could get away with s, m, lg, xl to come close to nekkid sizes.
I mean, this would be great most helpful for SFW kinds of renders... where you don't want the static cling alternative.
The clothes, especially if using smoothing, follows the characters polygons assigned to it by the weighting when it was created, which in turn the characters polygons are map weighted to the bones. This is why Daz clothes does this with the breasts. It has to know why polygons on the clothes match up to the polygons on the skin so it's like a shrinkwrap.
I'll watch this thread with interest because this is a big problem that bugs me no end. Only today I've been trying to pick a dress for a character and her bust is not really that big - it just has a bit of gravity. the under-bust crease is transferred to the clothes and I just don't want to render the result. And dForce doesn't really help because the projected bad shape just distorts the drape too.
Maybe make a morph which shapes the breasts like the 'cube' in the picture, then import the morph to the figure twice, one with autofollow and the other without and link them so that when the one with autofollow is dialed in, the other one is automatically dialed the same value only negative.
This way the figure stays the same but the fitted items will autofollow the 'cube' shape.
This is how some of the fitting helpers have been done.
The trick is in how you use dForce, because done properly it can resolve the issue very well:
You want to dial the breast shaping in over a timeline, so that you start with an undistorted geometry that is then pushed into place.
This largely avoids (or at least heavily reduces) both creasing and weird texture stretching.
I've tried the dForce / timeline thing with not much success, but seeing the result there makes me want to try it again, as it would be far easier than how I do it at the moment when it comes up (custom morph in Blender).
Are you just adding the dynamic modifier, or do you change other parameters?
That's good to know Matt_Castle. And by the way what hair are you using on the model in your example?
I have used Fit Control with good results with respect to the under breast crease and the spandex issue but there are issues with texture stretching as noted previously (depending on the clothing item).
I wanted to take some time to do some experiments and look at the issue from the ground up. From what I can tell the biggest issue is the under curve when breast morphs that sag are used.
We can use smoothing in most cases, but have to up the smoothing pretty high to eliminate the undercurve effects, but this will often cause glitchs in other parts of the clothing. And as in the last picture shows, with some clothing, not even smoothing will solve the issue.
Women should have no breasts, they are so troublesome
Here we can see how the quads become extremely scruntched from applying natural type breasts caused by the under hang.
Also we can see how these quads become stretched and shrunk, leading to as someone mentioned texture stretching ont he clothes. Because remember the polygons that make up the clothes have been told which of these polygons on the character to match to, so if the ones they are assigned to stretch, they must as well.
All I can think of when it comes to "skinning" and breasts...
As MimicMolly pointed out stretching is also problematic. Here I went extreme on size to illustrate. And this a G3M shirt on a G8F.
That's exactly the case with the character I was describing above - as I said, not big but having gravity. I have tried the timeline method and it makes sense (though I have not had perfect results) but I try to avoid timeline drapes even though they are the often the better option. My problem is that I often render the scene as a still and then use it for an animation and I don't like to contaminate the animation with drape simulations. If only there was a way to have a separate timeline for simulations and animations, that wouldn't be a problem. There is also no easy way to clear the timeline. Ideally, given the timeline that we have with DAZ Studio, the better option would be to have a way to save out a single frame as a scene or scene subset.
"You put... CLOTHES?! On your FEMALES?!!!"
I love the Ferengi... they are like the Speedy Gonzalez of Star Trek. (A horrible stereotype that is such a ridiculous caricature, you just have to embrace it.)
...
Morph distortion happens regardless of tits. You slap a conformer on, and it'll warp since you're not using the morph that the PA did when he or she designed the clothing. Tits do amplify the distortion, but it's always there.
Once you autofit, that distortion seems to get worse, yes... but that's the same if you go from G3M to G8M. It's not necessarily the tits. You're not really going to avoid that unless the clothes already account for it.
Distorted buttons and nametags and whatnot... that's IMO a clothing design issue. Especially these days, where more PAs know how to do hard follow nodes for buttons, buckles, swangy chains and necklesses, etc. For Hard Armor, sometimes I even parent it or I lock rotations. (A good combination of that would be Jerry Jang's Aquarius armor, as an example. Some really cool follower bits, I thought.)
Even when it is designed for G8F (or whatever you're using). You put big tits on the girl (yes, I am talking about birds), and the fabric pattern stretches.
Don't want your conforming belt buckle or cop's badge to stretch?
I'd point to an video from Mada.
I'm not even starting to look at animation yet. But eventually a solution should address it as well.
