ok dynamic cloth will not collide with child objects of the figure to which it is parented. so the answer is to run the simulations with the lower cloth unparented to the figure but still colliding with it, then parent the top cloth to the figure and have it collide with the figure and the lower cloth, which is an entirely separate object. i read through so much stuff and never encountered mention of this. nice tutorial, by the way, fugazi, and love the cloth primitive idea gracias

Hi elenorcoli :) Glad you like the Cloth Prims idea :) I can't quite visualise the problem with layeting dynamic clothes you are having, I don't think I've had problems with cloth not colliding with child objects. If you could post a piccy I'd appreciate it. It may be a mesh resolution problem, I've had that before, you could try changing the cloth sim settings. By default it's set to detect cloth vertex against object poly collisions, but you can set it to detect cloth poly against object poly. Hope that helps :) John

Interesting. I didn't know that. I guess I never ran into it because I rarely parent dynamic cloth to the figure. I dunno, the results just seem to look better if you don't parent it.

the problem is when you dont parent the cloth when you try need to translate the figure the cloth sim breaks but oh well i will just have to get it right the first time i always check the other collision options just because i like to set the cloth very close to the figure (0.1 and .01) and post work on patterened cloth is a nightmare. i will pop some pics up this eve see if theres another way around this fugazi, i particularly liked the way you grew the cloth to size by simply parenting to the figure, resizing the figure and growing to fill the cloth. i had been going about that in a way less efficient way, sizing each independently gracias again for a spectacular tutorial

Hiya :) Not 100% sure what you mean by translate, I'm having a dim moment I think :)

To parent or not to parent? :-) Personally, I too prefer not to parent. If I need the figure in another position, I parent the cloth, move the figure, then parent to universe. (This only works for stills, of course - animations are another matter altogether.) Some other mini-tips: If you're fitting the cloth to a morphed or re-sized figure, or even a different figure altogether, the shrink-wrapping technique touched on in post 4 works, but sometimes you can run into problems if the cloth has straps holding a dress up. The straps stretch tremendously, from the "weight" of the rest of the dress. Several techniques can help with this: * You can assign the straps to a constrained (or maybe make soft-decorated) group, especially if the underlying figure hasn't changed in height. * You can increase the "stretch resistance" to something like 500 (or even 1000), 'tho this also affects the rest of the clothing, which may or may not give the effect wanted. * You can constrain everything (ie. ADD ALL); this then gives a "Wardrobe Wizard"-like effect... I prefer to do "fitting" and "posing" as 2 separate steps. I do the fitting in the zero pose. I load the figure, key-frame it at frame 20, (and break spline in the editor), return to frame 1 then load the clothing. If the cloth is thinner than the figure I scale the figure down so it fits inside the clothing, sometimes using x/z scaling on individual body parts. (I often change transparency to 50% on the cloth, so I can see what's going on.) If the the cloth is shorter than the figure, I scale the cloth in the y direction, if possible. It's best if the cloth only has to be stretched in the x/z directions.. I then run the sim. If the sim works (about 80% success rate 1st go for me), I either export the best frame from 20-30 as a .obj or create a morph target and add it to the cloth prop and re-save into the props library (under a different name..) Sometimes I have to increase the no. of frames and try again. Then I quit Poser. Just to free up that fragmented memory... Restart Poser, load figure, Pose at frame 20 (or whatever - depends on how complicated the pose is and how much the cloth is going to have to collide against), return to frame 1, load the .obj or the new prop (and remember to dial the morph to 1), and run the sim.. Oh, and before I forget. I never put hair on the figure before getting the clothing right, especially if the hair extends below the neck. Very often, long hair will constrict or intersect the cloth right at frame 1, causing the sim to fail tragically as the cloth room tries franticly to get out from in-between and I've found, to my cost in time, that trying add or delete additional collision objects after running the 1st sim can often crash the cloth room in one of several ways. So I don't add hair til later (then I don't forget to remove it from the collision list..) Cheers, Diolma (hope this helps a little..)

One other thing (before I forget): remember that you can "fit" bits of a cloth garment in separate stages. Just group the bits that you DON'T want to bother with immediately (or group the bits you do want to do now, then hit inverse, sometimes quicker) and delete them from the dynamic group. Run the sim. export as .obj, (exit/restart Poser), then reverse the selection. This is sometimes helpful if you want to get close-fitting bits (belts, cuffs etc.) "fitted" using a different technique from the rest. It's best to the the close-fitting bits 1st.. cheers, Diolma

wow cool tips many things i haven't tried! just when i get okay at the cloth room everything goes haywire again. now i have been working on modifying cloth in max and trying out the meshes in poser. i've managed to keep the cloth from self intersecting ( i run collision with the ground...as far as i have seen this stage will tell if it is self intersecting by blowing out the sim count or just not running at all) but i am having problems applying the cloth to the character and the sim running for more than like 10 frames before it blows out the count is it advisable to restart poser everytime? should you always delete the simulations and start over instead of just recalculating?

