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Carrara Soft Body Animation Problem

JoepingletonJoepingleton Posts: 746
edited January 2015 in Carrara Discussion

See the animated version at http://youtu.be/-nCChhlg6Yo

This is a screen capture from Carrara showing how the soft body modifier animates the cape. It appears to simulate inside Carrara, but doesn't animate when I try to render it.

Has anyone else ran into this problem?

capeAnimationTest01.jpg
640 x 718 - 132K
Post edited by Joepingleton on

Comments

  • JonstarkJonstark Posts: 2,738
    edited January 2015

    Yes, I have and so has PhilW, in the thread talking about cloth dynamics and using the technique that Stringtheory came up with of having softbody on top of softbody.

    We were the only 2 that reported running into this so far that I know of, so apparently this bug is affection only some of us. I found that if I rendered the scene with Octane that the softbody sim/animation rendered correctly, so it seemed to be a problem with Carrara's internal renderer. I know you've been experimenting with Luxuscore, so you may try rendering it that way to see if using a different external render engine will allow you to render correctly.

    I don't have any explanation for why this is happening so far, or any other workarounds or fixes except using the Octane plugin to render. It's a little mystifying.

    Post edited by Jonstark on
  • JoepingletonJoepingleton Posts: 746
    edited December 1969

    Thanks Jonstark,
    I had tried it in both Carrara's default render engine and Luxuscore and got the same result.

    Your feedback got me thinking that it might be that it was a conforming object that caused the problem. The trick was to export the cape as an .obj file and then import it into Carrara and apply the Soft Body Modifier. I used Wildenlander HD for Genesis 2 Male cape. No hand animation used in this test.

    See the animated solution in action at http://youtu.be/vQuP5DPMCgU

    There are still lots of problems, but its at least a start. ;)

    capeAnim01.jpg
    633 x 573 - 78K
  • JoepingletonJoepingleton Posts: 746
    edited December 1969

    See the animated version at http://youtu.be/oCUN69fX9y8
    This is another experiment in getting Carrara's soft body modifier to work with DAZ clothing. I used Wildenlander HD for Genesis 2 Male cape on a walking Genesis figure. This technique is pretty limited, good for capes and such. It didn't work on dresses or full body clothing. :(

    capeAnim02.jpg
    633 x 573 - 164K
  • PhilWPhilW Posts: 5,139
    edited December 1969

    Cool work with the cloak! I reported the issue to DAZ and I know they have been looking into it, but it was hampered by the fact that they weren't able to reproduce it - so if others also report the same issue, it will help give this some priority.

  • JoeMamma2000JoeMamma2000 Posts: 2,615
    edited December 1969

    I must be dense, but I'm not sure I understand what exactly the issue is....

    What's not working here?

  • PhilWPhilW Posts: 5,139
    edited December 1969

    JoeMamma2000 said:
    I must be dense, but I'm not sure I understand what exactly the issue is....

    What's not working here?

    Soft body simulates OK in the Carrara Assemble room, but when you render it, it renders the same cloth configuration in each frame, so in this case the cloak does not move in the renders, but has been animated OK in the Assembly room. I can render it OK in Octane, just not in Carrara 8.5! It works fine in 8.1, so something broke when they did 8.5. I have logged it as a bug report to DAZ and I know they are looking into it.

  • DiomedeDiomede Posts: 15,079
    edited December 1969

    And part of the problem is that it works for some of us. Works sometimes is one of the worst problems.

  • JoepingletonJoepingleton Posts: 746
    edited December 1969

    Thanks for the info Phil,
    I didn't realize it only happens in Carrara 8.5. Making the conforming object an .obj seems to be a workaround bit its a limited solution.

    Where do I log a bug report?

  • PhilWPhilW Posts: 5,139
    edited December 1969

    joeping said:
    Thanks for the info Phil,
    I didn't realize it only happens in Carrara 8.5. Making the conforming object an .obj seems to be a workaround bit its a limited solution.

    Where do I log a bug report?

    http://www.daz3d.com/help/help-contact-us/
    and select the "Submit a Help Request" item.

  • JoeMamma2000JoeMamma2000 Posts: 2,615
    edited December 1969

    Oh, okay....now I understand.

