It seems conforming clothing is more plentiful than dynamic clothing, but which one is more popular? I'm guessing that dynamic clothing doesn't work in P4, and since more people have 4 than pro or 5, maybe that is one reason why conforming is seen a lot more often than dynamic. Also, I was playing around with some freebie dynamic clothing I downloaded from planit3d and noticed on installation that they don't have OBJ files... So how is it made? My guess is the creator uses an obj to create the clothing but then when its turned to dynamic cloth it no longer needs the obj file? Cause all of that info is stored in the dyn. clothing's character file... I'm just guessing. If so, does that make dynamic clothing, in essence, easier to create than conforming clothes? Seems like it would, since if there's no OBJ, that should mean there's no grouping of bodyparts to be done. Again, I'm just guessing here. So, are there tutorials around for how to create dynamic clothing?

http://www.philc.net/tutorialsIndex.htm
http://www.poserfashion.net/tutorials.htm
http://www.nerd3d.com/Tutorial/Tutorials.htm

Good luck
JV Message edited on: 09/27/2004 22:37

Creating dynamic clothing is MUCH easier than creating conforming clothing. Dynamic clothing items are almost always (parented) props, so you don't have to create bones, you don't have to tweak joint parameters, you don't have to create morphs to fit all kinds of body shapes. Indeed, you don't have to do grouping of body parts. Actually, body parts will often prevent the dynamic cloth from working correctly. I've tried! But there is no hard and fast rule. Rigid or semi-rigid clothing (shoes, armor) is (almost) impossible to make with dynamic cloth, conforming cloth is much better here. Loose flowing skirts and blouses are almost impossible to do well with comforming cloth, and this is where dynamic cloth shines. In my opinion dynamic and conforming cloth complement each other.

Good to know. And, svdl, it is your v3 dynamic skirts and tops pack that I was playing with that got me interesting in finding out how to create dynamic clothes. very nice work.

totally incidental: there are more users of poser 5 than Poser 4. There are, however, more experienced users of 4 than there are of 5

There may be more Poser 5 users than Poser 4/PPP, but I bet that a LOT of the P5 users have looked in the cloth room, yelled AAARGH and left again. I've used dynamic clothes sometimes and I like what it can do, but partially due to the lack of varied items, I don't use it much. I also tend to pose my characters before I clothe them, which is a no-no when you're talking dynamics.. you gotta have a zero pose to start off with...

Yup. Same goes with morphs, dynamic clothes only fit unmorphed figures. But it's simple to start with the zero pose at frame 1 and set the final pose and morphs on frame 20. And add the clothing later.

Not always. But there is an easy way to deal with it. You have to create an animation for the dynamics to function; so just open your animation pallette, set the right field to 60, drag the slider -to- 60, and do your static scene posing there. When you add a new element scrub it back to 0, add the item and make any position changes to prevent intersection with what exists already, then return to frame 60 and do your positioning. Unless you are working on figures that are tightly intertwined, what you want is a free move zone around each figure, to give the dynamic cloth room to sway and deform. When your scene at frame 60 is ready, reset the time scrubber to 0, go into the cloth room and make your settings (I tend to use either 30 or 45 for the drape frames setting; dyn cloth needs time to settle and stop reacting to implied gravity). Run the sim for each piece of cloth, checking its look back in the pose room at frame 60, then saving each successful run, so that if something borks on you, you haven't lost it all. Once all the cloth is done and you're happy with it, just render frame 60. And you can do -layered- dynamic clothing; this is a test with the Carla character for the Solandra III character (frame 59 out of a 240 frame walk test). The loincloth is for Jim Burton's Ingenue Vicki, the mantle is Nerd's and the cape is PhilC's. You have to start with the innermost cloth layer and work your way out, but so long as you make sure you have the collision detection enabled for the layers that will be contacting each other, it works fine (at least in the walk; haven't found out just where the break point is in motion where the action is sufficiently violent to override the collision detection). You can't see it, but the structure underlying the mantle has had Ockham's 'jiggles' script applied to them, and the cloth seems to have handled the bounces (the effect is almost exactly like what you see when a well endowed woman wears a top that's either a little to big, or the elastic is dying. It slips, it dips, it threatens....but it never fails :P ). And yes, I know the loincloth isn't quite centered; that's where you have to watch your settings, when you are scaling something up to fit a different character. Being a prop, it centers on its attachment point, not the creation point like a character does. So when you scale up, it may scale more in one direction, which that did. But it still draped, so NHNF. Conforming has its place, as does dynamic. There -is- a dearth of dynamic items....but there was a dearth of conforming items at one time, too. As more people get into the function of P5, new guru's are going to surface (already happening), and there should be a future groundswell of demand, and the smart merchants will leap at the new money chances.

