Is it possible to have skirts REALLY fly and twirl using dForce?
SnowSultan
Posts: 3,773
in The Commons
I've been experimenting the last two days using wind modifiers and negative gravity and I really haven't been able to give a skirt the kind of 'flowiness' and motion that I have with some morphed conforming items. Wind gets them to move realistically but minimally, but negative gravity just seems to bunch them up and risk the dreaded polygon 'explosion'. Has anyone had any luck really getting skirts to fly around like a dancer's might? Thanks in advance.
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One thing to try is using an animated simulation and move the character as the dancer would move. As the character twirls in the timeline, the simulation will follow. It can be tricky, though. If you have too much stabilization time at the end, the dress will relax again, just as when the dancer stops and the dress relaxes again. Animated simulation allow you to pick any frame in the animation to render, so you can pick the best one that shows the movement you want.
My guess would be that "thinking around corners" might help...
Wind can only do "so much" in dForce - I've tried it myself and wasn't really satisfied with the results - but using wind and one or more primitives to "push" the clothes in the right positions for the wind to do it's job can get nice results.
For example, when going for the famous "Marilyn Monroe's skirt getting blown up" scene, I'd use a sphere to push up that skirt at the back, then get a wind source to turn upward below it to give the cloth the "getting moved by wind" look. When it works as intended, just remove that sphere for the render and everything should be fine...
It also might help sometimes to position the figure not in the usual way - head up, feet down - but "hanging in the air". Then, with a very small gravity setting, use the wind to keep the skirt from going down... it should move a bit downward, but the wind should (!) keep it from going to far down, all the while giving it some "flowiness".
As it is now, dForce still is a lot of "try and error, then try something different..."
Admittedly, I haven’t really messed with dforce much since it first came out. Personally, I find that the dforce clothing available now to be a bit simple, and can be a little on the stiff side. In time, I believe it will mature. I do, however, think that some decent results can be achieved with a little effort:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/3083651/#Comment_3083651
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/3151191/#Comment_3151191
I’m eagerly awaiting the next beta assuming that it will include improved handling of intersection, as well as some other physics.
- Greg
The challenge is that most dForce clothing by default does not have enough resolution to create finer detail simulation results.
This means it will especially be difficult to try to create more extreme results like a skirt twirl affected by wind when there are not enough polygons to allow for the needed twisting and bending.
You will not see much bending or small folds because the points are spread out to far from each other on base resolution.
- - -
the longer version:
You can not just raise the subdivision level and then run the simulation.
The simulation will only calculate based on the Base resolution of the simulated object.
Subdivision levels are only used in the calculation for the other objects in the scene that interact with the simulated clothing.
The base resolution of many clothing items is just around 20'000 points.
Such a low amount of points will only allow for the most basic of bends and no detailed folds.
- - -
Example:
Base resolution
20'000 points
Subdivion level 1
80'000 points
Subdivision level 2
320'000 points
Subdivsion level 3
1'280'000 points
compare:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/234056/dforce-are-subdivision-levels-not-used-for-the-simulation
- - -
Create a higher resolution version of the clothing to run more detailed simulations
- Raise the subdivision to the next level. -> This means you will have 4 times the vertices that can be simulated.
- Export the clothing item at the higher resolution and save it as .obj.
- Import the .obj
- Now run the simulation again with the higher resolution item.
When the simulation does not fail you could repeat the process.
Subdivide. Export. Import. Run the simulation again until you see the amount of folds or bends that your are aiming for.
After a while you should have some baseline how much resolution your computer can handle.
- - -
It would be interesting if dForce content creators would start to provide two or even three versions of their clothing items at different resolutions.
Base resolution ~ 20'000 points
Medium resolution ~ 80'000 points
High resolution ~ 320'000 points
Ultra High resolution ~ 1'280'000 points
- - -
Obviously more points will also mean that the simulations will run longer.
To help improve the time it might help if we could use more than one video card to run the simulation.
- - -
Thanks for the replies. I'd thought about putting an object under the skirt or maybe an invisible figure, yeah. Guess that's about all we can do for now. Just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything obvious, I hadn't even tried wind modifiers until a few days ago.
Just a suggestion, in the animation, have the model start slightly above the Y coordinate that you want them to finally rest in and also give them a little y rotation from it as well, when the animation ends, if it slowly went into the final position, it should have a little lift and a little spin to it.
A better question might be: is is possible for dForce to do ANYTHING except ball the clothing up around the character's middle or to explode it halfway across the viewport?
LOL, yeah that's kind of common with non-dForce clothing. I had luck with one outfit, every other one either exploded or just generally didn't look good. dForce clothing does handle it well of course, but I hope we get more options in the future.
OK, I'm trying to get some non-dForce clothing on Gades (that giant G8M behemoth character) but I know it's not going to happen if I try & get everything to simulate together...
so...
a) I am hiding everything one the pants to start. I make the pants too big so they'll get nice sags & wrinkles. I simulate.
b) Mystery? I can't hide the simulated pants but if I run the simulate again with both the pants & shirt I know it probably won't go good. I noticed there is a 'freeze in simulate' button. Does that button freeze my simulated pants such that keeping them visible so that the shirt can simulate draping over the pants properly will not loose my already simulated draped pants (and won't try to resimulate the pants again either)?
c) Repeat for each article that needs to be simulated to the outermost simulation layer...
Thanks.
