is anyone actually using dForce for animations?

Hello,

lately I have (again) tried to create animations with dForce involved. Past experience has taught me to keep scenes simple when it comes to these simulations, so I started out with just one G8F with long dForce hair and an idle animation spanning several hundred frames. No other objects, even hid the clothes from the simulation. So what could go wrong? Well, of course the hair explodes somewhere around frame 270 even though the figure is barely moving. To me this is just the tip of the iceberg, so please forgive this little rant here. I have seen dForce items behave this way so often by now it has become pretty much what I expect to happen. And while I can sometimes figure out a cause, it's usually more a matter of trial and error. And the longer the animation is, the more frustrating it gets because simulation time goes up and I always have to start over the simulation from the beginning. Maybe I should get into the habit of rendering shorter scenes, but on the other hand is 10+ seconds of non-exploding hair really too much to hope for?

Now, to end this post on a more constructive note, I would be interested in the experience of others who have tried to use dForce beyond stills. Is it just me and my bad luck when it comes to dForce or have you felt the same frustration? Any useful advice?

 

Comments

  • donte4011donte4011 Posts: 73

    I am right there with you.  I just did a sitting pose 139 frames and D Force said un uh....ain't gonna happen! So what is dforce for if it can not do animation?  I have looked through all of the threads no one wants to talk about this.  I guess I will have to continue using camera tricks to get around it as always.  I am suprised Daz does not mention there is a problem we know and we are working on it. Lawd, I guess we will have to wait. Wish you well on your projects. 

     

  • GordigGordig Posts: 9,035

    I made this as an experiment.

  • barbultbarbult Posts: 23,050

    You MUST avoid intersection of the dForced item (clothing or hair, for example) with other objects in the scene. If you are doing a sitting animation and the character's butt intersects with the chair seat, the clothing has no where to go (there is no space between character and chair seat). The clothing will explode. Leave a tiny amount of space between the character and chair seat and it will probably work OK. 

  • margravemargrave Posts: 1,822

    donte4011 said:

    So what is dforce for if it can not do animation?

    It's to benefit PAs. Sickleyield has some interesting articles on her DeviantArt page about how time-consuming and thoroughly unprofitable creating corrective morphs for clothing is. dForce allows creators to offload the work onto the physics engine and thus create products more efficiently.

  • GordigGordig Posts: 9,035

    I don't know, dForce seems pretty usable for animation to me.

  • jbowlerjbowler Posts: 741

    barbult said:

    You MUST avoid intersection of the dForced item (clothing or hair, for example) with other objects in the scene. If you are doing a sitting animation and the character's butt intersects with the chair seat, the clothing has no where to go (there is no space between character and chair seat). The clothing will explode. Leave a tiny amount of space between the character and chair seat and it will probably work OK. 

    The sitting-down scenario *can* be stable; yes, it forces an intersection with both the character and the chair, however dForce can handle this wihtout exploding in my experience.  Sitting down then getting up, so undoing the intersection, is more challenging but is clearly soluble when the character/chair surfaces are 2xcollision offset apart.  I don't think dForce special cases this (which is sad) or special cases the self evident issue where an item is trapped between two intersecting surfaces (which is even sadder), but I believe it has code to handle gross self-intersections because I have seen (strand) hair that seems to have a sufficiently high PS hair density that it must (I think) self intersect at the scalp.  I didn't verify the self intersection; it's a lot of work, at least for me.

    All that said, apart from the interaction-with-objects conditions (sitting down, leaning against a pillar, gesticulating expansively around urns, stabbing Julius with a dagger) animations really should be eaiser than complex interacting poses (Julius and Cleopatra, in flagrante - how on earth do you keep the hair out of his anatomy?)

    I do agree that animations are difficult; I gave up trying to do them because I am much more interested in still images, however the animations should be much, much easier as long as the characters follow appropriate rules for social distancing (i.e. they are not stabbing each other.)

    I suspect a large part of the OP's problem is, in fact, the hair.  Hair really should just pop out of the way; it is so light that strand based hair sometimes seems to take half an hour to actually drop to a credible position, though this has gotten better recently [4.15].  Sure, it does not pop out of the way in the real world, IRW it just gets stuck to our skin, yet in the dForce world a strong character striding across the forum should have his or her hair streaming back behind (given how light dForce hair seems to be) not doing the some version of an Atomic Gorgon.

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