Digital Art Zone

I don’t use dynamic clothing much, but I have a question for anyone who uses Dynamic Clothing in DS4 with Genesis.  I have DS4 Pro Version.

As far as I know to get dynamic clothing to drape properly in DS4 with Genesis you have to load the item, fit it to Genesis, then fit it to None, then you have to actually pose the figure inside the material zone of the item before draping or it does not drape correctly.  Is this the way it’s still supposed to be done?

I mean it’s easy to do this when you have a figure in a zero pose, but how do you handle a complex pose?  Do you have to manipulate the dynamic clothing zones to correspond to your figure pose before draping?  Isn’t that kind of a time-consuming nightmare—it is for me.  I remember using dynamic clothing in previous versions of DS where you fit the clothing onto the figure, and then draped.  It was simple, quick, and worked well the majority of the time (assuming you had the proper collisions set up).

At this point is there a fix for this awkward, ass-backward workflow in DS4?  Having to drape this way makes the use of dynamic clothing something to avoid.

Most people use an animated drape, it gives by far the best results.

Almost all dynamic clothing is made for V4 or M4, not Genesis, but you do not use the Fit To option as far as I know when using V4 clothing on Genesis.

Fragg1960 - 20 October 2012 10:30 AM

As far as I know to get dynamic clothing to drape properly in DS4 with Genesis you have to load the item, fit it to Genesis, then fit it to None, then you have to actually pose the figure inside the material zone of the item before draping or it does not drape correctly.  Is this the way it’s still supposed to be done?

I mean it’s easy to do this when you have a figure in a zero pose, but how do you handle a complex pose?  Do you have to manipulate the dynamic clothing zones to correspond to your figure pose before draping?  Isn’t that kind of a time-consuming nightmare—it is for me.  I remember using dynamic clothing in previous versions of DS where you fit the clothing onto the figure, and then draped.  It was simple, quick, and worked well the majority of the time (assuming you had the proper collisions set up).

Optitex is upgrading their dynamic clothes for Genesis so that you can use the normal Fit-To option, and the clothing will follow the figure in a normal static drape.  Their upgraded freebies on their site and the Michael 5 dynamic items work just fine. (I think they’ve got other upgrades in the DAZ store, but I don’t have them.)

For other clothing, in a complex pose, you have to do an animated timeline drape, starting with the figure in the clothes, as you describe. You add in the timeline, move the timeline to the last frame (the default is 30, I think, and dynamic clothing seems to need at least that much time), pose the figure wherever you want for that last frame, then move back to the first and start the timeline. The cloth will more or less follow the figure to where it’s going, shaping itself to the pose along the way.

JimmyC_2009 - 20 October 2012 10:39 AM

Most people use an animated drape, it gives by far the best results.

Almost all dynamic clothing is made for V4 or M4, not Genesis, but you do not use the Fit To option as far as I know when using V4 clothing on Genesis.

The Fit-To option is required for older V4/M4 dynamic items on Genesis.  If you don’t, the clothing doesn’t attach to the figure in the dynamic cloth panel, and it will simply fall through the floor where it is when you try to run the timeline. For the clothing that hasn’t been upgraded, as Fragg1960 says, you do Fit-To, then UNdo Fit-To, for older dynamic items.  (If you don’t turn off Fit-To before doing the drape, it wads up instead of fitting to the figure.)

The good news is that for newer items, the Fit-To part works; you may actually need to fit the clothing to the figure, or it may happen automatically if the figure is selected before you add in the clothing, but after making sure the clothing is fitted to the figure, you can leave it alone. It should work just fine in a static drape. 

In the image in this post, everything the guys are wearing—except for Nigel’s kilt, which is Wildenlander—is from the Michael 5 Dynamic Wardrobe. It was all done with static drapes, and didn’t take long at all. (You do have to pay attention and work with the collisions when you have that much dynamic cloth on that many separate figures, because otherwise nothing stays on anything.) Abigail’s clothing is all conforming, because I don’t have items upgraded for V5/Genesis, although there are some out there.

vwrangler:  Thanks for taking time out to explain all that. Glad to hear that Optitex is in the process of making their items work for Genesis.  I guess I could just use M4/V4 with Dynamic items that are not updated (or until fixes kick in).  Thanks again.

My last major image used Genesis and Dynamics with the figure sat.

You are correct in the procedure to get it working with Genesis. The rest is as you say time consuming but after doing a few hard drapes you soon get the hang of it.

For simple pose hey Pose and Drape, drape again for refining, clear if draping isn’t right, drape again. I like to get the drape looking right first in Ds4/4.5 then Freeze the drape, which turns it in to a static mesh. Apply the Smoothing and Collision mod to fix any poke through. That is how I did my last image “The Box” see my sig for my render thread.

If is is a more detailed pose then like a seat you have to do an animated drape not just on the figure but also props. The seat is moved back and down. As the animation takes place the seat/chair moves forward and up colliding with the clothing. I sometimes add another 5 or 10 frames for a static drape after this just to iron out any issues. But again yes it takes time go do poses like this. And some clothing will have more Geometry and will animate more slowly. The Century Nightgown grinds my old system down when do animated drapes.