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Okay, I'll get some things buttoned up and start on my instructional articles pretty soon here.
All physics simulations take work, some trial and some error. Practice most of all. But some fun tricks picked up from absorbing the "Extras" (behind the scenes) of movies and workflows can hint and lead us in the right directions. Practice and thinking outside the box is something that Simulation Success requires.
This hair, the clothing... none of it is made for this figure - and this Genesis 3F figure is made up of body shapes from Genesis 2, 3, 8 and the Victoria 4 family. I had to figure out how to tweak things just to make them survive launching a physics sim. But it pays off quickly and become fun Fun FUN!
I also have VWD Cloth and Hair, which almost Always works in situations that dForce doesn't like - which really isn't dForce's fault. Some things just don't react well to simulation - but we can fix that if we really want this difficult thing to simulate.
Daz Studio developers did an amazing job of giving us weight painting tools and surface controls to truly help us get virtually anything to be able to be dForced. Pick up some of Linday's clothing or hair and take a deep look at how he set up the material's dForce settings. Also read and/or watch the included tips. Incredible how much can be learned with a few quick "Aha" moments! Jay Versluis has some very helpful tips too.
This one is all dForce, except soft-body, which I always use VWD for. I bought 3DU's Spring Dynamics, but haven't tried it yet. Busy, you know ;)
This one uses Awful Soul's Platina Armor for V3 which has been vastly altered using Fit Control. I learned how to simulate this in VWD before I ever tried Daz Studio and dForce (Carrara)
The hair and guitar strap are simulated in dForce, however - I made up a special wearable rig that attaches the bass, bass control node, and initial bass pose (for her) that works flawlessly almost ever single animation I attempt
I have just over 80 completed animated, simulated and rendered scenes of her in this setup (below). She jumps off of scaffolding, landing on the one below, and jumps again, she protects herself when hunted by Corpo spies, she hacks into Corpo networks, she gets knocked out, plays bass, gets wet, looks in the mirror, talks to the gutter rats providing inspiration, she explains stuff to lower Corpo agents to try and get them to Not risk their lives on her... she does a lot of stuff - and dForce is part of each and every frame - run more than once each time. I do the shirt, then the hair separately.
Oh... and she drives, too
One way that I learned how to better use Carrara was to buy products that I liked for it, and dissect what I see to figure out how it was put together and what options it may have. In doing so, I've discovered that a few Daz 3d PAs enjoy providing written or video materials to help us get the most out of the product. mmoir (Mike Moir) was one of them. Grand write-ups. Got a question? Hit him up. He was always happy to help.
So when I starting learning Daz Studio in 2021, I did the same - except I never actually sent any of the PAs questions! LOL
Rob has some really decent information HERE, which is quite a lot. Keep in mind that there's nothing easy about giving everybody a simple solution when it comes to physics simulations, mainly because everybody works differently with different figures, styles, and needs. Some want flowy and dry, others want plastic-wrapped wet. I can do both with Linday's Car Wash Girls shirt in the last image and video above - mostly from reading and watching his documentation for the hair, which has a lot of excellent dForce info.
Just remember this - not everything with 'collison' has to be visible in the render. Bring in, or make some things to help the sim go the way you want it to. When I have Rosie 7 put her hair back like that, I have a special wearable that brings in animated collision objects that ensure the job gets done (including Rosie's hands and fingers in a hair sim is a recipe for disaster! Think about it!)
Hung over from infiltrating a Corpo party, she looks in the mirror to see if her face really is on fire
This shirt is not only made for Genesis 8 (so it had to be converted), but it also comes with an inner 'helper' and a bunch of buttons. I had to make plenty of changes and really think outside the box to get a more working version for Rosie 7. But it does work and it can be wet or dry - but both require caution and patience - and I always expect to run into a few failures before I get it. The other costumes I've shown work without a hitch/
" Jay Versluis has some very helpful tips too."
Yes, hats off to Jay for the time and effort he has put in to his tuts.
I've watched a lot of DForce vids. Almost all involve a woman walking. Very few deal with sitting down and standing up. The new Riversoft plugin hopes to deal with this. I haven't tried it yet, but I can see he's on the scent.
"One way that I learned how to better use Carrara was to buy products that I liked for it, and dissect what I see..."
I've tried to avoid that approach. My thinking has been, you can be a driver, or you can be a mechanic. Few are both. I may be too idealistic.
A quick example of what I meant is how Linday adds some magical "Damping" and other values into the material shader's dForce settings. Gold! And all it took was to take a look at the settings and go: "Hmnpf!"
Just another example of thinking outside the box to work out simulations, this is my workflow in Carrara. I took what I've learned there and applied it in Daz Studio - kind of like translating to English from a language that puts the words in a completely different order, I think. So that part took me a while. Still, simulations use collision, gravity and movement force. Keep that in mind as you work. 3D mesh isn't very strong against the artist's whims, so we have to give it strength and help it along as best we can. This was made before I realized that I could have made the same changes to the cloth without removing the rigging. But the way I did it here works really freaking sweet, and it ends up being just a prop being simulated into cloth.