    Weird. Here's a result I got in 8.5 using a mesh with soft body attach and it seems to work okay.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7HeqSxNDOU&index=3&list=UUPnP33rvCQ-q6p57ZOehdZg

  • JoepingletonJoepingleton Posts: 746
    edited December 1969

    Thanks for the info Phil,
    Joe - it appears to work on meshes, but not on conforming clothes.

  • JoeMamma2000JoeMamma2000 Posts: 2,615
    edited December 1969

    You mean conforming clothes with bones in them? Never occurred to me that the cloth sim was meant to work on rigged meshes, since they're affected by bones. Maybe I'm still not understanding...

  • JoepingletonJoepingleton Posts: 746
    edited January 2015

    It seems work inside carrara on conforming clothes, it just doesn't render them

    Post edited by Joepingleton on
  • JoeMamma2000JoeMamma2000 Posts: 2,615
    edited December 1969

    Wow, okay....I guess I always assumed conforming clothes weren't candidates for cloth sims...

    Personally, for reasons I described in a little cloth tutorial I did a while back ( http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/23632/ ), I wouldn't use conforming clothing for cloth sims, unless for some reason I knew its mesh was designed for cloth sims. From what I've seen of the meshes of a lot of conforming clothing out there, it's bound to cause a lot of problems inside cloth sims, for many reasons.

    You generally want a very uniform, clean mesh with no "bad" polygons (n-gons, non-planars, etc.), and there's generally no way to verify that with conforming clothing, especially since Carrara and Hex have a very limited toolset when it comes to identifying and repairing messy meshes.

    Oh, and when you said it works okay "inside Carrara", but not when you render, that threw me off. Rendering is "inside Carrara" too, isn't it? :)

  • JoepingletonJoepingleton Posts: 746
    edited January 2015

    I guess I should have said in the "workspace" or something, but I was unsure what to call it ;)

    Thanks for the link to your post it's very informative.

    Post edited by Joepingleton on
  • JoeMamma2000JoeMamma2000 Posts: 2,615
    edited December 1969

    Wow, joeping, you opened up a whole new world for me !!! For all these years I assumed you shouldn't even try to turn conforming clothing into a cloth sim, for the reasons I've already mentioned. Hey, they're rigged with bones !!! That's the biggest reason.

    But now that I just tried it on a quick scene, it works !!! I feel stupid. Yeah, you have to worry about the nasty mesh, but if it works then fine. And also it opens up a new world for conforming hair. One of the biggest problems with it is that it often/always looks very unnatural, and the supplied morphs are often pretty useless. But if you can use the cloth sim to make the hair "lay down" naturally on the head and body, it's a huge improvement.

    BTW, I just did a quick test scene with a conforming clothing with cloth and softbody attach also applied, and it works surprisingly well !! And it does render okay in 8.5, BTW.

    Wow, thanks for opening my eyes on this. I feel like an idiot.

  • JoeMamma2000JoeMamma2000 Posts: 2,615
    edited December 1969

    Here's a video of a sim I did by just adding a V4 to a scene, drag and drop an old conforming clothing on her, setting the clothing mesh to softbody cloth, and adding an attach modifier to the drawstring thingy at the top of the garment. Added a directional force, then ran a sim for a couple of seconds and it worked fine. No other tweaking. Cool.

    I did try to also add a conforming hair and clothifying that, but I got the lovely Carrara useless message "An error has occurred".

    But cool, it does work !!!

    http://youtu.be/aicCJERYzyM

  • PhilWPhilW Posts: 5,139
    edited December 1969

    JoeMamma2000 said:
    Here's a video of a sim I did by just adding a V4 to a scene, drag and drop an old conforming clothing on her, setting the clothing mesh to softbody cloth, and adding an attach modifier to the drawstring thingy at the top of the garment. Added a directional force, then ran a sim for a couple of seconds and it worked fine. No other tweaking. Cool.

    I did try to also add a conforming hair and clothifying that, but I got the lovely Carrara useless message "An error has occurred".

    But cool, it does work !!!

    http://youtu.be/aicCJERYzyM

    Great so far - I'd be really interested if you can animate the figure and see how the cloth reacts?

