Misadventures with Adventurer Knight [Pretty much SOLVED]
chris the stranger
Posts: 132
When I saw this outfit, I knew it was the one I needed to complete the outfit for my gruff, adventuring protagonist. Well, apart from the minor detail that I'm looking for something sleeveless, to work along with an undershirt. I've been working pretty hard to get this to work, and if I could just get around some major problems, I'll be good. Part of it might be that I don't quite understand how to use dforce outfits, but I've noticed some other little 'quirks' along the way.
- When I load the outfit onto G8M, it is unselectable in the physical scene. The only way I can acecss it is via the Scene pane. It's nothing game-breaking, but I was wondering if this is how dForce attire generally works, or if there's some strange bug.
- In Geometry Editor, I can hide the sleeves + cuffs in the surface groups, and things look fine. If I want to delete them, however (and maybe this isn't necessary), most of the buttons that exist on the outfit get deleted as well. Whaaaat? (Attachments 2 and 3).
- Okay, I can get by just hiding the sleeves or using 0 opacity on the surfaces just fine...but when it comes time for an undershirt, it's Pokethrough Hell. I'm just using a basicwear T-shirt for this example, but I've had similar problems when trying a Geo Shell, and the Sword of Time undershirt (the one I'd really like to use). I'm used to outfits like these having adjustment morphs, like 'Expand [Region]', or something to accommodate for other clothing items. Perhaps this was not considered since the outer coat is meant to cover everything above the waist, negating the visibility of under-clothing...or maybe I'm supposed to be messing around with the outfit in the Simulation pane. I haven't quite figured out a good workaround for this, and I've tried hiding all offending polygons in the undershirt, apart from the armpit, shoulder and collar.
So...is there a step I'm missing that would make this outfit far more kitbash-friendly? This really felt like the one, after having spending so much time messing with other outfit combinations.
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Comments
Are he buttons parentedf items? And if so are most of hem, other than the one that survives, instances?
I'm not sure how to tell these things yet, but it's possible they're instances. As for parenting, looks like Button N is parented to another 'thing' called Button N (a connector? Or is that an I for Instance?) Button 4 and Button 5 are share 'Button 4' as a parent. It might be easier to just show an image of it, because it looks pretty messy.
The I beam icons are Rigid Follow Nodes, the prop follows them but doesn't itself chnage shape so they are useful for buttons on dForce items. They do not, however, appear to be instanced props.
I attempted to reproduce this with a blank-slate Genesis 8 Male. No buttons disappear. For some reason, I thought I was able to reproduce it ONCE when I didn't take a screencap, but the last few tries yield the same results. Perhaps I'm dealing with a corrupted file? I'll try to see if there's a way I can merge my character into a new scene to address the problem.
Result: Genesis 8 morphs into the character shape, leaving the coat and buttons behind. I guess the buttons weren't disappearing, they were getting 'sucked' into the inside of the body. What's weird is that, when I load the full coat over the morphed body, the buttons stay where they're supposed to. But, as soon as I delete those sleeves (or even just the cuffs), they determine that they belong somewhere else. Is that a thing with dForce? Should the existence of polygons on the sleeve geometry really impact the position of accessories on the lower and upper abdomen? It doesn't seem to have the same effect when not morphing a character, so it might just be a problem caused by a third-party morph.
...that means I probably have to buy the 'fit helper' product after all.
I had a few minutes, and have had a bit of luck kitbashing older sets with dforce using this method so thought I'd give it a shot and see how it went. It turned out pretty well, in my opinion!
Okay so, here are the basic steps I took:
1) Loaded G8M and used the scene id method to fit the Sword of Time undershirt to him, avoiding any autofit distortions. Loaded the Adventurer Knight Coat and fit that as well. Like you, ended up with a fair amount of clipping. I kept G8M in the G3M loading pose since I find I get better results simming from that with clothing designed for it (less chance of self-clipping in the underarm that way)
2) Added a dforce dynamic surface modifier to the undershirt (Edit > Object > Geometry > Add dForce Modifier: Dynamic Surface). The undershirt is simple enough to not need a custom weight map. My settings are below, but you may want to fiddle with them to get a stiffer fabric for the sleeves, depending on your preference.