Another point to this is that, many of these PAs put a lot of time and effort to get it right. Again, using Linday as an example, it's really easy to see by looking at the instructions and playing the included videos that he wants us to succeed, no matter which outcome we're looking for.
Not being fluent in physical engineering, I try to absorb as best I can. Obviously it works, too. Because I'm having a Great time with this wonderful thing called dForce and loving to animate in Daz Studio more and more every day :)
Now, this can go the other way too. I have some dForce clothing that was weight painted to be completely motionless where one would expect the motion to occur, simply to make it user friendly in dForce, I think. Others are so well built for dForce that they don't have any weight painting at all - just using material zones and dForce settings in the surfaces tab to get the job done.
Nathy's dForce Latex Outfit is a great example of this. No weight painting. Very well designed material zones and mesh to work in dForce. By default the belt and metal bits on the belt (of the top) are not part of the simulation (turned off in the Surfaces tab). I wanted to get more drape from the cloth part, so I turned it on to set it up - but Nathy already has it set up - I only had to turn it on in the surfaces tab! And it simulated beautifully!
Thanks Nathy!
Between dForce and VWD, I'm so confident that I even just bought this amazing outfit for my Dartanbeck hero - made for Michael 4, going onto G3M!
Some important things to note about clothing and dForce:
Some Im[portant things to consider if you're having difficulties animating in Daz Studio
Here, Steph will show you how
Using the paid version of aniMate 2 (not sure about free) we can send aniBlock data to the Timeline, delete whatever we want from the animation, and make a new aniBlock to make partial animations - for arms only, for example. This way we can use a handful of motions to make near limitless varieties. When I have Rosie put her hair back in camera (for simulation) I use the Shoulder Stretch motion on the arms and head only as its own aniBlock that I can blend over any other aniBlock as a Subtrack. In my Loving Daz Studio! thread I explain that I make my own pose dials to assist with making things right.
I have made two discoveries about DForce that have been very helpful. Neither are documented, that I have found. These may have been self-evident to you, but they sure weren't to me.
1.) If DForce can't see it, it isn't there, and so it cannot interfere with the simulation. When in doubt, turn off visibility. This can apply to objects in the scene, body parts, or even particular parts of the simulated clothing. In an old clothing object, sometimes only one part is failing, while the other parts simulate OK.
2.) When more than one object in a scene requires simulation, turning off the visibility may not help prevent unwanted clearing of a simulation. Freezing the simulation may not help either. I save the figure as a subset, perform the simulation on the subset, and then merge the simulated figure back into the scene. So far, that works fine. Most of the simulation vids involve only a single character, so this issue never comes up.
"In Advanced view, select a joint rotation or translation key and click the near-invisible little tab at the bottom of the window."
Ya got me with this one...
Right. Think "Green Screen"
I not only simulate my main characters individually, but I render them separately as well - which explains why most of my Rosie images are png with alpha. I use Fusion to bring everything together.
That said, sometimes we need to render in-scene. As you say, I turn everything off from visiblity. I use Freeze though. It's part of my everyday routine.
Edit: Important Note - Freeze Simulate will NOT protect the simulation from "Clear"!!! You have been warned! :)
Something else that's really cool to note for your characters that get simulated upon a lot:
We can make weable presets, right? Check out the other tabs when saving that wearable. We can store surface and shape info that loads along with the preset. This can really get someone in troublwe if unwary, but it's immensely helpful for me.
A wearable can be pretty much anything.
My version of Rosie in the Platina Armor Bikini has shorter legs and smaller feet and has to have a special material zone that includes everything under her boots - they're made for Genesis 8F and don't convert in the right spot so her feet stick out the front of the shin of the boot. But I really like those boots, so I used Geometry Editor to make a marquee selection going almost to the top of the boots and assigned the entire region to a new material zone "Hide Legs for Boots" I called it.
Well the Cyberpunk Rosie is wearing Complicated Eve, made for Victoria 3. That converts perfectly. So for the Cyberpunk outfit wearable, I have it make sure that the legs and feet are reverted back to 0 as the wearable is loaded. It also sets "Hide Legs for Boots" material zone to become visible again. Everything I load into most scenes - I go to Display and make it Not visible in simulations. It's a habit I have. Even though I normally don't simulate within my scenery scenes, I still disable them from simulations just out of habit.
This is all very new to me, so I get a bit overjoyed as I discover these fun things - and since I normally don't spend much time on the internet, I'm usually stumbling upon these things as I try new things.
