Animated Dynamic Clothing Technique (proof of concept)

Diomede

@PhilW - I've always been able to address explosions eventually by adjusting settings. The margi setting has usually been most important for me.

@Stringtheory - I don't remember all the specific saving methods that I tried but I know I tried several. I will see if I can find some old files and give it another try.

JoeMamma2000

PhilW said:

It's been almost two months since this discussion was active - is anyone still playing with this or using it? Are you finding stable solutions, or is it all proving too difficult?

For me at least, the answer is this:

I've pretty much resolved all of the instabilities and other problems, and yes, it does work. Here's a simple full body anim, and even with 6 or 7 under armor pieces and a clingy cloth it seems to work fine. No instabilities, no explosions, and the cloth is behaving fine. Well, considering DAZ hasn't implemented cloth damping yet and you get a lot of wigglies... :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iglheHTqspQ

I've seen a number of fairly stiff cloth sims that don't really test the methodology (not a lot of collision points for Bullet to calculate), but I'm fairly convinced that even with a clingy fabric (lots of collisions for Bullet to calculate) it does work fine.

My problem is that it's just too much of a pain to put it all together. :) :)

If you have a lot of time and patience, then yes, it seems to be a workable solution, even for a full body animation. But to get there, and do all the fine tweaks of the under armor at the joints, and get all the correct settings and all of the under armor pieces arranged, etc., it's just too much of a pain. At least for me.

Especially when you consider that all of this Bullet collision stuff with moving characters was once working fine and DAZ disabled it, and they could probably re-enable it in short order and make all of this annoyance go away. For me that's the really frustrating part. And it's probably the #1 indication to me that DAZ has given up on Carrara completely. You just can't have a 3D software with a cloth feature that doesn't work with animations. That's just crazy.

Sorry for the negativity. But it's true. :) :)

So for any animated cloth, I'd probably recommend going elsewhere (like Poser, or the Blender import route, or maybe iClone, though I haven't tried it).

JoeMamma2000

diomede64 said:

@PhilW - I've always been able to address explosions eventually by adjusting settings. The margi setting has usually been most important for me.

Yes, and if you go thru my old posts on dynamic cloth I explain why some of the basic physics settings that most people tend to ignore are the most critical in a successful cloth sim. Such as margin, like Diomede64 says. You MUST set the margin low enough so that it's lower than the distance between the cloth vertices AND the distance between the cloth and collision object. Or else it will explode as the Bullet solver tries to push the vertices apart to be greater than the collision distance.

PhilW

I think you may be right that it is too much hassle - I would really like a workable solution within Carrara, and the under-armour solution works better than most, but still not fast and stable enough. I have had to increase simulation accuracy which helps stabilise the calculations somewhat, but at the expense of quite long calculation times, and even then I am getting explosions well into the calculations, just when you think it will finish without any issues. The cycle of trial and error is just too great. My personal solution for this on a proper project would be to use Marvelous Designer, which is fast and stable and I find quite easy to use. Although I am still on version 2 as I don't like the subscription model that they subsequently introduced.

stringtheory9

PhilW said:

I think you may be right that it is too much hassle - I would really like a workable solution within Carrara, and the under-armour solution works better than most, but still not fast and stable enough. I have had to increase simulation accuracy which helps stabilise the calculations somewhat, but at the expense of quite long calculation times, and even then I am getting explosions well into the calculations, just when you think it will finish without any issues. The cycle of trial and error is just too great. My personal solution for this on a proper project would be to use Marvelous Designer, which is fast and stable and I find quite easy to use. Although I am still on version 2 as I don't like the subscription model that they subsequently introduced.

Do you have collision turned off on the animated characters? What you are describing sounds like it might still be on.

PhilW

stringtheory9 said:

PhilW said:

I think you may be right that it is too much hassle - I would really like a workable solution within Carrara, and the under-armour solution works better than most, but still not fast and stable enough. I have had to increase simulation accuracy which helps stabilise the calculations somewhat, but at the expense of quite long calculation times, and even then I am getting explosions well into the calculations, just when you think it will finish without any issues. The cycle of trial and error is just too great. My personal solution for this on a proper project would be to use Marvelous Designer, which is fast and stable and I find quite easy to use. Although I am still on version 2 as I don't like the subscription model that they subsequently introduced.

Do you have collision turned off on the animated characters? What you are describing sounds like it might still be on.

Yes, it is turned off. I have a walk animation where the skirt works fine for 2-3 secs and then expodes and I have tried numerous possible settings, all with the same result. Actually while writing this, I thought of something and checked, and lo, the explosion happens where the NLA Clip that I am using loops! So it may be a glitch in the looping, rather than an issue with the cloth solution per se. I might have another look tomorrow.

stringtheory9

PhilW said:

...and lo, the explosion happens where the NLA Clip that I am using loops! So it may be a glitch in the looping, rather than an issue with the cloth solution per se. I might have another look tomorrow.

Very interesting. All my efforts so far have involved single cycle mocaps so I had not run across this. If you do do some more work on this I've found that a good troubleshooting technique is to delete the outercloth and look at the simulation with only the undercloth. If that is clean then typically so is the sim with outercloth; unless a hand goes through a hip or something like that (not factoring in NLA glitch).

JoeMamma2000

PhilW said:

My personal solution for this on a proper project would be to use Marvelous Designer, which is fast and stable and I find quite easy to use. Although I am still on version 2 as I don't like the subscription model that they subsequently introduced.

Yeah, it doesn't get much better than MD. But I assumed there weren't many other users of MD here. Maybe I'm wrong. It blows the shorts off of any other solution I mentioned. No reason to even think about Carrara cloth if you have MD.

