Poser has had the capability for dynamic/strand based hair and dynamic clothing with Poser 5.  I just wonder why so much of the commercial market is still conforming clothing and prop hair.  There has been a lot of discussion of late as to the use of shaders and lighting for more realistic skin.  Why is there not as much development for the dynamic clothing and hair?

Excellent question! This is something I´ve been wondering for a long time. I remember when the dynamic were first introduced, I thought would really change the content and usage of Poser but sadly it didn't.  There is good share of dynamic clothing in free stuff but there is not much going on in the hair department. Maybe it's because the dynamic system in P5 wasn't that hot. I don't know...

Extra work for the user most times is what I hear. Plus I have never seen dynamic poser hair that worked well. Plus it is slow and requires extra work again. I have never tried hair but I have very mixed results when I try things for the cloth room and most of it has issues but it does have better potential if you are willing to wait. Although it doesn' do well with some things.

Dynamic hair renders FASTER than transmapped hair in Poser 8. And looks better (well if the hair is well-made in the first place but that goes for transmapped hair as well) 

As for the "takes longer.. again.. yes it's not a "one-click-conform-to-your-preset-pose" thing like conforming clothes - but OTOH it's not all that slow - especially not in Poser 8 where both the hair room and the cloth room seems to have received a well-deserved overhaul.

My personal guess is that a lot of people are still clinging to what they "used to" back with Poser 4 (and to a degree in Poser 5 which had hair room and dynamic clothes but was so overall wonky that no one dared use it)

People are expecting conforming clothes and not dynamic ones when they buy a new outfit. Which is a shame because most clothes looks just better if they're dynamic.

Whenever I make something conforming I run it through the cloth room before I group the obj - that way it falls a lot more "real" than I can make it do in my modelling program alone :)  I'd personally prefer to release it as it was then, dynamic.. but dynamic clothes just doesn't sell well.

There is a recent thread here somewhere that's shows dynamic hair in Poser 8 and it's vastly improved and renders much faster then before. People were even saying it rendered faster then transmapped hair in IDL.  I must admit though that styling hair in Poser is tedious at best.

Arrgh TrekkieGrrrl! You beat me to the punch!

 I personally like strand based hair as well - I think it looks more natural.  But even now as D|S is developing dynamic clothing and Carrara has strand based hair, the Poser market is lagging behind when there does seem to be a demand for these items.

Poser Dynamics???.....

Yep...Under used and Over looked in EVERY aspect

HARD BODY DYNAMICS

Cheers

Definitely a case of scared of the feature-itis. Well, look at the texture market; we've had shaders in Poser since P5, and how many people -still- use the 4096x4096 textures that consumes 10+ megs of ram =each= instead of procedural shaders that have much less of a demand on memory (just processor time, which we have more and more of each year)?  

I think it's more than the technical issue. For rendering stills images, in most cases conforming clothes and hair are good enough. In animation though, you must use dynamic clothes, and now in poser 8, dynamic hair too. I hope to see more dynamic products, hair and clothes.

Quote - Definitely a case of scared of the feature-itis. Well, look at the texture market; we've had shaders in Poser since P5, and how many people -still- use the 4096x4096 textures that consumes 10+ megs of ram =each= instead of procedural shaders that have much less of a demand on memory (just processor time, which we have more and more of each year)?  

Without talking of the size of the runtime after uncompress the archive !!!

 I think that even for still images, dynamics would make the images more believable.

I still haven't mastered the fine art of modeling cloth folds/wrinkles, but when I can get results like this out of the cloth room, I'm almost inclined not to care ....

Well for one thing, traditionally dynamic clothing has sold far worse than anything made conforming. I was minorly involved with one product that was made "Hybird" with the skirt dynamic and the upper aprt conforming. It sold far fewer units than a similar conforming product, and on the rare occation I saw it rendered the users never much bothered to run it thru the cloth room and have the skirt fitted to the pose. Most of the time the skirt was left in the "as-loaded" teepee shape, on at least one occation the skirt was left as loaded ant the legs pose sticking thru the skirt. A tutorial explaining the use of dynamics and hybrid clothing was inclued with the product.

I admit from watching the forums there seems to be more interest in dynamics but it still form a small audience. The majority of the buying public still seems to want conforming over dynamic as they are "easier" to use, requiring less effort if, by the same token, giving a less satisfying result.

This is all my opinion, certainly, but it;s based on observation of both the marketplace and the forums. If I'm wrong in my conclusions I would love to hear about it!