Hi all here's my two penneth of opinion :) I've been trashing around in the cloth room for a while now and am not even close to using all the options. I think though that as far as flexibility goes dynamic clothing gives a more realistic effect, though it takes a bit of knowledge to get that out. I think dynamics will come to the fore, just as soon as people find out what you can do with the cloth room. It's just a shame it's not intuitive to use. John

Dynamic clothing does have an objet file, but it's embedded in the prop definition. You can export a piece of dynamic clothing from any animation frame to an object file. Conforming is more poplular for 2 reasons. First, it works in both P4 and P5, while dynamic only works in P5, and second because you can create more complicated meshes for conforming clothing. Conforming clothing works great for heavier clothing too, like jackets, or very tight clothing like form fitting pants. I'll often design a piece of dynalmic clothing, drape it, then convert the resultant object to conforming clothing. It can really help fitting the clothing to morphs too. Both have their place.

About complicated meshes for dynamic clothing: you can do very much with soft and rigid decorated groups. These haven't been used to their full potential yet. I wouldn't be surprised if the same level of detail that we find in high quality conforming clothing will be reached in dynamic clothing too, once the great cloth modelers adopt P5 dynamic cloth. I think the first merchant that releases high quality dynamic cloth with details like gems, pockets, belt loops, clasps etc will make a fortune.

You better believe it svdl, I've tried and it's not simple :) could do with an overhaul of the clothroom to simplify ammending the groups. Or maybe even an add on. You can get some complex effects, but the draw back being, the more complex the mesh, the longer it takes to calculate the dynamics. Many thanks to svdl for showing me what was possible with his excelent work. John

I've been using P5 for about a year now and I've just started using SVDL's dynamic clothes and Hmann's too. Dyamic is the way to go for realism, no question. What I have found is that you have to take greater care in setting up your complete scene and think more about what you want the finished result to look like. To explain more; I quite often start a scene using "conforming" clothing and then change thw whole look of it by the final render, sometimes it's nothing like what I started with or intended. With dynamic you can't change direction like that because if for instance you change the characters pose you then have to redo the "calculate dynamics" thing which can be a pain. So to cap, if you want to do quick renders and move things about it's best to use "conforming". If you've got bags of time use "dynamic". That's my view and I know it isn't the same for the more experienced guys but when you're learning I think it's the right way to go. Cheers!

I definitely agree with Fugazi1968 on the overhaul of the cloth room. Better selection facilities in the Grouping Tool (I'd LOVE to see a "Select Open Edges" and "Expand Selection") along with some other goodies, like a "prestretched" group (would be perfect for elastic materials) and a rope/strap simulator would be fantastic. A funny thing: I have converted conforming cloth to dynamic cloth, more than once (V3 Wizard robe, Netherworks Darkling skirt, V2 Posh dress) relieving me of the pain of manually adjusting skirt poses and morphs and never getting a realistic looking result. Just the opposite from pdxjims (though I also have used his technique to create morphs). thefixer is also right, if you use dynamic cloth you'll have to adapt the workflow. Takes some time getting used to, but it's not really that hard.

I like dynamic clothing when it's relevant. And also because it's versatile. It can (often - not always) be converted via the cloth room to fit a different character than the one it was created for. The problem with it is that, if you want to fit an item to a different character, it is virtually impossible to save the resulting mesh such that it can be re-used, without having to go through the whole clothifying procedure again. So I wrote a little app:-)) (Which is why this post.) I origanally wrote it to save myself a lot of text editor cut'n'paste hassle. The app assumes that you have converted some dynamic clothing (via whatever methods; magnets, shrinking the figure and/or clothing at frame 1 and letting the cloth room sort it out as the figure reverts to normal size etc.) then saved the resulting clothing as a Wavefront.obj file. Which, of course loses any P5 special groups (cloth room constrained/decorated or mat room transparancy etc.). My little app allows you to specify the original dynamic cloth pp2 file, the saved Wavefront .obj file and a NEW prop file. It then replaces the internal geom of the original prop with that from the .obj file, and saves the result wherever you specified. It's not rocket-science, but it works...(ish):-)) Anyone who wants a copy, just IM me or contact me via diolma2003@yahoo.co.uk. (it's free - just my little return to the pple here who have contributed so much that I use..) Regret: it's PC only ('cos written using MSVC). If anyone wants to attempt to convert it for Mac, they're welcome to the source code. Cheers, Diolma

Dioloma -- That sounds like a cool little app :) I've just pretty much used the grouping tool to do the same thing, though. ;) Your way will be much faster!

Attached Link: http://www.jwhitham.plus.com/Diolma/ObjApply.zip

Also my little app is also available at this link (kindly provided by John Whitham) Cheers, Diolma

Thanks Diolma! Downloading right now.