3) On frame 0 on the timeline, I scaled the AK Coat up to 115% and used dformers to pull any areas that clipped with the undershirt out - note that it doesn't matter how ugly or misformed it looks at this point, the only thing needed is that there is no clipping. (I'd often use fit helpers (Zev0's Fit Control in particular) at this stage before breaking out dForms but since you said you didn't have them and the clipping was pretty simple after upscaling in this case (only around the shoulder), I avoided using them).
3b) I turned the sleeve and cuff visibility off in the geometry editor. I hid the cuff buttons in the scene panel.
4) On frame 15, I reset the scale to 100% and dialed the dforms down to 0. The clipping comes back but don't worry about it, that's what the sim is (hopefully) going to take care of.
5) In simulation settings, you want to turn OFF 'Start Bones From Memorised Pose' and set Frames to Simulate to 'Animated (use Timeline Play Range)'
6) Run the sim. As it runs, the coat will scale down and 'pull in' the shirt with it.
7) There were still a couple of bits of minor clipping. I turned 'enable smoothing' to 'on' for the Coat (most dForce items have it disabled by default) and then set it to collide with the shirt rather than G8M. You can also try dialing back in your dforms from step 3 at very low amounts.
I ran this using the Sword of Time pants, but if you're using pants from another set you may also need to pull out the bottom of the shirt to avoid clipping in step 3 - in that case you might need to scale the coat up more to avoid clipping around the waist or use the movement dials for the skirts to avoid the same thing. Same rule of thumb though.
If you then wanted to pose, I usually set the pose I want at frame 30-50 depending how much of a change it is from the T/A Pose. So at frame 0 you have everything ballooned in T-pose, 15 everything at base at T-pose then the transition to your pose from there.
I hope that helps!
Did the shape you were using include any custom morphs that hadn't been saved as Morph Assets? Those can fail to project into fitted items.
That was super helpful, greys! I've been irrationally fearful of dForce simulations ever since I started using DS this year. I saw plenty of tutorials about how to use it with dresses + posing, but since 99% of what I'm doing is with G8M, it felt hard to get invested. Having a thorough, step-by-step guide that I can refer back to feels really good.
Now doing that G3-G8 trick to fit the undershirt is a little more intimidating to me. I haven't done anything with joints and baking before, but given how bulky the character is, distortions would be a legitimate concern.
Finally, I'm going to take audit of all the morphs used in the character. There may be a simpler way of achieving similar proportions, that correctly projects to rigid follower nodes. I'm not sure how these morphs were originally saved, but they were all ones I purchased from Daz's store. Perhaps I can find the culprit during the inspection.
One thing that's tsill a bit of an unknown ot me is this manual converting process. I followed the youtube video on my existing character (?!) and after fitting, got a pretty big mess for the undershirt. Is this one of those cases where it makes more sense to do this to a standard Genesis 8 Male, and then apply the character morphs afterward? Or is there more that needs to be done in the Bone Editor (Wasn't touched on in the youtube video, but was mentioned in the tutorial). Or maybe I'm supposed to adjust the shape and position of the outfit via basic posing tools and/or deformer morphs prior to Transfer Rigging (Figure Space).
EDIT: Second problem is that the sleeve, cuff and two collar surfaces keep reappearing whenever I load the scene. I would have to go in and turn their visibility off every time, which is why I'd prefer to delete the things. For now I'll just set their opacity to 0.
Right now the biggest problem I'm facing is a bumpiness that appears in the skirt region during the simulation. Didn't notice this earlier, but the same thing happens in greys' image.
RESULT:
MATERIAL SETTINGS
SIMULATION SETTINGS:
Anyway, I don't know enough about dForce to know how fix this - whether it's a material setting, something to do with the simulation settings, or if I need to be creating more subdivisions. Or running the simulation for more frames (though the longer I run it, the bumpier it gets).
I hate to keep bumping this thread, but I still haven't been able to come up with a solution to the to the bumpy skirt problem. But at least I've figured out the cause: it's the fact that 'Scale' is changing during the simulation. I don't know the technical going-ons within the dForce engine, but it appears to be doing a calculation based on whatever scale is set to on any given frame, and vertices positioned based on a previous frame's scale don't know what to do when a subsequent calculation is made with a different scale. It probably has a larger impact on parts that are more noticeably affected by gravity, and it wouldn't surprise me if this were happening on a much smaller scale for the upper regions of the coat.
The only solution I could see working, would be to morph the undershirt into the body, rather than trying to pull the coat out. So instead of using a dForce modifier on the shirt, my best bet would be Fit Control.
