Digital Art Zone

Hi.  Does anyone have any tips on how to approach posing loose fitting clothing (say a long dress) through an animation with significant movement (like dancing with lots of knee lifting moves)?

I understand some of the ways to fix or hide poke through, which makes it less critical for the dress to follow exactly.

But (for example), when the genesis figure picks up its knee in a dance step, the dress doesn’t even vaguely follow, and the bend knee morph doesn’t help much.

Is the best approach simply to make morphs for all of the extreme movements and then dial those in manually?

Are magnets (which I haven’t used much) a better alternative?

Other ideas or suggestions?

Thanks

I myself with Poser7 would save it as an object, seperate the skirt in the vertex room by deleting the rest and export it as an obj to Poser and do a dynamic sim with a similar sized V4 doing the same animation then run the dyntomorph py script and import the pz3 file and line it up resizing if needed, a bit bigger and perhaps slightly higher and turn down opacity on the original skirt.

you could try it with Carrara bullet softbody but do not expect much!
some skirts that are autofitted follow leg movement
you can also line up a skirt obj, select it and Genesis hip go to animation, attach skeleton
another posibility is getting the handles or leg morphs to track Genesis’s leg movements with the track modifier, I tried it and it half worked.
very simple animations with keyframed adjustments prob the only accurate way to do it.

What Wendy said.

Use Poser or equivalent. Personally, I think using conforming clothing for a loose fitting gown should be illegal. It will look so hokey and stiff that people will just snicker.

(BTW, I’m just joking a little to exaggerate a point, I’m not saying people will snicker at you, and I’m not saying anything bad about you whatsoever for choosing to use conforming clothing for something like this, I’m merely stating an opinion (though a fairly factual opinion) that a loose gown with conforming clothing will probably look very stiff and unnatural. Again, please don’t take this as anything negative against you.)

Anyway, unfortunately the latest Carrara cloth/Bullet beta is also hindered by the fact that cloth doesn’t collide with a moving base object, it just falls right thru. It collides with static base object, but as soon as they move there’s no more collision. That’s why Poser is about your only choice I think.

What Wendy and Joe said ...

There are some more alternatives:

- if you can find a suiting Optitex dress: DAZ Studio and its clothing sim is an alternative
- Marvelous Designer is also a possibility

Those work-arounds are a tedious process (all of them Poser, DAZ optitex, MD), but not so tedious as the alternative of setting up morphs and keyframing almost every frame.

Thanks for the replies - and no offense taken.  Conforming a loose flowing dress might well be grounds for ridicule.  I’m just looking for some practical starting points.  Then I’ll test different methods to see what works and is practical for my needs

One method I wanted to try was making morphs for different poses, but I haven’t been able to add one to the elven dress.  Not sure if that’s because the figure is ‘locked’ - get pop up warning ‘this edition is limited as this object has its topology protected - but even after going to View and unchecking Protect Topology, I still couldn’t add a morph.

Tried this with another clothing figure for genesis - and after unchecking protect topology, I can adjust vertices after creating a morph, but the morph doesn’t seem to take right - it either resets the geometry or leaves it in changed state, but the morphing slider doesn’t affect anything inside the Animation Tab and the new morphing area doesn’t even show up back in assemble room.

Any ideas if this is a bug or a limitation of ‘protected’ clothing even after unprotecting the topology?

Mosk the Scribe - 18 July 2012 06:19 PM

Thanks for the replies - and no offense taken.  Conforming a loose flowing dress might well be grounds for ridicule.  I’m just looking for some practical starting points.  Then I’ll test different methods to see what works and is practical for my needs

The first solution would be dynamic clothing. Keyframing will drive you mad.

On your other problems I can give no qualified answer, because “dynamics is your best choice”

On the posing, maybe clothify and drape - I do have Poser Pro 2010 - but I’ve had such poor luck with that program, I usually steer clear of it.  I’ve made some walk cycles but face room has been a flop even when using approved figures and haven’t tried clothifying and DAZ clothing and seeing if could get back out.

Don’t mind trying if someone can spell out simple steps.

On the morphing - doesn’t seem like I can morph any DAZ content in C8.5 - working fine in C8.1 Pro, however.

Is this a bug or is morphing working ok for others?

that Elven dress is a total PITA BTW
it falls apart in Poser as it is seperate meshes, even the skirt
has the most limiting morphs for posing
was playing with it already for BlumBlumShub in Daz studio,
just did a render in studio hiding the skirt and using Optitex Queen of Ages dress hiding the top
not terribly good
pretty much impossible to do in Carrara!
yeah morph targets on rigged garments can only be done modifying existing morphs, otherwise save dress as an obj and rig it to the figure using attach skeleton
see my tutorial for conforming prop hair
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mpWQwSxH_M
you can create what morphs you like then
and if you save an obj with the desired morphs you can load it as a morph target on the other obj

http://forumarchive.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=155230&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
some info on Poser and DS3 Optitex Dazcollada exports, does not work in DS4
http://forumarchive.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=145308&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
getting the elusive dyntomorphs script is another story
http://forumarchive.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=1519090&sid=c092b1f0d1855aeacfc5d79685c6f472
the Daz tutorial link no longer exists
it has a copyright so I cannot share it but according to this thread it is hidden in Poserpro