Both conforming and dynamic clothing have their pros and cons.
The advantage of conforming over dynamic is the morphs which are often present in the conforming items (not only bodymorphs, but also additional morphs such as open/close, lift, twist, etc). Most dynamic cloth does not have these and it is sometimes very complicated or impossible to do without serious modifications to the cloth itself.
With dynamic clothing it is much easier to create natural clothing shapes and they do look better. In animation it saves tons of work to use it.

Another often forgotten thing which comes into play with dynamic clothing is that you have to adust your workflow and start planning your scene in advance. Frame 1 zeroed figure, frame 5 morphed figure, frame 30 posed figure. If you have it interact with props, then you need to position and move these so they end up in the pose of frame 30 and do not interfere with the draping of the cloth in earlier frames. The order in which you run your simulations become important, etc.
With conforming clothing you do not have these problems

 I admit I buy conforming clothing - but that's primarily because it is what is mainly available.  I have some dynamic dresses that without I would not be able to cloth some 3rd party figures that have never received much support.  But male dynamic clothing is practically non-existent - which is inconvenient since most of my characters are male.

When I get a conforming outfit I consider it to be dynamic, too. Just export the clothing figure as an obj and reimport it and then copy the shaders over to it. Poser can clothify any object. If I need fast and easy I'll use the conformer, if I have the spare time and want something more realistic I'll clothify it.

Sometimes conformers have detached geometry that can make it fall apart when run in the cloth room, in that case I weld a few offending vertices in a modeler or transmap the problem areas invisible and it usually works fine.

That's how I look at conforming clothing: a 2-in-1 deal.

Personal opinion follows and in no way reflects the opinions of my employers:

I think many users are scared of the cloth and hair rooms. They simply don't know what to do in there. Also, and please don't take offense, the majority of Poser users can't be bothered to actually work a scene. At least, that's what it seems like. Most just want to be able to hit a button and make something happen. The cloth and hair room don't really lend themselves to that mentality. You can get something quickly that way in there, using default settings, but it won't look as good as conforming hair or as good as if you put some time in getting the settings right.

I feel the two rooms need to be simplified to make things more user friendly. Once that's done, more "average" users will start using it I think. As of now, it's like the material room was when it was introduced - people wait for someone else to make things they can use with it and then they wait for other people to tell them how to use those things.

At least, that's my opinion based on comments I've seen here over the years and is, to me, why more dynamic products aren't made.

I -love- dynamic cloth, although my attempts to turn conforming clothing into dynamic hasn't really gone very well :( I definately wish there were more dynamic cloth items out there.  I have a huge list of things that I want to be dynamic.

As for hair, tbh I haven't really seen much of it since it first came out in P5, and it really didn't look very good. That said, I've used Tiny's furred cat and rat and they look amazing.

 You won't get any argument from me on that, teyon. That was something I mentioned in every survey for Poser that had a text field; better cloth room references, a collection of preset cloth 'types', things that people who didn't know the first flipping thing about shear strength vs gravity vs friction could actually use. The power in those integrated plugins is amazing....but you are almost totally alone in figuring out what is what. And lets face it;  shader programming is far harder than dynamics is, usually......but you get immediate feedback. And that 'animation' word does tend to scare the bejesus out of lots of folks......

There also seems to have been a generational shift in the market, as well. The old P4 weenies used to dig into the cr2 and assorted other files with gleeful abandon, simply because they could. Someone would figure out a new trick, and many others would hop on the bandwagon. Recently, the folks who want to push the envelope are being buried beneath the 'load and render' crowd. Which is cool, as it keeps the product alive.....but those of us who want to move the application up a notch or three get buried under the make it for the masses mentality.

Quote -

There also seems to have been a generational shift in the market, as well. The old P4 weenies used to dig into the cr2 and assorted other files with gleeful abandon, simply because they could. Someone would figure out a new trick, and many others would hop on the bandwagon. Recently, the folks who want to push the envelope are being buried beneath the 'load and render' crowd. Which is cool, as it keeps the product alive.....but those of us who want to move the application up a notch or three get buried under the make it for the masses mentality.

Yes sir  We must Not Forget the Commercial reality
that the "Load& Render Crowd" Are the financial Backbone of this Market ,Such as it is, and they Will Always seek Prepackaged  solutions and eagerly PAY for them.
and as a Merchant Myself I dont see this as a Bad thing.
If you are an innovator of ,sorts, and find yourself Frustrated that hardly anyone seems
interested in learning to Extend the programs
Capabilities that way you have you really have two options:
Use your Innovations in your personal poser work
and forget about who else is Doing it.
or you can Package your innovation/Skills into a Click Load and render $Commercial$ product.
Either way you Will benefit.

