dForce is great!

crashworship

Or it would be if all I wanted to do was render portraits of upright figures facing the camera. For just about anything else using human figures, it's just so frustrating and disappointing. dForce hair and clothing props seem to assume the intended use is a front facing portrait. A side view of women with dForce hair almost always obstructs the face in some way. Windnode applications rarely work to move hair and clothing out of the way. For reclining or interacting figures, dForce simulations always disappoint if they don't outright fail. I've learned numerous workarounds and tricks but even these are only successful a small percentage of the time.

I get it. dforce is a complex process involving significant calculations but there's so much potential with it to create realistic scenes and it doesn't even come close to reaching that potential.

I know this post will be shut down and I expect there will be responses which assume I don't know what I'm doing. Fair enough. I don't have a degree from MIT and there is a lot about dForce I don't know but really, I shouldn't have to have a degree from MIT to make it work for things other than single figure, upright portrait.

Korpin.Sulat

Try X- or Z-rotating your figures before you simulate, then restoring them to position after. Play with the gravity, espcially if you want things to float. Take a week to tinker with wind nodes and find out what works for you. There are also some dforce hait packs that come with an invisible face mask to prevent it from blocking the face, but which ones specifically evade me right now. It's not that you don't know what you're doing so much as you're not at that stage of learning.

Richard Haseltine

It would be considerably easier to respond if you actually described what methods you had tried. Are you doing Timeline simulations and using props to push the simulated elements into place (which may be fiddly but is pretty exactly analagous to the way clothes and hair get tweaked on a photoshoot).