And yeah, the subscription model pretty much sucks all around, but nowadays it's all about boosting revenues by coming up with what appears on the surface to be awesome for users when in fact it sucks in the long term. People will always fall for the "cheap in the short term, expensive in the long term" option.

As far as stability issues with the under armor solution, based on my tests and results I think there's a good chance of incorrect settings or user error if you're having stability problems. I found it to be very stable IF you have everything dialed in correctly. But there are a lot of things to remember to dial in correctly, hence my frustration with the method.

Persona Non Grata

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PhilW

Thanks - but I have moved on from what I was doing with this four years ago.

Persona Non Grata

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WendyLuvsCatz

Still useful to know TY as I often use the native soft body physics too,

And want to do quick renders

while VWD is great for animations, for modeling soft body keeps vertex order so my choice if creating morph targets etc and generally behaves better than that DAZ studio Dforce!

PhilW

Selinita said:

When I said 'you,' I meant everyone who reads this forum, I hung the comment on your post as it stated succintly the difficulty with rendering cloth simulations.

Sorry for being facetious, and thanks for sharing the info.

Mistara

n/m

Persona Non Grata

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PhilW

Selinita said:

PHILW: I'm no expert, but I'm able to achieve some pretty impressive renders just using the basic tools that Carrara offers and I'm still learning! I hope I don't get to the point when I feel I have to 'move on' for this is a beautiful hobby for me to keep my brain active and delight my small sense of artistry. I can appreciate that people have 'off-days' so thank you for your honesty.

Indeed! I am still a big fan of Carrara and use it a lot in making products for my Daz store. And it still has many tools that Daz Studio does not have or that don't work as well as they do in Carrara.

Persona Non Grata

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Mistara

Selinita said:

PhilW said:

..The big issue I seem to have now is that the cloth animation is showing in the assemble room, but when I render, the cloth stays in its frame 0 position throughout...

I've been having this particular problem recently and found that by setting the SoftBody 'Smoothing' parameter to 0 clears the fault and the cloth will animate and render as expected using the Photorealistic render. I completed a quick experiment involving a cloth simulation with Smoothing set to 1, tried to render - no go, then reduced this setting to 0 and it rendered??? I haven't tried the reverse; ie complete a simulation with 0 as the setting and then trying to render with it set on a higher value... I just thought I'd share that with you.

smoothing above 0 effects the render frames?

Mistara

Selinita said:

Confirmation ...

I deliberately ran many sims with theSoftBody 'Smoothing' factor higher than 0 and then set it to 0 prior to Photorealistic render...

It seems to work OK!

very kewl lookin!

Mistara

nla glitches?

is it better to stick with keyframes?

PhilW

I find NLA Clips really useful for re-usable movements and looping movements like walks. The benefits are less clear cut for bespoke animation segments so for those, sticking with keyframed is fine.

Diomede

returning to an older topic within the thread, I seem to recall that I had two basic problems with the "softbody on softbody" undersuit approach.  Each problem had signs of hope when I abandoned the process in favor of VWD.

1) My Carrara saves did not preserve my named polygon groups, making it difficult to reuse a undersuits.

2) Attaching a multipanel undersuit to a rigging would rotate the parts at the middle of a bone instead of at the joints connecting bones.

 

The first problem seemed to be primarily a SAVE issue when dragging to the object browser.  Andy (3DAge) indicated that using SAVE AS and saving to a separate file would preserve the named polygon groups.

The second problem might be solved by using helper objects, at least (Marcus or StringTheory) seemed to think so.

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WendyLuvsCatz

I am testing on a morphing vertex object and it is colliding with the morphs

not well as once it pokes all is lost but it definitely influences it

so importing a figure's poses as a series of morphs might work

maybe someone can make us an obj series exporter with morphs and skinning since Fenric's never worked

WendyLuvsCatz

this is taking an eternity to simmulate but I actually managed to find settings in the soft body modifier and effects tab that work with a morphing object

I found 300% Self collision is needed and no pressure any pressure it flies off

stiffness and bending low but not too low 1% OK

advanced more is better but over 50% it exponentially crawls to a stop

drag and lift I put at 100%

and in effects density and friction 100% bounce 0 on both objects

 

Mistara

cant test anymore without a shot or 2 of jamiesons

WendyLuvsCatz

this is painfully slow but working

those poke bits it pops over again each frame snip caught it mid pop

WendyLuvsCatz

printscreen got me it popped in place

WendyLuvsCatz

guess what

it doesn't render!

I will try Octane next but not in Carrara engine

bummer

yes it renders in Octane

well rats hopefully you can in Luxrender too

the scene file

https://app.box.com/s/efhzgpjhgy6pzcf9zuxgfobehukdefm8

Mistara

SadKitty_Carrara said:

guess what

it doesn't render!

I will try Octane next but not in Carrara engine

bummer

yes it renders in Octane

well rats hopefully you can in Luxrender too

the scene file

https://app.box.com/s/efhzgpjhgy6pzcf9zuxgfobehukdefm8

dodyou try the change smooth trick?  Think it was change to 0 at render time

WendyLuvsCatz

Mystarra said:

SadKitty_Carrara said:

guess what

it doesn't render!

I will try Octane next but not in Carrara engine

bummer

yes it renders in Octane

well rats hopefully you can in Luxrender too

the scene file

https://app.box.com/s/efhzgpjhgy6pzcf9zuxgfobehukdefm8

dodyou try the change smooth trick?  Think it was change to 0 at render time

mmm I have smoothing will look again THX