Good CLOTHING simulation tutorial for Blender?
DrGonzo62
Posts: 382
Hi,
I'm currently trying to get clothing sims working in Blender. What a nightmare!
What's taking me mere minutes to do with DAZ dForce, is an uphill battle with Blender's cloth simulation.
While there are tons of cloth sim tutorials out there (plane draping on a cube), I can only find very little with clothing items on characters.
As an example, I don't understand why this gown does what it does in the simulation.
I weight painted the Shape/Pin Group vertex group to have full effect on the upper part of the gown, and yet at the first frame of the simulation, I see the gown being altered there by the simulation when Collision is turned on.
Why is that?
The only way I've managed to have zero simulation effects on parts of the clothing is to make a Pin group and only select the vertices that I want to exclude from the sim.
Isn't weight painting supposed to take care of that?
DAZ dForce to Blender cloth sim.
Aren't there any good clothing sim tutorials explaining the process?
Thanks!
Image 1: Not simulated yet
Image 2: First simulated frame.
Distortions on upper clothing parts due to collision with G8F, although this should be weight painted out?
Image 3: dForce Pin vertex group
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Comments
I feel your pain. This is probably the weakest point in Blender; sometimes the settings that work are an order of magnitude off of the defaults. Try scaling everything up 10x and increasing the collision distances on the cloth and collision objects. Also choose a simulation preset for the material, probably cotton.
If you can, just use Marvelous Designer.
OK, thanks.
Glad to see that I'm not the only one struggling with this.
And just when I thought that Blender is a 100% substitute for DAZ. Goes to show you that a 'does it all' app like Blender might not be for everyone.
Not having decent clothing simulations is almost a deal breaker for me, despite the fact that I'd take Blender over DAZ for everything else.
Even though it doesn't have something like Iray section planes either.
I'll try your scaling it up tip. Let's hope that helps.
Diffeomorphic does import the dforce pin maps for you and set the collision parameters. There's usually no need to scale 10x. If you want to do it yourself it may be useful to read the issue discussion, where some reference is also linked.
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/wiki/Features/Simulation/Make dForce Simulation
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/410/better-dforce
Hi Padone, thanks for the links.
While simulating "simple" clothing items works pretty well, Blender's cloth simulation becomes a mess with more complex clothing items, like that gown in my example. The sleeves have to collide with the gown, and the gown with the figure.
That's when the Diffeo Simulation setups no longer work well. Which is a Blender issue, and not a Diffeo one.
DForce in DAZ is primarily used for clothing simulations and well set up for this, often producing good results right out of the box.
In Blender, it's called cloth and not clothing simulation for a reason. Most people wear clothing items and not just a cloth, so this has often very different requirements.
Good collision & self-collisions are much more difficult to achieve than they are with dForce, IMHO. Blender just isn't geared for that purpose like DAZ is.
And - God! - is it time consuming fuzzing with all the different sim settings in Blender when the sim falls apart at the end and you have to tweak it and then start it all over again.
If you - like me - frequently pose characters in a scene and have to adjust their clothing for a given pose, it becomes an issue when you have to spent too much time on tweaking the simulations.
In my experience with Blender's cloth sim, weight painting is not really working all that well.
I've weight painted the Pin vertex group at 100% in my example which, as far as I understand, should remove all those vertices from the simulation, and yet, I still see those verts being affected by the sim. I can't have that, because that means that I have to go in and sculpt smooth all that out again after the sim.
I'm quite surprised that I haven't seen this being mentioned here before, considering that (I'd guess) most people use DAZ for character renders, which would include adjusting at least some clothing items on their figures. Unless everyone is naked all the time, of course! ;^)
My main concern here isn't if Blender can ultimately achieve similar results than DAZ dForce sims, but how long it would take to get these results.
So, I guess I'm just wondering how other DAZ to Blender users deal with this. Do I just have to spend even more time with this until it's just like using dForce?
[Frustrated rant OFF]
Thanks!
I've added some images to illustrate the issues. From left to right:
A. Simulated in DAZ. dForce Medieval Style Outfit for Genesis 9
B. Simulated in Blender. Only collision item is the character.
C. Alternate view. All the dForce Pin Groups are Diffeo generated and seem adequate.
D. Simulated in Blender. Added Collision to the upper skirt and removed the under skirt, since it was blowing everything up.
E. Alternate view. I have not been able to achieve anything remotely like the DAZ sim. Adding self-collision makes things even worse. I've played with tension, vertex weight, friction, separate weight painted vertex groups for collisions & self-collisions trying to exclude parts of the clothing from the simulation, internal springs - you name it.
Can anyone (who has this asset) show me a sim done in Blender that looks anything like it does in DAZ?
