Loading...
> >

Dynamic Cloth in Studio 4.8

ValkeerieValkeerie Posts: 163
in The Commons

This is an account of my experience of using VWD cloth and hair dynamics within Daz Studio 4.8. It isn't a DAZ product, but I checked through the Terms of Service and I hope the mods will be fine with this - it is a straight user review of something of interest to many Daz users.

I like using historical wardrobe items. Many of these items are old and date back to the V4 generation. Posing morphs may be very limited. To give an example, many medieval dresses (even G3) have flowing sleeves that can be near impossible to pose in the simplest situations - they intersect with the arms of a chair, or the top of a table. They stick out at weird non-physical angles. Many clothing items don't have sitting morphs, or if they do, they drape badly and usually intersect with the chair. This drives me nuts. I seriously contemplated using Poser just to have the cloth room. But I never went that far.

I have attached an image showing the standard G2 female wearing the freebie (and very nice) Persian Dancer outfit from the G2 starter pack. I chose that combination because I know everyone reading this has it. The Persian Dancer top has floaty sleeves, and if there are pose controls for them, I have yet to see them. In the image you will see the sleeves are  draped from the upper arm in a more realistic manner than one could achieve using any pose control on the model. How did I do this?

I used an accessory program called VWD Cloth & Hair that has a DAZ Studio Bridge (written by another person). I had to buy both parts. It is easy to install. XVD 'sees' the DAZ Studio scene and one can select out of the scene a cloth mesh, a hair mesh, and one or more collision meshes. It then imports the meshes and converts cloth (say) into a mesh of springs. The Persian Dancer top is imported as a single mesh and the nodes become weights and the vertices springs, and the weights and springs move around according to gravity, inertia, air resistance and friction, while avoiding collisions with the selected collision items (e.g. the G2 figure and perhaps a chair say). The dynamic system then evolves forward in time and when one is happy with the result, one can export a deformed version of the Persian Dancer top back to Daz Studio for normal rendering.

What I have done with the Persian Dancer top is the simplest version of what VWD can do: drape a garment over a figure in a static pose. It can also do the dynamic verson, starting with the Null pose and animating a deformation into a more complex pose.

Anyone who has tried dynamic cloth will know it is as unpredictable as picking up overcooked spagetti. It goes everywhere. VWD recognises material zones, so in the case of the Persian Dancer outfit, I selected the rings on the upper arms and nailed them to the G2 female. I also nailed the central jewel in the underbust area. This has the effect of holding those points to the figure mesh using stronger springs. They can still move, but not by much. There is an elaborate set of tools for selecting parts of the cloth mesh and treating it - making it more rigid, or nailing it.

The first item I tried was an old M4 priestly cassock, a classic voluminous drape-from-the-shoulders item that is really hard to pose. I did a 30 frame animation that went from the Null position to kneeling, and not only did it work, it looked amazing as the cloth reacted physically to the speed of the body movements.

The second item was a G2 Sensibility dress, a classic big dress that is snug around the chest and arms, and loose from under the breasts. There are beautiful materials for this item and I really like it. At first I was disappointed. Because the dress was made of springs, it hung out of shape. It needed to be nailed under the breasts. The arms hung too loose. I realised I need to learn a lot about nailing vertices and rigidifying vertices and I'm still way down the learning curve on this. There is a neat cheat though. I increase the strength of gravity during the early part of the sim to pull everything down, and then reduce the strength of gravity to a tenth of its normal value, and the springs naturally pull back into shape. I did that with the Persian Dancer so that fabric in the breast area looked better.

The initial learning curve is not too steep. There is a 58 page manual. The simplest situation: one figure, one clothing item, no animation, can be tried out in minutes. On my system the sim runs in interactive real time - I can pull and deform the mesh manually, and watch it relax into shape. Then disappointment sets in. It's like buying an ancient V4 Poser item and realising the shader settings are terrible, and not knowing how to fix it. A month later you know how to Iray it, and it is then fine. That is how VWD is. You can do the simple thing quickly. Then you spend the month. I am about 8 hours in.

I have had lots and lots of crashes. The sim has usually been fine. It is the cumulative impact of multiple load/configure/sim/load/configure/sim cycles that does the damage. I tend to save lots and reload a lot. Tedious but worth it IMO. When one considers the time I waste fiddling with lights, rendering, and fiddling with lights, its fine.