Moving onto now a dforce test with the same shirt as above. This shirt maybe too extreme, because you can see via the white outline all the subdivisions. But lets try it anyway, I apply dforce modifier with no addons or weight mapping. In image 2 we see the whole thing just falling apart as I expected. In image 3 I turn off simulation to everything except the shirt itself and the undershirt. Well that's no good because badges and buttons and stuff just stay static. I think the addon option is for this but I have to look it up. But most dissapointingly is that this did nothing to actually solve the issue with the breasts. Even with weight mapping and vising subs this is not a viable solution for fixing the clevage and unercurve.
I get what you are saying, I am using this an worst extreme test example. I have used this shirt before and removed all the buttons and tags and replaced them as you said with rigid follow ones. I picked this shirt because I knew just how difficult it was actually going to be to fix.
In this case, the outfit is an untextured https://www.daz3d.com/gamer-girl-pjs-and-accessories-for-genesis-8-females and I think just added a dynamic modifier and the default settings managed - although possibly I reduced stretch stiffness to about 0.5-0.6, which helps stop fabric exploding if it's pulled too much.
However, it really depends on the clothing involved. Some things absolutely hate dForce or need a load of parameter tweaks, so ideally you start with something that already supports dForce in that area.
Tinkerbell Hair. I think it's in the Girl 7 bundles, but I've overridden its scene ID so it works on G8F.
Thanks very much! I'll give it a try
...I have the same issues as a number of my characters are small breasted and younger versions of them are flat. I end up having to use simple one colour shaders on tops with no pattern because of the distortion (next to lettering, stripes tend to be the worst). Also with some clothing any distortion of the underlying mesh (particularly when trying to get a flat chest) can show through in the clothing fit. .Even the Growing Up morphs dont often help woth distortion in the chest area.
Really wish someone would do a full flat chest morph, not just a "Breast Small" or "Breast Gone" one, as the pectorals and upper chest don't end up quite right (had one for Gen4 that worked great).
Like the OP I have all sorts of breast and clothing adjustment utilities but none seem to solve the issue. I miss the old "Spandex" settings from Gen 3 as well, the Decrackifier (for butts) works sort of like that.
If I didn't know any better, I'd think breast were an afterthought for Daz3d.... its the 3rd party vendors/PAs that said, we need a way to make bazingas on this model...
The end result is that the system in place doesn't really work well... which is a shame.
Seriously, to make it look right, I have to dForce Time line it? (no offense for the suggestion, as a work around that works... well, it works!)... but that adds a great deal of time to the creative process.
Because of my character/morph numbers, I already have to wait over 6 minutes for GF8 to load.... sigh...
Once the character is loaded, the fun should start... posing, dressing, enviroments... etc etc. If we have to load character *wait* Load Clothing *wait* adjust breast *wait* dForce timeline *wait* don't like result, change settings *wait* dForce Timeline Fit *wait* don;t like the result so I change outfit *wait* adjust clothing *wait*......
It really affects the pleasure I get out of doing it as a hobby, which ultimately reduces the time I spend on it which ULTIMATELY REDUCES THE AMOUNT OF MONEY I SPEND ON IT....
DAZ seems to want all the solutions to these problems to be a PA product that they can sell us.... and while I understand that business model to some extent, I'd rather buy more outfits (if they worked) than I would solutions to problems because I feel it was on DAZ to begin with to have a system that worked....
The boob genie is out of the bottle and has been dancing around the with the coochie genie for some time now. Daz would be better off embrasing those genies and have built in solutions than crossing their fingers that somebody else will come up with a solution or that it will go away, cause it ain't gonna....
Maybe Genesis 9 is taking so long because these problems of static cling and texture stretching are being adress at a fundamental level... hope springs eternal.
Another Question
For one outfit I had, the model was rather buxom, and I was trying to fit a pirate type outfit to her. The outfit IRL, would be a heavy woolen garment, so there would be virtually no static cling around even the largest of breast.
Well, it didn't work like I wanted, you would have thought it was a spandex yoga outfit onesie with the way the results turned out.
I then went and bought one of the helpers and gave that a shot, and it ddidn't work, or I couldn't get it to work (most of the time, these solutions have no PDF or Video on how to get them to work, and if they do, they don't show you how it is sone with a difficult garment, they choose the simpelest, easiest garments to use as demonstrations... )
The best result I got was loading the coat into the scene... moving it over the character, and using the built in garment "adjusters" to cover the character.
And after all that, here is the question....
Is there any way to make that garment, that was not parented to the character, move and pose with that character without parenting or parenting it to X? Cause when I'd try to move the character, it all become a dogs breakfast!
To my knowledge - only doing it manually.
You can copy the pose of the character to the clothing.