On a side note, does anyone know why AK Coat can't be selected using the Node Selection tool? Sometimes I have that problem when loading, deleting, and reloading the same hair files, but that tends to be sporadic. AK Coat is consistently unselectable outside of the Scene panel.
Oh hey.... I know this outfit ;)
ok first off - button construction method. All the bajillion buttons on this thing are using the Rigid Follow Node method. As Richard said, this is a kind of magic glue that attaches a parented props to a specific set of polys on the mesh. What it means is I can make a button (buckle, flower, whatever) and glue it on and as the underlying mesh moves via morph, bending or cloth sim, the button follows along and does not get distorted or fall off. There are the chest buttons, shoulder buttons and L & R cuff buttons. I think around 20 in total? a lot.
What you as a user will see in the scene tab is the usual list of boyparts plus the Rigid Follow Node (which I usually give a name like Button 1) and then the prop Button1 If you delete the prop, it should not effect any of the other RFN on the clothing item. I say _should_ DS however sometime gets confused. Now since I have used the same button.duf to load in over and over when I set this up, I have seen some weirdness here and there when switching from base to high resolution. And yes, tucked away in the data folder for this outfit is a lonely little button prop.
In theory if you find a fancier sexier button you like more, you should be able to align them to the RFN, delete mine, and glue yours on instead.
Fitting over other items - Does this not have an expand all morph? I usually try to include them in outfits. I will go and have a look at the set, if it doesnt have an expansion morph I will see if I can add one in. You are right in that I didn't anticipate anyone needing to slide another shirt under there. In the meantime you might be able to get by with changing the smoothing collision to the new undershirt.
Selection -. Um. That one I can't tell you. Usually when an item is unselectable it means that the bones arent attached to face groups, which is frankly odd and somehting QA usually notices. I'll have a look at that as well.
Bumpy skirt - holy hannah! well it didn't do _that_ in testing! Can you tell me what character morphs you ahve going on there? As you can see I clamped down the sinmulaiton so its only hitting mainly on the skirt of the coat. It's possible that its specific to this character setup, but I'll give it a poke on a few shapes and see if I can replicate the issue. Once I make it break the same way then I can see what can be done to make it less groovy.
Cutting off sleeves - as I'm sure you noticed I made separate material groups for sleeves and cuffs. You should be able to turn them off with an ivisible material, or in geometry. I try to do that with all my outfits where possible. I've found being able to select sections makes it easier to make the various masks for dforcesimulation, as well as making items easier to adjust for kitbashing. On this one the skirt of the coat is also set as its own thing, to leave a very dashing jacket :)
OK I'm off to check the selection thing, the skirt simulation and the expansion morph
LM
OK I've got the morph made and working nicely and the seleciton issue sorted.
OK I've messed aorund with the coat simulation. with the 'regular' default settings I can't break the sim, even by flipping him on his head.
I tried on the animated timeline option as well as in your setting simage, but no luck. Even scaling from 100 to 150 at frame 25, nothing much happened.
Now the coat settings are really stiff - like leather or heavy boiled wool, so the skirt tends not to do a lot. The torso, epaulets, collar, and cuffs are locked down pretty tight (via weightmap) so very little simulaiton there. The seeleves do sim, and I'm seeing the same draping there as expected.
So I'm pretty sure that the issue lies in a) your morphs and b) how you've set your simulation. Which means we ought to be able to work it out with adjustments to your process and the simulaiton settings.
So I'm going to send in my patch, so QA can poke around and make sure I haven't done anything dumb again *ahem* and broken something, and hopefully you guys will see an update in a week or so.
If you like I can send the expand all morph to your email directly, so you can move on with your project :)
LM
Thanks for the informative post! I fell in love with this outfit, and am willing to bash my head with a brick do whatever it takes to get it working for this character. So, here's the morph inventory, in order of what I think could be affecting the buttons (at least, when arms and/or collar are deleted):
He's wildly cartoonish in proportion, but part of that is because these are the concessions you make when drawing character sprites that are meant to be viewed from a distance.
Next up, the bumpy skirt. When I loaded a Genesis 8 Male Base and the outfit, I saw no issue with simulation. Same applied when using a number of combinations of character morphs. But the moment I set scale to 115% on the starting frame, and 100% on a subsequent frame (At first it was frame 15, but it also happened if I used frame 2), the bumps started showing up. I'm not going to rule out the possibility that my paltry GTX 950 is to blame, but when I went back to greyss post, I noticed they were there as well.
