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Well here is (probably) my final video (great I hear you cry!)
It only shows draping with a loose mesh of quads which was hastily created. It lasts about two and a half minutes with no long pauses.
What next?
Well, first of all, thanks to those who commented. I've learned that comments came from very advanced users and I'm sorry if I raised hopes of doing anything new - particularly with animation. When I wrote that physics could be more than see-saws and dominos falling I hope I offended no-one. Some videos of that kind of work are superb accomplishments.
My aim next is to attach my simple meshes to figures and rig them for posing. Once posed I will 'convert to other modeller' - that will allow me to export as objects fixed in the pose. The clothes can then be converted to soft physics for draping from a posed starting point. Maybe it will work?
Another possibility is to export clothing from the drapes I've shown. Once re-topologised, if required, they could be fitted in Studio using the transfer utility. (Then morphed? - this is something I still need to learn about.)
The last use I can think of is to use draped cloth much more in still scenes. Although I've draped a young female figure I could imagine, say, Ghengis Khan with his advisors. There would be tents, flags, clothing, capes etc in such a scene.
Anyway, here is the link:
http://youtu.be/d6QBoCH1i7w
Hey Dartanbeck,
I just posted before I knew you had responded.
No, I haven't used Sparrowhawke's plugin at all. I downloaded it but haven't installed it. Everything shown is in Carrara 8.5 pro only.
I haven't attempted more than one cloth in a scene at once but I don't see why not.
Remember that a cloth, once the simulation is over, can be exported at any point in the timeline as an object. The polygons will be stretched all over the place and I haven't seen yet what happens to UV'd textures.
So I think you could simulate a tunic, export it as a fixed object, drape it back over the figure as an object and then go on to drape a soft body cape or scarf or whatever. Layers of draping.
IF I have noticed anything new in this work (and it is a very very VERY big IF) it is that a single mesh (say a cylinder) can have soft and stiff regions at the same time. The stiff regions are immune to the physics draping but can move within the scene as part of the object. The stiff regions can be exploited to hold cloth in place where desired during the simulation. (the regions come about through the 'soft body attach' function)
You can also adjust settings such as bending or stiffness along the timeline.
Very cool. Love seeing your results, and can hardly wait to try this myself... including trying out Sparrowhawke's plugin as well.
Thanks for posting this ;)
Hi Dartanbeck
Thanks for your kind remarks.
Now, without meaning to get beyond myself, I've replaced the realistic MakeHuman figure in my last video with a low-poly figure I created this morning. I would be very pleased to give you the Carrara project file with this figure and clothing ready-to-drape. Then you would have a launch-pad for changing the different settings for yourself - starting from the settings I ended with in the video.
The figure is just a blocked-out torso with head, arms and legs but no hands or feet - just a shop-window dummy. I can't imagine it being offensive (apart from being an amateur's work).
Is there a way to provide this to you and/or others here at DAZ? (I don't do social networking).
It is about 23 megabytes.
I'm happy to offer this project to anyone to do with as they please as long as it is OK to distribute a .car file with two meshes I built and textures which came with Carrara. And if there is a way to post it without going into shark-infested internet waters or losing a weekend over it! The freepozitry at DAZ seems to be just for links to where things are hosted for download.
An alternative is just to post the settings. Then you could build your own cloth mesh which is basically not much more than a cone.
I know you are doing all sorts of things so there is no rush.
I like Dropbox. It's free to a certain amount of storage (2 GBs if I recall) and I don't get spam from them. The Public folder is still pretty secure as the only thing another person can DL from it, is from a link you give them.
Hi Marcus!
You arrive at an excellent result now, I believe that a “small tuto” with screenshots would be appreciated of all those which, like me, lost some hair with that…
Thank you.
Thanks Evilproducer for helping me again!
I put the project on Dropbox in spite of my dread of self-publicity on the Internet.
I got rid of old masters and shaders and the file size dropped to 104K - unless something is really wrong.
So here is the link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/yk8qsvijx7ep11h/DonorPhysicsProject.car
IMPORTANT
The file should not contain any virus! You can be sure that I distribute this in good faith but I cannot take any responsibility.
Use the file and meshes in any way whatsoever without attributing any renders or developments to me please.
@DUDU - thanks for the kind words. I think animating these clothes is not going to happen as I hoped at the outset but draping is looking more promising
TO USE THE PROJECT:
Simply hit the physics simulation icon at the top left to simulate for two seconds. Then render.
You can choose the 'soft body attach' modifier then 'edit' to paint fixed vertices.