Now back on the subject of Posers Dynamic Cloth
I Completely Agree it is Superior to Conforming In many Aspects.
But as already Stated the number of parameters one has to learn & Set  BEFORE you even begin your Simulation is just too intimidating for many and the simulation times are an additional deterrent .

And finallyI am Certain Poser8's Advanced IDL Rendering option will Suffer the same Fate.
Look at the Sudden Drop in the number of threads about IDL. Does it indicate that people have figured it out??
or have largely abandoned it and gone back to
traditional Light sets? 

Cheers

Anyone who thinks that conforming clothing is less work than dynqmic obviously hasn't tried to pose a girl in a long dress in a feet up seated possition on a sofa!  It's a snap with dynamics but trying to get the dress between the sofa and the girl is more than a pain with a conforming dress.

Quote - Whenever I make something conforming I run it through the cloth room before I group the obj - that way it falls a lot more "real" than I can make it do in my modelling program alone :)  I'd personally prefer to release it as it was then, dynamic.. but dynamic clothes just doesn't sell well.

What a cool idea, TrekkieGrrl. I'll have a go and see if I can get a few more natural folds and wrinkles and get away from that Neoprene look.

My experience (experiments) in the cloth room have been fraught with frustration: missed settings or my pose was wonky or Poser (7) flat-out spat the dummy... would you be able to suggest a comprehensive tutorial / manual that kinda discusses common pitfalls users tend to get snagged on...

I think most of my "Dynamic hair looks worse" comes from the fact that most of what I see from it looks like slightly styled wires sticking out of a head with bald spots in the examples I have seen but I admit I have never used the hair room because of that. And the few times I have used it on stuff that came with it renders VERY slowly.

As for dynamic clothes, most times the stuff I have used ends up torn, in pieces and on the floor but sometimes can produce decent results. I do wish there was a way to smooth the bends sometimes because they can look rather crinkly (when I have gotten them to work) but it annoying since it is hours and hours to see if something will look like garbage or what.

Doesn't matter whether it's dynamic or not, if there's a log of hair it will render slowly.  Try rendering the fuzzy version of the bedtime sets plush bear.  Look at it this way to get really nice looking hair you need to have about 14,000 - 20,000 hairs.  Much more than that and Poser will choke.  Each hair casts a shadow.  I think you get where I'm going with this.

Vincebagna posted some nice renders of dynamic hair in P8 in this thread:

IDL and dynamic hair

The Firefly renderer was optimized to work well with dynamic hair in P8 and it renders faster then transmapped hair.   I wish there was an easier way though to style the hairs but judging from vincebagna's thread using over 14,000 - 20,000 hairs should be no problem in P8.

That does look much better than the previous things i have seen. I don't have P8 though and not sure if I would use IDL anyway but it does look much better.

Last time I tried using dynamic hair, there were still problems with the collision handling.  The hair would still penetrate the head, shoulders, or neck of the figure wearing it, or it would explode into frizzies when it collided.  Has that been resolved in P8?  (Here's hoping it has....)

For me, it's a matter of system resources. When dynamics first came out for Poser, I was very excited by the idea, but when I tried to do something, anything, it would take so long to simulate that I just gave up on it. Now, I can simulate cloth so fast that it is almost as easy to use as conforming clothes, easier in some cases, such as skirts. Making someone walk in a skirt is tedious, have to morph every step. With dynamics, it's just click and wait. I use dynamics in almost every animation I make, in some way or another.

Great thread!

There is sellection of dynamic hair at RDNA. Some of it looks good.

If a content provider is going to make cloths dynamic first (to get good drapping and folds), and then conforming. , why not sell both the conforming and dynamic item in the set? The dynamic work is already done anyway.

I have seen in another thread on this subject the suggestion to just import the object file of a conforming clothing item, and skip the export step. This would somewhat simplify the process of using conforming cloths as dynamic. Of course, one needs to know where the object file is located.

lmk

well, if you are working with a skirt, often you don;t even have to do more than load it and even conformit before making it a Hybrid conformer/dynamic. Most creators make the skirts as a single body part (usually hip but sometimes "skirt" etc.)

Load it
Conform it
move the slider to an appropriate frame
move to the cloth room
go thru the C-room steps and make the skirt group (hip etc.) the dynamic group.
run the simulation as you would for a normal dynamic cloth item.

A bit more advanced, but necessary if the skirt is fancy (with seperate trim parts that might fall away during the simulation, or it has a turned under hem) select those areas and make them into a "Soft Decoration" group. THis wil let them move with the simulation but (hipefully) keep their shape (sometimes it works sometimes it doesn;t for me at least). If this doesn;t work you may need some postwork.