Don't worry about sending it to me personally, especially when an expand all morph could still potentially trigger the problem that my card or the dForce engine is having. I'm not in a huge hurry, I just wanted to know for sure if there was a way to fix this, or if I would have to go with a separate outfit. And since I'm working outside the original scope of the outfit, I didn't even think it appropriate to ask for accommodations - and I really appreciate them, thanks!
Edit: it would probably benefit me to simplify the body morphs as much as I can, just to go easy on DS's fitting process. I realize I'm using three separate morph sets alone that are individually dedicated to creating that overly muscular look.
yeah the simulaiton is going weird becasue you are changing the scale. Its possible that adjusting the simulaiton settings will help it settle down - I've been told reducing damping on the surface settings may help reduce the ripples. Is there a particular reason you are scaling and shrinking things?
I suggest getting this set if you can, it makes finding a good starting place for dforce cloth sims much easier. https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-master-cloth-simulation-presets
LM
I was using the scaling because I can't afford Fit Control until next month. The undershirt clipped through AK Coat, since the coat sits a lot closer to the figure's body.
The Cartoonized morph (Body Brave) seems to be the one causing most of the problems. I think I can get close to the right shape without relying on it, and it might also make it easier to hide the clipping polygons under the coat (So that only the sleeves are the part that appear).
ah well in that case Expand all should obviate the need for the scaling. ALso, you might want to look into using dforms (they are like the old Poser magnets) to help with layering items that dont have the morphs required.
And yes, do get Fit Control, it is a lovely thing :) Zev does some very useful products. It should be very useful for future kitbashing projects :)
LM
Whoops, sorry for not replying to this sooner - meant to get back to you a while ago. For the manual conversion in sickleyield's tutorial, you want to perform it on the base G8M before dialing in in your character. I usually save an item (File > Save as > Support Asset > Figure/Prop Asset - save it with your own name or conversion or something as the author or add G8M to the end of the product name so it doesn't override the existing item) once I've converted it, that way I only ever have to do it once per item.
I have an idea that might work to help reduce the skirt issues, but i'm away from the computer and won't be able to test it immediately. Since it's only the top that's having issues with layering, using a dformer with a custom weight map limited to the top portion with the scaling on the dform might help... hmm. i'll experiment a bit more when i get back to my computer (but yes, Fit Control does fix the issue as well, and if you plan on a lot of kitbashing i'd say it's almost mandatory. )
(Of course, that may also be moot with Lyrra providing some lovely support direct to the outfit! Going to go hunt through the rest of your catalogue now Lyrra - I love a PA who actively tries to help like this.)
You could also potentially use the geometry editor to hide the parts of the shirt hidden by the coat (select the pixels, assign them to a new surface then dial the opacity to 0 or set the surface hidden in the geometry editor) - you'd need to leave a little bit of a buffer/overlap to allow for arm movement, but it should sort it through the chest/waist at least.
Let's see if I'm absolutely crazy. I was thinking of going even one step further;because the buttons tend to do weird things when deleting parts in the geometry editor, and leaving the coat sleeves intact (albeit, hidden with zero opacity) can result in explosions when running the simulation, AND because there was a clipping issue with the collar of the shirt and the front of the coat that could not easily be resolved--I had the ingenious idea to just replace the top part of the outfit entirely. Since I'm using the Striker of Shadows Undershirt, I decided to use the top-half of the SoS tunic, which was designed to be sleeveless from the start. I can do some texture editing to make the two outfits blend together, since they'll be separated by that belt. I just have to make sure that 1) the AK Coat lower half doesn't clip through the belt under any circumstances, and b) the same goes for the SoS Tunic. I'm rendering the character from a far enough distance that hopefully, the fact that the blet might be a bit floaty won't be a concern.
(I could probably make another topic about the issues I'm having with the SoS tunic, called "SOS with Striker of Shadows," but this one I'm directly taking to Daz support).
edot: I'll definitely pick up the Fit Control pack, next time it's on a good sale. I have some trepidations about getting the Add-on, though. It looks like a few of the 'Top Morphs' would be helpful, but I can't help but shake the feeling that the majority of the pack (and high asking price) is for striptease morphs. xD