You can change sliders in the soft body modifier and in the effects tab and in the scene physics tab.
I hope it all works!
Probably nothing to worry about regarding the file size. Clearing out all that stuff is good scene housekeeping IMHO. Not sure I can look at the file, as I don't have C8.5, so no bullet for me.
Thanks Marcus!
I did download the file, but it's hard to say when I'll get a chance to try it. I am often busy all the way up until I have to launch my Batch render when I finally go to sleep! LOL
It has been like this a bit too heavy lately. So I've finally adopted a special new "Dartan-Time" where I get to work on MY thing for a change... which is nearing the point of soft-body experimentation, but not quite yet. Granted, the stuff that I have been doing, aside from my experiments with Genesis 2, is stuff that I am very comfortable with, but it's amazing how quickly the clock hands turn when I'm working on my own fun stuff! :ahhh:
But it is my work in Genesis 2 that brings me to this. I am intending on making a setup of primitives that follow the motions of the body parts that soft-body needs to collide with during the animation, and set that soft-body to only collide with those primitives, while the figure beneath it all guides the motions. It should work great, I hope!
I agree with DuDu... I'd love to see a tutorial of your settings and such. I really love that first video you made, with the text, video clips, and stills. Very nice. From a post you've made since, it sounded like you thought that it may be too long of pauses... not for me. I actually paused it a few times to study the drape during various frames, and checked out all of your text. Such a style of video would make for a beautiful tutorial-making method. Also, I really like what I've seen so far of your Make Human figure. Sweet!
Hi Dartanbeck,
Your post was much appreciated - I'm very pleased that you like what is going on.
The MakeHuman figure was from an early alpha release. I saw the program for the first time a while back and dialled the figure I'm now using. It exported as an OBJ consisting of different regions which Hexagon joined for me. Then I put a simple skeleton in in Carrara.
The settings for the last video are in the project you downloaded. There are only a 2-3 places to see them.
I might have given the impression that getting settings is an agony of work. Actually most of mine remain at zero or default. It is just that the mesh may or may not be dense so the settings change from one mesh to another. I think the mesh size matters too. Sometimes I've imported from Hexagon into a medium scene and the object has been small. It was only when I enlarged it that it stopped being rubbery. Smoothing makes the cloth more sleek as you would expect. So, in the end it is actually very simple.
Also my talk of virus risk etc was probably over the top. The file on dropbox is a .car file saved in from Carrara. My Carrara preferences are 99 or 100 percent at default.
The colliding with primitives idea you want to pursue isn't going to work (or work well) for animation. That was what I set out to try. I did get a little success shown in the very first post in this thread but I think the idea will only really be good for stills.
BUT I can now see the way forward for still renders.
Hi all
What I've done today is:
1 Removed the skeleton from the rigged figure
2 Added the dress to the figure and then re-attached the skeleton
3 Posed the figure with the dress (a silly pose unfortunately)
4 Exported the dress as an object in the pose
5 Replaced the poseable dress with the OBJ version. The figure's pose shouldn't be changed.
6 Turned the OBJ into a soft body object with some pinning at the waist.
7 Carried out the simulation - now the creases and folds appear.
8 Export the draped version of the dress as an object. The soft body version is now deleted and replaced with this solid, draped version.
9 Then I brought in another mesh - which was turned into soft body - to make a cape
Interesting.
Hmmm... I'm still going to try my primitive collision experiment. I am really only in this stuff for the animation, so if I cannot get good results in animations, then I have to ditch the idea, at least at the (then) moment. So I am always trying something inside or outside of the box to make stuff work.
It sure is fun seeing your progress in this stuff.
HI Marcus Severus :)
Have you tried adding a Damping force into your simulation when you're draping soft-body stuff.
it can really help to soften the impact of soft-body on object,. and lessen the flapping and settling down
Just insert a Damping force into you scene, then change it's initial value to something really low, such as 2kg
You've done a lot of nice work here, and the more people who explore physics the better we all understand what it's capable of and how to make it work.
sadly, some functions aren't fully working, and the biggest of those is the lack of interaction / animation with any moving object.
Those issues can stop most people from exploring what's working.
I'd glad they didn't stop you :)
Thanks, 3dage for the advice on damping. I haven't used that but it sounds good and I'll try it soon. So far all I've used are the two modifiers, soft body and soft body attach. And sometimes the settings tab sliders for an object to reduce friction.
I'm very pleased that you found it interesting - I feel that I'm a one-track record here although in fact I take a keen interest in all the other threads.