I could write more, but the essential message of this post is that there is a product that will take a lot of older DAZ and Poser content and do wonderful things to it. By magic.

Valkeerie


 

Comments

  • nicsttnicstt Posts: 11,715

    I agree that VWD is an excellent item and makes many clothing items more useful, (and my opnion is makes some useful when they were not).

     

  • SPACECHIMPSPACECHIMP Posts: 212

    Thanks for that Valkeerie I have been considering this product you have given really useful information.

  • Oso3DOso3D Posts: 15,085

    One thing I was impressed by is the ability to take hair that lacks morphs I want and get particular effects from them. Like 'have the wind push the hair out of his face.' And boom, barely functional clunky hair became useful dynamic hair.

     

  • ValkeerieValkeerie Posts: 163
    timmins.william said:

    One thing I was impressed by is the ability to take hair that lacks morphs I want and get particular effects from them. Like 'have the wind push the hair out of his face.' And boom, barely functional clunky hair became useful dynamic hair.

     

    I have yet to try hair - I didn't want to push my luck while I am still learning my way around the underlying mesh dynamics, and I thought I would back up and experiment with basic clothing items. I'm glad you are a happy customer though :-)

     

    Valkeerie

  • AllenArtAllenArt Posts: 7,175

    I just bought both of these very early last week. Haven't had time to really play with them yet (wanna get a freebie finished first), but I'm dying to try them out. I have so many dresses and things that would look fanstastic if only I could drape them, and am pinning my hopes on this program to get the job done ;).

    Laurie

  • grinch2901grinch2901 Posts: 1,247

    It gets the job done.  Three case studies provided below. 

    1. In the first, both skirts are simple drapes. The system lets you bridge animations over to VWD so you can have your character sit and the skirts will drape over furniture you also sent over, as you can see.
    2. You can assign some vertices in the cloth to be glued to vertices in the figure, even if they don't quite touch the cloth will follow. I used that to have a short animation where the girl on the ladder lifts her hand and the skirt rumpled up as if she had lifted it with her hand. Then I just adjusted the hand  pose a tad for the render to put it in the right spot. And bam, someone walking up steps can raise the hem of their skirt.
    3. Some other dynamic solutions will let the cloth fall apart at seams if they weren't welded together when modeled. VWD lets you automatically hold things together via proximity if you want (by default) but sometimes you want stuff to open. I wanted Clark Kent to rip open his shirt so I turned off that option at import and then I froze the buttons and the cloth vertices bellow the chest so they wouldn't budge. Then I used the "moving hands" trick described above to pull the cloth apart. Then back in daz, adjusted the hands to align them with the cloth and Kent can finally get back to patrolling the skies.

    Bottom line, love this tool, now use if for many renders because ... why not?  It does take some experimentation though.  Highly recommended.

     

  • ValkeerieValkeerie Posts: 163
    grinch2901 said:

     

    1. Some other dynamic solutions will let the cloth fall apart at seams if they weren't welded together when modeled. VWD lets you automatically hold things together via proximity if you want (by default) but sometimes you want stuff to open. I wanted Clark Kent to rip open his shirt so I turned off that option at import and then I froze the buttons and the cloth vertices bellow the chest so they wouldn't budge. Then I used the "moving hands" trick described above to pull the cloth apart. Then back in daz, adjusted the hands to align them with the cloth and Kent can finally get back to patrolling the skies.

    Thanks for the ideas. VWD is a tool of such versitility it needs a catalogue of use cases so that people can understand what is possible, and how to achieve it. I have already stumbled across clothing flying apart. I disabled neighbourhood stiffening when posing a dress and all the material zones flew apart at the seams in the most comical manner.

    Today I posed V4 wearing a short dress in an extreme squat. It wouldn't stretch over her bottom but I reduced the friction so it slid easier during the animation, and paused the sim a few times to do manual displacement to pull the dress down just as a person might do. It 'rode up' in a realistic manner, and I could pull it down like balloon elastic. After some fiddling, a very decent drape in a difficult posture. Watching the drape is a bizarre entertainment like watching paint dry :-)

    Valkeerie

  • nicsttnicstt Posts: 11,715

    I import hair by not automatically linking all the parts together.