OK, so 'Freeze in Simulation does do what I guessed, but can someone say how to, for example, on the VS Pants (Victorian Santa Pants) I can make the waistband elastic such that as the pants slip done his waist the elastic would cinch at his hips and keep from falling further while the main material of the pants would continue to drape on his hips & legs?
Thanks.
Maybe I should copy this question to that very long dForce thread.
Faster/easier thing to try first: if you're getting "minimal" movement with wind it may actually be an issue of diameter. You can turn force up super high and get minimal results if your diameter and length do not completely encompass all of the geometry of your item. I just had to ask other Published Artists about this last week. :D
I haven't really tried adjusting the parameters for the clothing itself, will try that soon. I figured not a lot of adjusting was necessary for dForce-ready items because they would already have optimized geometry and such. Thanks.
I don't know that peice of clothing but there are a couple of ways it can be done. If the waistband is a seperate material then select it, go to the dynamic paramaters in the materials pane and turn simulation strength to zero. that material will not sim at all, the rest of the item will though. If it's not a seperate material then you can either use the geometry editor to select the waistband and then assign a new material to it. Copy the old material first, then paste it onto the new one so it looks the same. Then you can go ahead and zero the sim strength. The last way I know is to add a dynamic weigh map and holding ALT paint over the waistband until it's gray, meaning it has not impact on the sim.
Today or maybe tomorrow I'm going to be posting some thoughts on a little experiment I did with converting hair for dForce use and I will include the process for making such a map because hair absolutely positively needs it or it all falls apart. Same idea will apply to the pants. I don't really know how to save the maps though, not yet. Still learning!
Exactly what I've been working on with a skirt. It just keeps sliding down the hips much further than it should. Even using an animated timeline with a scaling factor on the skirt to cinch it in, but it keeps sliding down. You can create a surface as a "belt" with dynamics strength of 0 (or even 0.5 works) and sim the skirt. Conceptually you can then freeze the skirt and only sim the belt. But that's where I've run into a problem where Visible in Simulation no longer works - everything unfreezes in the first frame so you lose the already-simmed skirt and then only the belt sims.
You can set Dforce to use the subd; it doesn't by default. That might help. If i want those effects I use VWD, as I find it easier to do there.
You can also - provided the waistband is a separate material zone, set "contract/expad" (I think that's the parameter) to negatives to have it shrink. Be cautious, however, as this can cause explosions if the rate of contraction is too high for the rest of the sim to keep up with.
I gave up on the Visible in Simulation as it doesn't appear to work right now. I was able to cinch in a belt surface by setting Contraction-Expansion Ratio to 62% on the belt (all other dForce surface parameters were the default), That held it in place. I wrote it up and added it to my thread on dForce.
The OP asked if you can get a skirt to swirl and the answer is yes, at least with this one. No wind node. Gravity and air resistance are at their default values. I did have a belt surface on the skirt set to a 65% Contraction-Expansion Ratio to hold it in place around the waist and a density of 70 on the skirt surface to let it rise but not too high (reducing density allows the skirt to rise but below 70 it started to develop some odd folds at the outer edges). I did use what Barbult suggested below and rendered frame 10 (later frames have the skirt bunching up around the waist too much):
As I haven't experimented a lot in dForce so far, can you explain a few things in a little more detail? When you say "a belt surface", do you mean that you created a new surface at the top of the skirt using the Geometry editor? Also, could you also be more specific as to what type of poses should be at the start and end of animation? Is the character raised on the Y axis at the start of the animation and then lowered to ground level at the end, and is the raised one set as the memorized pose? Sorry to ask, I'm just not quite familar yet with these more complex processes. Thanks in advance.
Thanks very much. I eventually gave up one the Victorian Santa Suit simulation as I needed to make progress on the scene I wanted to make but you tips are helpful. Had I not clothed Gades with that suit I probably would of had an easier time with it. I'll try it again at a later date.
Oh, that's intersting. I had to stop but I was trying to make the 'waist' on the Victorian Santa suit elastic like because I was using it on Gades so like most people that size that elastic band will sink off off his big belly and cinch between his belly and hips which is the area I always though of the natural 'waist' but that body building and fitness guides say the waist is at the navel.
It's not that easy to figure out.
Ah! I didn't see that. I'll try it. Thanks.
Yes, the belt was a separate surface created at the top of the skirt with the geometry editor. I explain how to do the belt in this post here. That post also explains what dForce parameters to use. The dForce simulation was done using an animated timeline with the default G3F pose at frame 0 with Y-rotation -60. Classical Dance pose 10 at frame 5 with Y-rotate 0, and Classical Dance pose 13 at frame 10 with Y-rotate 80. I did the render at frame 10. All the poses sit on the ground, there was no up/down movement that I added although there was some Daz Studio created as the figure transitioned from one pose to the next.
Thanks very much!
Thank you RGCincy, appreciate it very much.
is it possible to have a female handstand - or be hung upside down and have the skirt go inside out?
has anyone here played with that type of image?
Yes, it can be done. I did this image. I didn't want the skirt to go all the way inside out, so I pinned the back of the skirt between her legs and the tree beanch. You can see how the bottom of her jacket turned inside out.
It depends on the skirt. I made this a while ago, using the https://www.daz3d.com/classy-dress-outfit-for-genesis-3-female-s I found that I needed to use the dress's movement morphs to flair the skirt out for the starting position of the simulation, otherwise nothing happened.
Title: Lets Play Handstands