I could show another video for that last set of renders but to any casual visitors to Youtube it's looking like I'm obsessed with figures without shoes wearing billowing clothes!
@Dartanbeck - maybe I was too abrupt in saying that using primitives colliding with cloth is unlikely to work for animations. Today I had success in trying that again.
The interesting thing is that it failed totally with the Carrara-rigged Makehuman figure but worked with a Poser figure. Each of the two successes I've had have been with Poser figures.
What I'm wondering is: when I look at the named parts of a Poser figure in the scene tab, do the names represent bones or areas of the mesh? In my figure they represent bones.
When I attach an elongated sphere to, say, the right thigh of the MakeHuman figure, I'm effectively getting the hot point of the (child) sphere to follow the movement of a bone - situated in this case at the point where the thigh joins the hip. And the sphere goes haywire if it is colliding and the limb changes direction - even if I re-locate the sphere's hot-point. But that didn't happen today with a Poser figure.
I'll try to build a skeleton with an extra bone situated mid-thigh to attach the sphere to. If I manage to set the constraints correctly, it should be OK and might even work.
So I can't check the physics, but if you parent a sphere to the thigh, you should be able to move the sphere wherever you want, even offset it outside the body. The hot point of the sphere remains the hot point of the sphere.
I'm assuming you have collisions disabled for the figure's mesh? If not, that may be an issue.
Maybe not enough offset is an issue?
One other thought: With Carrara's rigid physics engine, it calculates not only the surface properties of physics enabled objects, but also any non physics enabled objects that the physics object collides with. Does Bullet take this into account?
Just thinking out loud here...
I wonder how softbody physics and Carrara's standard solver would work with Age of Armour's Trebuchet? It does need a sling after all.
http://www.ageofarmour.com/3d/free/trebuchet.php
Like I say, I've not actually tried the sphere plan yet - or even soft-body. The primitive idea came from a friend, 3DLUST, giving me advice for dynamic hair, and then I recall seeing something to that effect in some of Sparrowhawke's notes on his Dynamic Clothes plugin.
Like I say, I've not actually tried the sphere plan yet - or even soft-body. The primitive idea came from a friend, 3DLUST, giving me advice for dynamic hair, and then I recall seeing something to that effect in some of Sparrowhawke's notes on his Dynamic Clothes plugin.
The older Poser and DAZ figures such as Vicky 2, 3 and 4 all have rigs. They can be revealed through various nefarious means that usually wreck joint weighting and the ability to conform clothes. I have done it. I know Wendy has probably done it.
Wow - that was a fast response!
I did try with and without collision of the figure's mesh.
In the scene tree, I drag the sphere below the thigh and that makes it a child of the thigh - at least if I rotate the leg forward from the hip the sphere follows nicely and it follows back again.
Then when I run the physics simulation and the cloth drapes downwards to collide, it sometimes works perfectly up to a point and then there is poke-through of both sphere and limb as the leg rotates forward.
Sometimes, instead, the sphere gets trapped under the cloth and just judders. Other times it and the cloth explode spectacularly and sometimes it works perfectly before the sphere suddenly springs out sideways and the cloth gets mangled.
From the last case I concluded that the sphere's hot-point was attached to the bone - what I'm calling the bone is the little diamond shape at the hip rather than the elongated wireframe.
Maybe the distance of the sphere's hot point from the bone is part of the problem. The bone is making a tight rotation while the sphere is fighting collisions further away?
From the little I know (because in all of this my focus has been very narrow) collisions with objects do happen by default. There is a tick box to disable collision with other scene objects in the settings tab for any object selected.
When draping is simulated the collision with other scene objects works well most of the time - with bounce and flapping as the cloth settles onto an object, as 3dage mentioned.
What I'm doing is taking a sphere and applying a soft-body modifier to it. I also apply a soft-body attach modifier.
In the soft body attach, I select all the vertices of the sphere (as though I wanted them all to attach to something) . Such vertices become stiff and exempt from the simulation. This makes the sphere hard-body (sort of but with the ability to have a greater collision margin set than it would have if it was only a normal object with default collision. You can set such a sphere to 300% collision margin)
When the cloth has good setting such as a smoothing level of 4 it can work. The moving sphere pushes the cloth. It worked for me today with a poser figure. But with other figures the sphere doesn't stay in place as the limb moves as though it doesn't have a tight grip on the limb.
I really regret that you don't own this version of Carrara. Believe me, I can identify with the reason you gave.
Well I answered evilproducer's first reply as well as I could and then found more posts...
Thanks for the info on Poser figures and others. There sure is a lot to know about all this isn't there?
