DCArt opened this issue on Jan 19, 2007 · 103 posts
kobaltkween posted Mon, 12 February 2007 at 10:50 AM
RorrKonn - that hasn't been my experience at all. i have stuff that doesn't convert to hybrid well simply because i've yet to see a simple and obvious way to combine groups. if i wanted to make the whole thing a prop, (mostly) no problem. but i haven't found a way within poser, for instance, to convert pants to have conforming hips and buttocks but dynamic legs made out the shins and thighs. i tried for a while with a certain set of clothes. every single option i tried allowed me to subdivide groups but not combine it with others. and when i left each part separate and made them dynamic, they did bizarre and unusable things. it's probably possible, but not so simple that i've figured it out, and i don't think i'm average in terms of willingness to muck with stuff.
conversely, philc has made a tool to make conforming clothes out of an obj file. and in fact, here's a one page tutorial showing how to do it by hand.
explained easy and fast? all the tutorials i've found have been both. compared to my efforts to convert conforming pants to hybrid, which failed after days, my efforts using my first dynamic clothes were painless. as in, about 10 -15 minutes, with trial and error of different settings.
but that's the important part. if clothes are quality made hybrids or dynamics to begin with, they're pretty easy to use. it's been hours of work and sometimes futile converting stuff. from making custom morphs so that stuff is pulled up in order to fall properly (i.e., in many poses, loose skirts should come down from a circle), to carefully choosing settings in order to make it behave properly. it would be a lot easier if clothes were made with the right morphs, the right dynamic, conforming, soft and hard decorated groups, and the right settings to begin with. asking customers to do all that themselves is basically not making it dynamic.
frankly, i don't think it's the info. i've been around a while, and i've seen multiple threads, multiple tutorials, multiple very clear instructions detailing all sorts of aspects of how to use dynamic clothes. i think it's three things: the quality of most dynamic clothes on the market, the lack of communal effort put into making dynamic cloth easy to use, and the complaints most people have about dynamic clothes in general.
in the first, i think so many dynamic clothes are made with no seams, edges or other finishing touches. they end up looking like paper thin clothes draped over the figure. so they don't look as good. hybrids and dynamics need to have the same level of quality as conforming to gain people's interest. in the second, i only know of a few people who have made presets for different cloth settings. if the community as a whole spent as long on cloth room settings as was spent on jcm tricks and killing poke-through for conforming clothes, it would be worlds easier for the average poser user to use dynamic cloth. also, as i mentioned, i find that with dynamic clothes you really have to consider the starting pose. results will be totally different with different starting positions. i think dynamic and hybrid clothing would be much easier to use if they came with morphs to work with that. there's lots of details and concerns that should be addressed. dynamic clothing shouldn't be treated like less complex conforming clothing, because it isn't. and the less that difference is handled by the creator, the more that difference has to be handled by the user.
the third issue stems from the other two. because users have to handle these issues, or just have things not work, many who try to use dynamic clothes end up having huge problems and giving up. and posting complaints that make it sound terribly difficult and arcane. personally, i've had issues in the cloth room and ones that i shouldn't have had if poser's cloth room were better. but the difference between quality dynamic clothes, clothes that were kind of thrown together (a couple of freebies, so no complaints), and converted clothes has been consistently huge. and hasn't just been a matter of the mesh. dynamic or hybrid clothing should be tested just as rigorously, come with just as many features, and be made with just as much care as if conforming clothing.
people will never use dynamic or hybrid clothes if they're made as an afterthought, and more effort is put into conforming versions.