I'm usually "riding a bike" so-to-speak. Animate > Simulate > Simulate > Simulate one more time > set the camera and lighting > Save > Render
But I go through times when I just want to learn. Times like these I explore Daz Studio and try options that I've seen but haven't tried. The developers did a great job of having the interface itself help us discover what it is that the function will do - sometimes just the name of the tool or function gives away what it does - but not always.
Studio is So different from Carrara - or anything else for that matter. But the fact that it includes literally every tool needed to take a model from bare mesh to completed figure makes it a very powerful set of tools for anything we want to achieve using these figures. So sometimes just exploring the Daz 3d documentation for Studio can be a real asset. I've happened upon a lot of functions that I didn't know I'd ever want to use by grazing those pages. Fun stuff!
...and then there's Jay WP Guru Versluis!!! He's an old Carrara colleague of mine! He Rocks!
Don't forget, however, to check out other tutorial contributing PAs. Off the top of my head there's RiversoftArt, Sickleyield and Esha, weho give wonderful advise about a good many things.
Daz 3d Help Tutorials are fricken Awesome too!
Ah, I see! I've spotted it before, but never looked into it. I have GraphMate too, but never took it out of the garage either. I always assumed they were just complex alternatives to PowerPose, still limited by the DAZ IK implementation, in the same way. DAZ IK is what I'm strugling with at the moment. Do you find the Graph Editor is more obedient that PowerPose?
I have a man smoking a cigarette. His hand is near his face. The butt is near his lips. I can't get it any closer. An hour's fiddling made no improvement. DAZ IK has a mind of its own. Turning it off only results in disabling the XYZ Transition tool. Can the Graph Editor overpower DAZ IK? or is it bound by the same restrictions?
This brings up some funny points about me.
I have never tried PowerPose or have any clue how it works. I'm only slightly experienced with Puppeteer - I just don't get a groove working with that - though I'm glad it's there. Some day....
IK is something that I never quite got to grips with either. In fact I tried using it to keep Rosie's hand on the steering wheel for me. Nope. Just didn't work.
So, here's how I solve your cigarette problem:
Hmmm... the hand isn't getting into position, eh? I'll try the morphforms (Arms Front-Back, etc.,) Hmmm... I'm not seeing anything that works. What I need is something that can rotate the arms a bit and bend the forearm more... yeah... that's it. Save the scene and start a new one.
Now repeat this process for any other joint controls you'd like to have to help edit animations and poses. Works like a charm, and making a whole bunch of these takes very little time - so take your time and just do it right the first time!
In your case, you'll want one that controls the bending of the elbow - but I went much further than that and made controls to bend and twist almost all joints of the figure - including the hands.
Speaking of hands, I made a bunch of hand controllers for their pose. I didn't do it this way yet, but we can load in the base figure, apply a hand pose from the library, and save that to a dial. We can also do this for the whole figure if we wanted to. But....
Okay so to make this work on your saved figure (and any figure using this base), when you're done making dials for the day, go Save As > Figure/Prop Asset > Morph Asset
Create a new folder with your name or handle or whatever. Just make it unique and something you recognize.
Come up with a Name for your collection of dials. Every time you make a new one, you'll want to save them to the same "Product" name - or you'll end up with a mess and won't know where stuff is.
In the pop-up window, open the hierarchy of the figure to Pose > Arms (and any other locations you may have saved to) and select only the dials you've made this session.
Done.
Now, I said to save make the example under Pose > Arms as an example. Buit here's where some real power comes into this. We can make our own groups to contain our properties. Mine are as follows:
Majority of adjusters that bend or rotate any joint - I save these under Pose > Anim + (my name - make up your own!!!) LOL
That makes it easier to make a bunch of little tweaks without having to switch to different categories, but it can get cluttered - so you might want to keep things differently. I'm just telling you this as an example.
Pose > Hands > Anim + holds my hand posing dials. (I rotate the joints of the fingers to create a nice, natural pose and make a dial out of it - I also have one for each hand that closes in one direction, opens in the other)
Pose > Legs > Anim + holds my thigh twist, bend. Shin bend, etc., but I left Foot Bends in the main Anim + mentioned above
Pose Head > Anim + holds expressions that I've made
To create your custom group, in the "Location" (or is it called Address?) field, when making the New Property, Type the new name of your group. You only need to do this once, after which we select it to make a new property.
Example: To make my main Pose > Anim + group, I started by clicking on Pose, then immediately right-click to make the new property. By default, the Location field will be "Pose"
Click after Pose and type (without quotes, of course) "/His X
This first property will now reside there.
Now that you've made a new group, you can also place dials that you've made prior to this into that group by editing the properties of the group.
So if I wanted a His X in the Head category too, I'd start by clicking on Head (Pose > Head) right-click > create new property. etc., etc., etc.,
Questions? Just ask. I was typing from memory because Daz Studio is busy at the moment.
Well, I'll need to read this a time or two! Thanks!