What dress is that if you can link the product page I may be able to give a look and let you know what I find.
I've just added the link.
And this is a different gown than my very first example. That was simpler than the latest one that consists of different meshes.
First gown: Camilla Gown
Cloth and other VFX simuation is a low priority for the Blender foundation just as it is not much of a concern for the Blender community at large
This is because cloth simulation it is a character animation related task and the Blender community is dominated by
Hard surface modeling enthusiasts not Character animators.
Check out this recent thread where I have to school the Blender “pros” on how a nonlinear motion clip system really works.
This is only after some guy apparently has created an addon that finally gives us blender users the same true nonlinear motion clip capability that we have had in Iclone and Daz studio for a decade.
https://blenderartists.org/t/i-made-an-addon-to-combine-animations-in-both-time-and-space/1599041/10
Stop wasting your time with Blenders Cloth or hair system and simulate with Dforce and use the Alembic exporter by
@TheMysteryIsThePoint
and export to Blender and get on with your life
Yes exporting with Sagan is certainly a good option if you want to animate in DAZ studio, while Diffeomorphic is more designed to animate in blender. To export single poses simulated with dForce you can also use DIffeomorphic as dbz which bakes the viewport. While I agree the blender simulation could be improved, I generally find it manageable.
Going to check the medieval gowns.
update. Camilla Gown.
Well I tried the Camilla gown and didn't find any issue it worked just fine out of the box. Only caveat is I had to set the cloth quality to 16 that was the default but it seems the addon lost it. Now reported to Thomas. Let me know if you have any trouble but should work fine.
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/2508/regression-dforce-quality
steps:
update. The dforce quality is fixed in the last commit.
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/downloads/
@wolf359
Thanks, I'll check it out.
You're right, it seems that Blender is more of a substitute for Maya or 3DS Max.
There's definitely some DAZ functionality that I'm missing in Blender.
@Padone
Thanks for checking! I'll try increasing the sim quality. Do you also change the collision quality as well?
Not sure why there are two settings for that to begin with.
The Camilla gown was my backup choice, but I really would like to use the Medieval Style Outfit for G9.
The problem with that outfit is that it is comprised of five separate meshes, which severely complicates the collision/self-collision in Blender.
As you can see, there are no problems with odd sleeve deformations using dForce.
I may just have to stick with single-mesh outfits in Blender for now.
update. Medieval Outfit.
Works fine here. There's a little caveat that diffeomorphic doesn't recognize the weightmap for the sleeves, so I had to assign them by hand, now reported to Thomas for the fix. For the various dforce pieces I decided to join them into a single cloth, so self collision takes care of everything. You could also assign different collision collections but seems overcomplicated in this case.
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/2511/g9-bones-can-be-all-deform-bones
steps:
update. The sleeves weightmap is fixed in the last commit.
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/downloads/
Hi Guys,
I should add that the next version of Sagan, which I should have out the door in a week or two, can (among other things) export animated SBH as true Blender Hair Curves, and it includes a Blender addon to set up a handler to update the hair animation frame by frame as the animation plays.
Thank you Donald for your excellent work that you share with us. SBH support is good news and Sagan is certainly a wonderful tool to import daz animations including dforce. Personally I don't use it just because I prefer to animate in blender, so Diffeomorphic is more my tool.
@Padone
Joining the meshes that need simulation and using self-collision definitely helped.
Thanks Padone!
Thanks for your kind words, @Padone
Developing for DAZ Studio is a thankless endeavor, so comments like yours, especially considering your own contributions, are an actual currency.
And soon(ish) I hope to make animating in DS and animating in Blender the same thing, heh heh :)
@DrGonzo62
Wow, very nice... you've got to be pleased with that
Edit: spelling
Thanks, very pleased indeed!
I am still in the process of figuring out if I can fully realize my next project in Blender alone or not, so I was pretty put off when it looked to me like decent clothing simulations might be a real issue.
But like most roadblocks in this journey, it looks like they can eventually be resolved. Especially with the help of the good people in this forum. My experience in that regard in Blender forums on the other hand, is sadly not all that great.
On to the next roadblock!
@wolf359
One problem with blender is there's a lot of people making bad tutorials, so one gets wrong information about features and limits. But I guess this is a problem with web tutorials in general. One has to take them as a starting point rather than a definitive solution, then always compare with the official documentation.
For example the cloth simulation doesn't usually require a 10x scaling, it is enough to increase the precision, also because scaling affects the physics attributes so it is to be taken into account as the simulation gets affected. NLA and animation layers are also entirely possible without extra addons though a little convoluted to setup. If the criticism is about usability as it's there but difficult to use, then yes I agree, the blender team in general tends to do things very technical with lots of options which are hard to setup properly.