I don't know if you can copy the translations. But why not just parent the clothing to the character? That will just make it follow without changing the clothing.
As someone who does make 3D content (albeit not yet professionally), I will stress that this problem is extremely difficult, at least if you're trying to solve it with the hardware available to most mere mortals.
The general standard when it comes to posable 3D models is inherently inaccurate. It gives us a thin skin mesh that is proportionally weighted to a branching armature, and then (depending on software) may also have access to mesh morphing to help alleviate the limitations of this. However, in reality, our skin does not perfectly follow to the motions of our skeleton, and its position is instead handled by material physics regarding how our muscles bulge in that pose, and how our skin stretches over that. And, similarly, the ways clothes fit, move and drape is also based on the laws of physics, not weighted rigging.
The main system we use is an approximation, because "not an approximation" requires a massive amount of computing power. And a core problem with approximations is that they do usually eventually break down.
Auto-follow morphs are already basically computer magic. Being able to even semi-reliably transfer morph shapes between non-similar meshes is not a trivial task, and Daz's software often does it better than most. Things like manual fits for common morphs and projection morphs help...
Here I've used LaTonya's "Breasts Gone" corrective to dial out her own breast shaping, then replaced it with more commonly supported morphs, and the result has improved somewhat:
... but, eventually too reach their limit, particularly when many are combined. ("Whisky" in my original example deliberately uses almost exclusively breast shapes from the core Genesis 8 Female Body morphs pack because they're supported on the most clothes, but even then the results usually leave something to be desired).
Possibly this is the kind of problem that an AI could be trained to solve, showing it a load of auto-follow solutions on a load of morphs, then a load of good simulated or manually fitted results, and making it learn how to turn one into the other, but I feel that too would have its limits.
~~~~~
Ultimately, the only truly accurate and universal solution for the clothing fits problem is indeed a physics simulation, so the best thing we can hope is that Daz improve the speed and capability of dForce, and that vendors refine their methods for making clothing for it. (I know a lot of people criticise dForce for resulting in flat looking clothing, but there are ways to solve this).
Thanks Matt... for chiming in and providing your thoughts
I guess though, what I am ultimately asking (in the original post) is... Are we thinking about this wrong?
We are asking clothes to fit around boobs, but in reality, as you say, we don't have the compute power to do it.... So the end result is that we get results like your first pic, and, except for maybe a wet t-shirt contest, doesn't fit like any of the clothes I have seen on women in my daily work routine today (I work in a building with probably 70 women between 28-60yo).
So.. how can we use what we have to get better result without the need for more computing firepower?
Well, we really don't need clothing to go over boobs... and in turn get caught up in the underboob and gravity etc etc. As I show in my first post, we need clothing that goes over a triangular or cylinder shaped object on the front of a figure. We just need a quasi boob shape under the clothes, which I think we can achive with either smoothed out triangles or even cylinders.
I am sure my lack of understanding of how daz (and in turn, 3d software) works that is clouding my vision, but I feel we are making it harder than it has to be. If it isn't seen, it can be implied. Boobs under clothes are not seen, so why don't we imply them with a boob like shape that doesn't have underboob that gets in the way of our computing firepower?
SY's boob helper thing does create a morph that projects something onto the boobs... and, therefore, pushes out the clothes into a non-shrink-wrap shape. (You can see it with 3rd party boob grafts.)
Theoretically, one might add a smoothing modifier to the figure, then make the figure morph/smooth onto some kind of geometry to push the surface of the books outward (in order to make a shape onto the clothing).
Like... I wouldn't just parent an object into the boob region. You'd want to force the boob region to conform to that pusher-object, which would then influence the clothing.
Theoretically speaking, anyway.
I use SY's boob helper.
/"FEMALES!" *sighs in Ferengi exasperation*
This has been something that has bothered me since Poser 6. The lack of boob and buttock spanning clothes drives me crazy. I like tight-fitting clothes as much as the next guy, but that's not always what the outfit in question SHOULD look like. Belive it or not, things are much better now than they were way back in the Before Times. It is possible to make clothes that span rather than cling, or it used to be.
Been trying to do a geograph, problem is the geograph winds up being no better than the commerical breast helpers we've already talked about.
I think the solution is going to have to be a combination of selective dforce and weight mapping for smoothing as well as morph helper tweaks.
Or the solution is a morph set that is used to create the breasts exclusively for the clothes, you use it INSTEAD of any other breast morphs. However for character bodies (because often the body shape itself includes breast morphing) you would need to remove the vertex manipulation for the breast. This won't fix texture/UV stretching.
The goal on this one below is to reduce cleavage valley depth and undercut distortion.