I've done that but have found that it tends to "tear" at the stomach when I do, especially with the Morphing Fantasy Dress. I usually just conform the dress, pose the figure to the starting frame of the animation, then export the whole dress as an .obj then import that and it will fit perfectly at the frame one and easy to dynamify it.

One thing I find frustrating about using dynamic cloth is the fact that I keep forgetting to go back to frame 1 to position other figures, props and lights. I keep addiing them on the last frame of the simulation. Usually not a issue except that if you want to add another dynamic cloth to a figure, things get messy  because on frame 1 all the new objects are out of position and you often have to move all the changes from the last frame to the 1st. Not really a problem, just (sometimes) a lot of extra work.

But I do love dynamic clothing for its versatility. You can get much better results as with magnets or morphs to which you are limited if you use conforming clothing.
I just hope they will add multiple choreographed groups for a single clothing prop in the future. That would allow you to have much more control over how a cloth behaves and will allow things like opening a coat.

Regarding the usage of conforming clothing with the clothroom: It is possible, but you have to use the constrained zone properly otherwise it will tear. For skirt-type clothing it will usually work fine if there are enough vertices on the right places to work with. If not, the folds will not look natural and it will not look very good.

.

wimwdb for the lights when you create on you just have to uncheck the "Animating"  in the panel properties, for the props i've tried the Animation palette ( Window menu ), to delete an animation click the end frame of your prop and slide it to the first frame, your prop stay at the last posotion you done ( i hope i'm easy to understand ! )

Anthanasius - thanks for the tips!
I never realized that you could move a single element in the animation frame and I totally forgot about turning off animation for lights.  This makes it much easier.

I'd just like to chime in -- as someone who is really trying to learn the ropes in poser, I find it tremendously difficult to get any answers. There is no central place to find answers -- no comprehensive guide.

I can find 100 tutorials on how to conform hair to a figure, for example, in poser 4... but if I want to learn how to make conforming hair? Forget it -- I'm looking at days of poking around on the web. Eventually I end up asking here on the forums and if I stick with the thread and bump it a couple times, I might get at least most of my question answered.

I WANT to learn how to make the dynamics work. I don't need a beginner's tutorial the starts with "open the cloth room." I want a guide -- I want my questions about how a figure is going to act if I have a bunch of dynamics going and I have to render a series of complicated animations. What's the workflow going to be? What are the gotchas?

That's just one example of an answer I am never going to find with google. No good resources exist to get those kind of answers (or if they do, they aren't easy to find!).

So to answer your question: dynamic stuff isn't popular to make or buy because there isn't sufficient documentation about HOW to use them beyond the bonehead basics.

*dynamic stuff isn't popular to make

*In fact dynamic cloth is easier to make than conforming clothes because you have don't to do the whole process of grouping and rigging, and you don't have to worry about morphs.
But it's also more limited than conforming clothes. It's much harder to make rigid objects like belts and buckles.
English Bob has  some quick suits and quick dresses which are a good starting base mesh for making dynamic clothes, you just can adjust them in your popular modelling program perhaps they only need some subdividing to make them more "fluid" in the cloth room.

Here's the link BTW.

www.morphography.uk.vu/index.php

If this is too technical, just say so, I can explain more if you want.. If you just want to have some dynamic clothing, search for svdl, he has made some excellent cloth for V3 and V4.

Dynamic hair is another chapter. Although I've made several attempts to make some dynamic hair of my own, I still find it extremely difficult to get some acceptabel results. making skullcaps isn't difficult, but the styling in poser isn't easy at all.
It is easier to adjust some existing dynamic hair than to make your own. Adorana has made some excellent free dynamic hair for V3 and M3, which isn't too difficult to adjust for V4 and M4 or any other model. She has also  a lot of material settings for dynamic hair, just look in the freestuff area.

Finally: poser 8 rendering is optimised for dynamic hair, like others said, and I believe the cloth room has also been optimised  and runs much faster now. So to get the best result upgrading to poser 8 is advisable.

best regards,

Bopper.

I discovered a wrinkle (!) during my last project.  If you do a dynamics run and then save, Poser saves the settings.  However, it does so by saving the cloth groups within an embedded object.  If I tried to change the reference to an external object Poser would crash quite thoroughly and instantly the moment a cloth simulation was attempted.

So...you can set up a cloth object that is already "preset" with the correct groups and cloth settings, but it can not conform to current Marketplace standards for external object files.

Still, more experimentation on this might be useful.