A few beginners' questions on collisions, intersections, floor management...

funwrestling

Hello,

Here is my plan for my first Daz 3D project:

1. I want to assemble a set of (gym) rectange mats on the floor of a room.
2. Then, I want to add 2 characters wrestling together on those mats.

Here are a few questions regarding the methodology I should use:

a - How to assemble the mats if I need to assemble 24 of them for example. Can I assemble 4 of them and them duplicate that assembly 6 times?

b - How do I make sure every mat is at the same distance from the surroounding mats? In other words, I want all my mats to be perfectly aligned and I want no space between each of them. How do I make sure they are positioned exactly the same with respect to each other and there is not one that has more or less space, or another one that is not perfertly aligned with the other mats.

c -Basically, is there a way to integrate collision management in Daz 3D? It would enable me to position the mats on the floor - and not 1 inche or whatever above it. Anyway, how can I make my mats are exactly at level 0, on the ground and not floating above it or having different mats at a different distance from the floor?

That same question apply to the wrestlers: how do I know when their body parts touch the mats and won't go through the thickness of the mat materials? Again, I'm a beginner, but I'm sure there must be a way to manage both the interaction with the floor or between figures and objects? How can I manage those collisions, intersections, interdependances?

 

 

Richard Haseltine

The Align pane (Window>Panes(Tabs)>Align) can be used to line things up by their bounding boxes (the box the item just fits inside, including any protruberences, which may not be what you want with a complex shape). However, a set of perfectly rectangular mats perfectly aligned and butted is not going to look realistic - you may well want to break the alignment slightly. You can also set up a smaller number of mats, group them and duplicate them from the Edit>Duplicate menu.

DS does support colision via the Smoothing Modifier, but it's a mesh deformer rather than an alignment tool and works against only one oter item at a time. There aren't, that I know of, any quick ways to align figures - though something that may make life easier is to temporarily set them to contrasting colours (using the Diffuse or Base colour setting in the Editor tab of the Surfaces pane, with the figure selected in the list on the left of the pane). When done reapply the original material settings for the character.

Petercat

I'll add this to what Richard said: Since mats do give under pressure, you don't want your figures resting on top of them, either. Fingers and toes, yes, but if you have the more weight-bearing parts such as elbows, knees and hips barely touching the mats, it won't look very realistic either.

I haven't used the Geometry Editor tool much, but there may be a way to deform the mats at the point of contact to look more realistic. Richard or Will Timmons would know more about the possibilities than I do.

nonesuch00

You should know that if you're using animate aniBlocks that the wrestling poses and aniBlocks don't work on Genesis 3. You can look for a converter but I'm not sure if there is one in the DAZ Store.

For deforming the mats:

http://www.daz3d.com/simtenero-shape-reprojector

You've a lot of work ahead of you. I don't know that I wouldn't prepare the animations nd models in DAZ Studio & Blender but use the Unity 3D engine to do the physics & animation. You would have to use a frame capture app to capture the playback in Unity or a Unity plugin to do that and save it as a movie file since Unity is more of a game engine.

Richard Haseltine

nonesuch00 said:

For deforming the mats:

http://www.daz3d.com/simtenero-shape-reprojector

Note that the mats will have to have enough mesh-resolution for this (or soemthing like a DForm) to help - tools for reshaping mesh work on the vertices, where the strong lines in a wireframe view cross, so if you use 1 division cubes for your mats (a vertex at each corner) you will not be able to dent them in.

nonesuch00

Thanks, I mght try that too someday.

funwrestling

Ok, let me rephrase my need and simplify it.

So everybody understood my goal is to have two wrestlers wrestling on the ground. Please note that I am not looking for any mat deformation: I don't need that and this is far too advanced for my beginner level.

I'm actually struggling to make sure my wrestlers remain on a same plane. Be it on a sand beach, on a wrestling mat or whatever floor. Each wrestler has many fullcrums (I hope this is the right English word: I mean places where theyr body parts touch the floor). One of them might have only one hand, his torso, his knees and only one foot touching the floor, while the other might straddle him on the back and mainly have his lower legs and knees in contact with the floor/mats.

How do I make sure all these fullcrums are at the same level?

Hence my initial question on collision for my plan was to define a plane through which nothing could penetrate. That "blocking plane" woud then be like a bumper making sure all body parts are stopped on the plane and can't go lower. But my methodology is thought without knowing how Daz 3D should be used to that extent. I hope this is not what lead you to a wrong route to answer my question.

Thanks for your feedback.

Richard Haseltine

I am not aware of any tool to help with that, though you might check the scripts in the Freebies forum by Casual (or even contact him directly by PM) as he does a lot of animation-related scripting.

barbult

I don't think I'm allowed to post an offsite link, but just Google search for "mcasual script" and you'll find his homepage listing lots and lots of scripts. I use mcjDropToTop all the time to position one object on top of another. I also use mcjJump to move one object to the same position as another object.

nonesuch00

Yes, the McCasual or export them to Blender & do the animation there. If you are a PC+ member chevk if Carrara is on sale.

Chohole

barbult said:

I don't think I'm allowed to post an offsite link, but just Google search for "mcasual script" and you'll find his homepage listing lots and lots of scripts. I use mcjDropToTop all the time to position one object on top of another. I also use mcjJump to move one object to the same position as another object.

McCasual has all his scripts listed and posted in the freebie forum here.   AS Richard says   contact him by PM if you can't find one in his list of scripts 

This is a link to his site

https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts6/mcjfx

And this is a link ti him, if You want to contact him by PM   http://www.daz3d.com/forums/profile/358729/mCasual