  • JoeMamma2000JoeMamma2000 Posts: 2,615
    edited January 2015

    I thought we already determined that in 8.5, for at least the last year or two, they broke the "cloth colliding with moving objects" feature....that's been proven over and over hasn't it? Or did I miss something along the way? Which is why they were coming up with the softbody cloth colliding with softbody cloth workaround....

    Post edited by JoeMamma2000 on
  • JoepingletonJoepingleton Posts: 746
    edited December 1969

    Very cool Joe,
    Sometimes my noob experiments pay off. I was hoping it worked as simple as it did for you, but I still run into my original problem in 8.5. Maybe it's because I am trying it on genesis figures instead of V4?

  • JoeMamma2000JoeMamma2000 Posts: 2,615
    edited December 1969

    Yeah, who knows....only the programmers I suppose....

    And on a similar note, I've tried 3 or 4 different conforming hair objects, and each one gives me a "An error has occurred" when I try to run a sim with it set as a cloth object....

    With one exception.... :)

    I'm running it now and it's working in the same scene that I just posted a video.....sweet....the hair and the clothing are blowing in the wind... :) :)

  • JoeMamma2000JoeMamma2000 Posts: 2,615
    edited January 2015

    With the hair I'm running into the problem I described before....most of the conforming hair is obviously not designed for cloth sims, and as a result you have a lot of the hair mesh intersecting with itself and all kinds of nastiness, which plays havoc with the Bullet sim. And the collision distance setting is again a key factor, since with all the nasty mesh you have no clue how to set it.

    And if you want to modify the hair mesh before the sim you're out of luck, because of the frustrating limitation that you can't modify conforming meshes outside of their morphs. And if they have no morphs you can't modify anything. And since the morphs don't work as soon as you clothify, you have to hope for the best when you run the sim.... :-S

    Post edited by JoeMamma2000 on
  • JoeMamma2000JoeMamma2000 Posts: 2,615
    edited December 1969

    Okay, here's some less than satisfactory results that show how you can have conforming hair and clothing clothified and it will work. Amazing...

    Of course, you need to find conforming meshes that aren't so nasty, as you can clearly see with the hair. But hey, if you can find some decent conforming hair, or make your own, then you don't need to mess with all those dynamic hair frustrations. Just drag and drop, set it to Bullet cloth, and you have dynamic hair. Cool.

    Now maybe some enterprising person could make some conforming/dynamic hair for Carrara that can be used in either mode.... :)

    http://youtu.be/zv8w6FrLO6o

  • DUDUDUDU Posts: 1,945
    edited December 1969

    The bullet engine of Carrara is true wind turbine-generator !
    When I see the facility and the quality of hair and clothing simulations in Poser, I believe that it still had things to be improved largely in Carrara.
    But it's nice to try to control the beast ! :-P

  • JoeMamma2000JoeMamma2000 Posts: 2,615
    edited January 2015

    So I'm curious...what happened to the interest in this? Seems like a very nice and innovative solution to the current limitations with Carrara cloth.

    What I'm doing is exporting the character mesh (say, V4) as an .obj, then breaking it up into sections that correspond to the arm bones, leg bones, etc., and attach them via softbody attach to the corresponding character bones.

    Does anyone have any results so far, or has all interest dwindled? :) :)

    EDIT: Hold on...sorry I think I've got the wrong thread...I thought this was the thread on using a softbody attached proxy so the cloth would collide with moving objects...nevermind... :) :)

    Post edited by JoeMamma2000 on
  • keithgkeithg Posts: 62

    Not sure if this thread is still live but I'm just learning Carrara and ran into the same problem. It appears to be the smoothing. Set it to 0 then try rendering the animation. Worked for me.

  • MistaraMistara Posts: 38,675
    keithg said:

    Not sure if this thread is still live but I'm just learning Carrara and ran into the same problem. It appears to be the smoothing. Set it to 0 then try rendering the animation. Worked for me.

     

    Thanks!

  • chickenmanchickenman Posts: 1,202

    thanks I wil try it later.

  • MatCreatorMatCreator Posts: 215

    had my 1st go at it today, wanting to create the very same effect shown from initial post... where is the documentation on it?

  • UnifiedBrainUnifiedBrain Posts: 3,588

    Can't answer your question - but I have been trying to reach you via PM...smiley

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