by translate i mean, say you did a walk cycle, and ran the cloth sim. then you realized that the character was not on the floor, or you wanted to move the character over a foot or two. if the cloth is parented, it will move with the character and the sim will remain intact. but if the cloth is unparented it will continue on it little morping oddessy on it's own outside of the character's body. by the way i also noticed (am i crazy for this?) that the cloth simulator seems to take into account other objects the cloth could collide with, even if you don't check collision with that object, and that the only way to reduce that time is to hide the object. (late night last night...i could be crazy) in this case shorts that character was wearing (unparented) that the simulator also checked against a dress that was to collide with the body. i ended up trying the dress alone to collide with the floor, hid the body, and when it came into contact with the shorts (collision not checked) the simulator time increased. could be just a coincidence though, but you you never know

Hmm. Are you using P5 or P6? I'm more conversant with P5 (I only got P6 recently), and I never came across either of the problems you mentioned...
BTW - I have noticed that in P6 you can't rely on the cloth-rooms preview screen (which you can do in P5). You have to wait for the sim to finish before you can see exactly how it has worked (it's a PITA!)

If the figure moves, the cloth should move with the figure (as long as the character is checked for "collide against", of course. The figure moves the cloth..
NB - When checking for "collide against" for a figure, always use the figure's name, not "body"..
BTW (not sure of my facts here, but..) if the other clothing (shorts in your example) is conforming (and has been conformed), not dynamic, that may also account for the auto-collision..

If any other articles are parented to the figure then they will, by default, be included in the collision tree. You have to uncheck them manually (prefererably at the time you check the figure, the cloth room can take a horrendous time to re-caclutlate collision object after the 1st one).

If you are doing calculations for multiple dynamic cloth, start from the inside and work out (obvious I know, but I've seen that come up a couple of times..). Also, if the original props are being "fitted" to a different/morphed, or are not in a "pre-draped" form (many aren't), do that for each article (in innermost to outermost order) first, saving or creating morphs for each as you go through the sequence.
THEN (and ONLY then), do the posing sims for each (in order). The reason? Supposing you have a long jacket or cardigan or somesuch that needs to be draped over a mini-dress (or whatever) and that the mini-dress starts out as an almost-horizontal circle. It would be almost impossible to prevent the upper clothing from colliding with the undraped mini...

Re: "Is it advisable to restart poser everytime? should you always delete the simulations and start over instead of just recalculating?"
As ever there's no hard-and-fast rules here.
It's probably a memory fragmentation thing.
It seems to depend on the number of polys in the clothing, the extremity of the pose and whether Poser has decided it's not getting out of bed for.
Usually I can get away with 2-4 re-calculations (I always do a "clear simulation" 1st) before coming up with glitches..
(NB - that's "clear simulation" - not the "delete simulation").
I have found it good practice to set up everything ready for the sim then save the scene as a pz3 file. Then I run the sim. If all works, save the result as a new PZ3 file.
If it fails, I quite Poser, (take a tea break to allow myself to utter swear-words in private), re-start Poser, and re-load the PZ3 file (which maintains all the Cloth-room settings etc. Make any corrections for things which might have caused the sim to go wrong, save the file (over the previous one - it didn't work, there's no point in keeping it) and try again..

Be warned: this can seriously affect your hard-drive space. Not only does Poser save the pz3 file, it also saves a file for each piece of clothing, holding the progressive morphs of the cloth.

Best to delete old files on a regular basis..

Hope this helps,

Cheers,
Diolma

PS: A lot of it is the old "suck it and see" technique (AKA "trial and error"). You gradually get a feel for what will and what won't work...but you have to go through it to find out.

PPS: Exit and re-load Poser at least once an hour. Not only will this save your eyesight and lessen backache, it frees up Poser's fragmented memory..

Message edited on: 10/08/2005 15:58

all good words. yes i am cheating and draping everything from a looser fit to a tighter one. i sort of don't know what i will attempt next so i just start running. so lets say we're gonna do shorts and a dress. (and of course nothing fits right) we want the dress to drape over the shorts. so i will have to set up the shorts first, save the obj, quit. then do the dress...but i will need to inflate the keester a bit so that the dress will fit over the shorts when draped. save and quit again. then load the saved dress onto the shorts sim and run again. i believe i have a process. by the way i have p6 but did not get along with it too well, i use p5. might just use p6 to render if i can figure out all that stuff.

Ummm.. I'm afraid I'm no expert. What you have suggested is probably the way I would approach it. Saving soon and saving often is usually the way to go with Poser. It might seem long-winded, but I have learned that in the long term it seems to be a time saver. You can delete the older files later (if you need disk space). The "exit and re-load Poser" stuff is just 'cos Poser is notoriously bad at dealing with memory. Both simulations and renders tend to fragment RAM, and so it's usually easier to save, quit, restart, reload than suffer the consequences of not doing so. But how often you have to do that depends on your PC setup. After a while you get a feeling for it.. Cheers, Diolma PS: you might want to IM svdl (steven) if you're having problems with dynamic clothing - he has far more experience than I do, although I understand that he's a little pressed for time just at present. He's not a tutor, as such, but does have some tutorials on his site (which I can't remember the links of at the moment)