Digital Art Zone

Dear DAZ team…

I love your product(s)!

I am an artist who has worked in the 3D animation field (I worked for Netter Digital of “Babylon 5” fame) using Newtek “Lightwave”. I always wanted to continue after Netter Digital closed, but could not afford the money Newtek wanted for the full program (the cheaper student version is just not the same).

In playing with the morphs in DAZ, it was very easy to do a “Bruce Banner to Hulk” animation. I wasn’t able to animate the changing of the skin color, but I “faked” it by adding a green distant light and adjust the levels during the transformation (of course this wouldn’t work with a background as everything would turn green).

Besides the morphing of colors, I think it would be very cool if you developed a “Dynamic Tears and Rips” for clothing and such, using control rings to adjust the length and opening of the tears as you animate. This would be useful in animations where a character grows to big for the clothing being worn, sword-fights (getting slashed), and other scenes that would call for cloth being ripped or torn…Perfect for a scene where Pirates slice a flag of a conquered ship…The possibilities are great!

Just something to think about.

Keep up the good work!
Sincerely
Rob Sherlin

This would be amazing, but I doubt it is possible. Maybe I am wrong. I would love to see more dynamic features like this someday.

I don’t think such a thing would be possible with Optitex. Although it is shilled as being an ultra realistic dynamic cloth solution, it’s really only made for clean catwalk fashion, and nothing else. It does everything aside from tears, rips, or even animated buttons/zips/etc.

What Daz Studio really needs is a standard physics engine, such as Bullet (which Carrara and Blender uses) or PhysX (used by most modern PC games like Mirrors Edge & Batman Arkham City). Both support soft-body physics, which can be used to simulate cloth and other soft/squishy surfaces. Both support the tearing/ripping of surfaces.

So, yeah, before we can get any truely advanced physics, we need to get a proper physics engine built into Daz. I know a group of people were working on porting Bullet Physics to Daz Studio 3, but they’ve disappeared.

Yeah, the Bullet idea seems to have gone on vacation…

I didn’t know that Bullet was the engine in Carrara…so really how hard would it be?

And there are a couple examples of Bullet in Qt apps… http://www.developer.nokia.com/Develop/Qt/Code_examples/

Plus there’s a Maya plugin and Cinema 4D uses it, too.  So, it seems that Bullet should be the choice of engines and not all that difficult to include.