Secrets of Poke-Through (Smoothing & Collision Detection)?

Gator

Updated title - not Autofit, as it's a G3F clothing item on a G3F figure.

Sometimes Smoothing & Collision Detection works wonderfully, sometimes not.

I have Outoftouch's Superhose for G3F.  For Victoria 7, it worked wonderfully.  For Lien by Fred Winkler which requires Mei Lin, not so much.

What has me scratching my head is that it looks perfect in the preview window.  But when it renders, there's lots of poke through all over the place.  I've messed around trying both Base Shape Matching and Generic for the Smoothing Type, and bumping up smoothing iterations as high as 100.  It has some morphs which don't work very well in her case.  Not to sound too picky, but with stockings a smooth fit is essential since it's partially transparent. 

It's a Genesis 3 clothing item on a Genesis 3 figure - seems it should work better.  Am I missing anything?

oomu

Preview is not showing everything. For example, you don't see displacement. A shader can have displacement value which will create "poke" when rendering.

Don't put high value in Smoothing. Smoothing is in fact making the mesh more and more flat until it has no shape anymore. Beyond 8, it's often worse.

 

A quick (and dirty) way to avoid poke is to add a "push modifer" to your object (the cloth):

Select the object (for example SuperHose cloth), and go to menu Edit / Geometry / Add Push Modifier...

The object will be much "thicker". You go in your parameters panel , you will find a new category "Push Modifier", try a 0.1 value for example. It's often enough to avoid poke, but not too much thick to be weird.

-

Some cloths are made with a custom morph to "push" their boundaries.

-

If your character is very "difficult" (a crazy custom shape like for example a Dwarf or a Monster with a scaly skin), you will need to use DFormer or to create a custom morph for the cloth with a tool like ZBrush (it's not that horrible once you have learn the workflow to export, touch and reimport to create a morph).

SpottedKitty

Does the G3F under the clothes have Displacement on the skin surfaces? Are you rendering in 3Delight or Iray? If that's the problem, then it isn't a Mesh Smoothing glitch after all, it's the Displacement.

One other possibility, it isn't the Smoothing Iterations parameter on its own you should be tweaking, use the Collision Iterations as well. I've sometimes had to play around a bit until I get values that work, and note that there's no such thing as a One True Value — every combination of clothes and figure morph will be different, and sometimes the pose will have an effect as well.

Gator

oomu said:

Preview is not showing everything. For example, you don't see displacement. A shader can have displacement value which will create "poke" when rendering.

Don't put high value in Smoothing. Smoothing is in fact making the mesh more and more flat until it has no shape anymore. Beyond 8, it's often worse.

 

A quick (and dirty) way to avoid poke is to add a "push modifer" to your object (the cloth):

Select the object (for example SuperHose cloth), and go to menu Edit / Geometry / Add Push Modifier...

The object will be much "thicker". You go in your parameters panel , you will find a new category "Push Modifier", try a 0.1 value for example. It's often enough to avoid poke, but not too much thick to be weird.

-

Some cloths are made with a custom morph to "push" their boundaries.

-

If your character is very "difficult" (a crazy custom shape like for example a Dwarf or a Monster with a scaly skin), you will need to use DFormer or to create a custom morph for the cloth with a tool like ZBrush (it's not that horrible once you have learn the workflow to export, touch and reimport to create a morph).

GREAT trick!  The push modifier worked wonderfully!  Thanks! 

Gator

SpottedKitty said:

Does the G3F under the clothes have Displacement on the skin surfaces? Are you rendering in 3Delight or Iray? If that's the problem, then it isn't a Mesh Smoothing glitch after all, it's the Displacement.

One other possibility, it isn't the Smoothing Iterations parameter on its own you should be tweaking, use the Collision Iterations as well. I've sometimes had to play around a bit until I get values that work, and note that there's no such thing as a One True Value — every combination of clothes and figure morph will be different, and sometimes the pose will have an effect as well.

I checked, this figure didn't have displacement set on any of the skin surfaces.  Thanks for the pointer.

RobotHeadArt

The source is the HD morphs on the character.  If you change the Render SubD Level on the character from 3 to 1 you will see the poke through go away (just tested it with the character and clothing item you mentioned).  Since this SubD doesn't show up outside of render time, that's why there is no poke through in the view port.

Another tip with using push modifiers to correct this is that you can weight map paint them so the push modifier can be applied to only the parts of the clothing (say just the toes) instead of uniformly across the whole clothing item.

Gator

RobotHeadArt said:

The source is the HD morphs on the character.  If you change the Render SubD Level on the character from 3 to 1 you will see the poke through go away (just tested it with the character and clothing item you mentioned).  Since this SubD doesn't show up outside of render time, that's why there is no poke through in the view port.

Another tip with using push modifiers to correct this is that you can weight map paint them so the push modifier can be applied to only the parts of the clothing (say just the toes) instead of uniformly across the whole clothing item.

Thanks, but "weight map paint them" - afraid I don't know what you mean.

fibyken

oomu said:

Preview is not showing everything. For example, you don't see displacement. A shader can have displacement value which will create "poke" when rendering.

Don't put high value in Smoothing. Smoothing is in fact making the mesh more and more flat until it has no shape anymore. Beyond 8, it's often worse.

 

A quick (and dirty) way to avoid poke is to add a "push modifer" to your object (the cloth):

Select the object (for example SuperHose cloth), and go to menu Edit / Geometry / Add Push Modifier...

The object will be much "thicker". You go in your parameters panel , you will find a new category "Push Modifier", try a 0.1 value for example. It's often enough to avoid poke, but not too much thick to be weird.

-

Some cloths are made with a custom morph to "push" their boundaries.

-

If your character is very "difficult" (a crazy custom shape like for example a Dwarf or a Monster with a scaly skin), you will need to use DFormer or to create a custom morph for the cloth with a tool like ZBrush (it's not that horrible once you have learn the workflow to export, touch and reimport to create a morph).

Thank you, this worked like a charm for me!

dijitul

A trick which sometimes worked for me was to add a geoshell to the figure, then reset the geoshell surfaces to default (no mats/bumps/displacements), and set 0 cutout to make them all invisible.  Next, set the collision of the clothing object to the shell instead of the main figure.  Now, you can go adjust the offset of the shell to increase collision surface height and that might take care of minor poke-throughs.  This may be the equivalent of the push modifier solution as well, not sure because I've not used push modifiers often enough.