Here's another helpful tip I did for Rosie's dual pistol blasters:
I loaded in each blaster - I'm using the older Poser Nightshift Arms collection, so I used my collection of jgreenlees shaders to give them some yummy Iray bliss!
I loaded the parent-to-hand versions so, since they were made for V4 I had to tweak where the fit the hands
I took my time and make a nice pose for each hand - how it should look when she's using them - finger on the trigger
For this I just used the morphforms, like grasp, fist, index bend, etc.,
When I was all done, I went Save As > Wearable
I selected the two blasters and then went into the Pose tab, where we have to enable saving pose data. By default, I think the whole figure's hierarchy is checked, so I delect that top one to deselect everything. Then I open up the hierarchy to the hands and just put a check in each hand, which in turn selects the entire hand hierarchy.
So now whenever I want her to have her blasters in hand, I hide or delete them from her holsters, select her (Rosie 7) and apply the wearable.
Tip:
If I'm animating her getting the blasters from the holsters, I first animate her getting her hands into position of the handles of the blasters, and then load the wearble, so the pose and the parented guns load at that place in time.
I select each blaster in turn and set the 0 frame tweener to "Constant" in the timeline. At that 0 frame in time, I set the scale of the ones parented to her hands to 0
At the point in time when I want to make the switch, I set them to 100 and set the holstered guns to 0
Bam.
There is another way - we can use aniMate 2 to parent change the parentiung behavior of the guns. How it does this? No idea. Works great though. For this example, however, I prefer the above method.
This whole method that I explained above is the magic that makes animating in Daz Studio really fun and effective for me - and I get pretty much just what I'm trying to achieve in very little time. Then I can set the hair to simulate and go hang out with my awesome wife and cool little dog! And hour or so later it's done and I can have the shirt done while I sharpen a pencil, set the lights and camera and get the render going. Bam!
dForce and aniMate 2+
Okay this is all straight from the library. I don't have my Anim + helpers on Genesis 8 Male yet, so this is straight off the shelf.
Josh Crockett's Outlander HD running Reisormocap's Walk Stop Turn aniBlock (Ambient Moves Collection) stopped before the full turn splicing in the Idles A aniBlock from the same collection.
Cyber Arms!!!
dForce Zeus War Outfit - no changing of any settings - just ran dForce.
Animation rendering as we speak - the simulation turned out pretty darned good!
EDIT: I did shorten the arms all the way and used Legs Spread to separate Outlanders awesome creature feet better. With my Anim + dials, I'll be able to really make those cool feet come to life!
He's awesome! He emotes really well across this animation. Should be showing off the outcome of all this stuff fairly soon
What Daz needs is a good quality FK/IK system with a full set of constraints. But why reinvent the wheel when it's available for free in Blender. I've had some success round-tripping animation to/from Daz, using Diffeomorphic (its simple rig). I understand the massive convenience of having your assets in Daz and rendering there though. It's a long way from one click into Blender, one click back to Daz, which would be ideal.
I'm not sure the hard part is actually doing it. The hard part is figuring out HOW to do it. For me, anyway. I spend a year learning what would take me two weeks with a book and a classroom.
I second this. It was easier for me to overcome the shortcomings of DS's lack of proper anim tools than to continue dicking around trying to figure out what to do. Blender is truly amazing but you have to admit that it has a lot of its own absurdity to overcome.
Blender has potential as a DAZ animation tool, but as I said earlier, I want to drive the car, not become a mechanic. Cascadeur looks like it's a bit more targeted to this job. Right now I'm trying to get a grip on the basics. Personally I find iClone's pose tool to be easy enough to use, but iClone's not ideal at import/export.
Animation can be used for website banners for web design.
I Created a new animated video banner for my website tonight made with daz studio post worked with Adobe InDesign
ivysdomain.com
Thank you, Ivy. That's quite a website, and quite a collection of work.
I currently use Deepmotion for motion capture (body) and Face Mojo for face capture via my smart phone.
Only issue is that they dont work with Genesis 9 so far.
https://www.deepmotion.com/
https://www.daz3d.com/face-mojo--facial-mocap-retargeting-genesis-3-and-8-bundle
It has been my experience that the iPhone will not register the raising of a single eyebrow. It's either both eyebrows, or none at all. Have you noticed this?
I don't think it does anymore, no. The UI is much more rational and usable now. It's just a question of learning. You do that by repetition and trying to get something done (undirected learning, i.e. where you don't have a specific goal, is a terrible way to learn anything imho). You have to put hundreds or thousands of hours into it to become good at it of course. I've probably done that with Daz. Blender is a way off but I've got my head around the basics and even some moderately advanced things, like rigging splines.
Thank you. its just one of the many uses for animation right :)
Remember, Daz is making money by model shop, not by software. Just get your Daz model to other tools for animation.