The trebuchet (?) video was amazing. If I am on the earth (skills-wise), Age of Armour is in the stratosphere!
Probably I'll only pursue the moving collision a little more because I think real success there is unlikely for me at least. I like the idea of moving on to creating some still scenes in Carrara with some cloth draping thrown in. But Ill give it another shot first!
It's great to get such helpful replies to questions - many thanks.
Hi All
The previous video was supposed to be my last on this subject but here is another lasting just over a minute.
It is a quick 'proof of concept' demonstration but the concept needs more work!
It shows a figure's leg moving draped clothing by means of an attached sphere which has a 'soft body attach' modifier applied and a large collision margin set - a larger margin than seems to be required.
Hope you find it useful, if this topic is of interest.
Here is the link: http://youtu.be/HgW1UXLyBBc
I've continued to try out 'clothes-building rules' by adjusting the mesh I offered in the dropbox project. (free - and worth what it cost!).
The gif below shows a tiny glimpse of the 60-80 two-second renders I've done. The clothing is now halter neck, Cinderella style, for want of a better description.
Hello again,
Maybe I should have let this topic rest in peace but I've created a new video of about 8-9 minutes.
I know that in this friendly lake I'm small-fry in my Carrara knowledge but I've called it a tutorial because I tried to set out the steps for what I've been doing in a logical way starting from the first application of a modifier and the first simulation. It will teach the experienced majority nothing new but might help someone beginning.
I will try to find a chance to create clips for part 2 so that some requests for the settings I've used can be shown and my contribution to the subject will have a cleaner ending.
I've still only used a sub-set of the Carrara settings and sliders but I hope it is of use to someone.
There is no audio - just my text narrative - but I think the interface buttons should be visible enough.
The link:
http://youtu.be/n3wBa3CV-JE
I'll never tire from your reports... just so you know. I love the sphere video up a post, and I'll watch your tutorial as soon as I get back.
Very nice video, Marcus. It certainly shows how easy it can be to set up the soft body physics in Carrara.
FYI, Carrara has primitive planes and cubs as well, no need to import them from Sculptris ;)
Hi Dartanbeck
Once again you are very kind for watching my efforts and extremely generous in your comments. It isn't too easy for the viewer to stare at a lo-res screen where he/she needs to discern which area someone is working on. I do cringe when putting these out because of their shortcomings.
I'll try to get the next one ready in a week or so.
The plan is just to show the draping yet again but to show how different mesh densities and specific slider settings behave.
I would like to show what could be tried for posing the figure to be draped - I've mostly shown the T-pose.
Lastly I want to show a couple of examples of collision - in order to show how a seated figure can still be draped.
My end belief in all of this is that if someone wanted to build their own characters with a few basic (home-made) clothes, then it could be very worthwhile to find good draping settings for those clothes - for still renders at least. Since Carrara is such a great all-round construction set, it would be fantastic to do that.
A side-effect for me is that now I see draping everywhere - so be prepared to say: 'Honestly... I wasn't staring at your wife/daughter/girlfriend ... I was studying the DRAPING!!'
BAM!
LOL! BAM!!!
I think it's cool how you make these with the text to read, and then the example. It gives a nice demo on how you've set your physics up, and then the rendered result. And along the way, we can see what options are there for what you're using, too... so I think there's a lt of value to this. Great job, and thanks for these.
nice work - keep it up
Beautiful tutorial as I like them!
I didn't know that we could move the clothe after simulation, I believed that the position belonged to the recorded data.
On this subject, I suppose that these data are registered in a kind of (python?) script, do you know where one could find them?
Normally, these data are safeguarded with the object when we records it in the library, but it is not restored always perfectly when the object is reloaded in a scene.
If we could have access to the script, it would be the ideal. (allo Fenric... ?)
Great job Marcus. I didn't mind the tutorial or find it dull.
HI Markus :)
Nice info and tut :)
The frustrating thing for me, watching you do this is that, In the past, soft-body has worked with Animated objects, and some of us even managed to get soft-body clothing draped onto figures, although that usually lead to an explosion of mesh when it was animated.
Soft-body attach is a great way to "hook" curtains onto a rail. and it can be animated.
I've tried using that on my own clothing on a figure, but animating it, resulted in the clothing sinking into the mesh, and sometimes sticking in space until the figure has walked through it.
We could also embed youtube links into posts here,. but things change and things get broken,.
hopefully both of these things will be fixed at some point in time.
you may find some of the nonsense on my youtube page slightly interesting for some of the physics experiments.
http://www.youtube.com/3dagedesign