    Once in the scene, I just use the vertext neighbourhoos (proximity) setting to link the strands to the scalp this allows the lower parts to drape better. Sometimes I group some together when moving them about.

    As said already, it differs for clothes; what's best varies.

    It is also possible to pin vertexes, and unpin them (called fixed); this won't work with dynamic poses. There is also a a nail function that is used with dynamic poses (pose sequences).

    http://www.daz3d.com/goth-girl-outfit-for-genesis-3-female-s

    http://www.daz3d.com/goth-girl-sugar-and-spice-textures

    http://www.daz3d.com/goth-maid-for-genesis-3-female-s

    http://www.daz3d.com/sana-style-for-genesis-3-female-s

    These are all items I wouldn't have bought because they just don't look believeable in many situations. I now buy outfits.

  • ValkeerieValkeerie Posts: 163

    Another example from a work-in-progress whimsy I am working on. First I draped the dress using a dynamic sim. The animation had 100 frames, with the first 20 being movement, and the rest an opportunity to let the sim settle as I messed with gravity. Gravity was 1 at the start, and 0.1 at the end (a clunky way to get the dress into position quickly and then shrink back to fit). I spent a long time messing with the straps.

    At first I nailed the straps to V4, but as the shoulder moved the straps kinked. Then I stiffened the straps, and they did what stiff straps do - they flopped around. In the end I left them stretchy and reduced gravity so they pulled the dress back into position. There must be a better way. They are still a little loose, but real straps do that. I had to pull the bottom of the dress to get rid of folds. In the end it looked okay.

    Then I realised the floppy top of the gloves looked bad, and draped those in a separate static sim. I selected a ring of vertices around the top of each glove to stop them falling. I should perhaps have done the same at each wrist, but I wanted to see what would happen. The floppy sleeves sag a little. Much better than the inverted umbrellas I began with.

    Valkeerie

    Lillith.png
    927 x 1500 - 638K
  • selias19selias19 Posts: 254

    Thank you for the information. I have both tools on my wishlist over there. The results in this thread look really good.

  • IslandgirlIslandgirl Posts: 384

    I will have to check this out. I have a love/hate relationshop with dynamic clothes in Poser......I'm still fairly new to DS and while I'd like to learn it....the idea of attempting dynamic cloth in DS scares me. LOL 

  • nicsttnicstt Posts: 11,715
    edited December 2016

    I've made a couple of vids showing how I use VWD for hair; I'm going to upload them, they should be available through my deviant art link; or more likely via youtube

    Post edited by nicstt on
  • ValkeerieValkeerie Posts: 163
    nicstt said:

    I've made a couple of vids showing how I use VWD for hair; I'm going to upload them, they should be available through my deviant art link; or more likely via youtube

    Cool. Perhaps you could post a link here?

    Valkeerie

  • ValkeerieValkeerie Posts: 163

    I have attached a rework using VWD of an image I did some time ago. Previously the habit looked like it was made from inflated lycra. The embroidered trim on the scapular was uneven and distorted and I made it black to disguise this. The wimple was like a latex gimp mask.

    Now the sleeves of the habit look plausible. The embroidery on the scapular is much less uneven. Even the wimple is improved.

    This was done a three separate sims using VWD. First the habit, colliding with V4. Then the scapular, colliding with the VWD deformed habit (sounds bad) and the wimple. Then I manually tugged some ruckles in the wimple.

    Valkeerie

    Princess of Cups 753 x 1353 Layers.png
    825 x 1425 - 2M
  • nicsttnicstt Posts: 11,715
    Valkeerie said:
    nicstt said:

    I've made a couple of vids showing how I use VWD for hair; I'm going to upload them, they should be available through my deviant art link; or more likely via youtube

    Cool. Perhaps you could post a link here?

    Valkeerie

    Link in my sig.

  • bwise1701bwise1701 Posts: 252

    Is this a PC program or Mac?

  • BrotherHadesBrotherHades Posts: 89
    bwise1701 said:

    Is this a PC program or Mac?

    Looks like Windows only

  • ValkeerieValkeerie Posts: 163
    BrotherHades said:
    bwise1701 said:

    Is this a PC program or Mac?

    Looks like Windows only

    Yes, there is an executable that is only in a Windows version.

    Valkeerie

Sign In or Register to comment.