Quote - i don't understand what a hex triangle is?

The lack of a mention of that term in this thread in particular and any context in general makes answering tricky.

Quote - > Quote - i don't understand what a hex triangle is?

The lack of a mention of that term in this thread in particular and any context in general makes answering tricky.

'xcept that BB already answered.

Quote - > Quote - > Quote - i don't understand what a hex triangle is?

The lack of a mention of that term in this thread in particular and any context in general makes answering tricky.

'xcept that BB already answered.

Lucky somebody knew what you were on about then.

Actually, I wasn't the one who asked.

Quote - i have one in work for Antonia, Olivia and Victoria4, currently i finish the antonia version and the olivia version must be ok for the end of this week and the V4 version a few days later.

gorgeous work!  what app did you use to make the dress?

Quote - > Quote - i have one in work for Antonia, Olivia and Victoria4, currently i finish the antonia version and the olivia version must be ok for the end of this week and the V4 version a few days later.

 

gorgeous work!  what app did you use to make the dress?

Marvelous Designer 2,  i don't use traditional modeling anymore to make dynamic cloths

Interesting!

I have been eying that program for a while and I finally got some time to download and test the trial.

I agree with kobaltkween, it's gorgeous and much more realistic than my attempts to create cloth with Silo and Poser. The modelling in Silo is not a problem, but to get a realistic drape in Poser is still not easy....

So my question is: is this draped in Poser or MD2?

Quote - So my question is: is this draped in Poser or MD2?

this is a MD2 screenshot, in Poser you get less folds on a static pose like this and the cloth engine is less powerful so you have to make some changes to the cloth.

on MD2 the belt part is a tight elastic band and can hold the weight of the dress but on Poser i have to make the belt constrained otherwise she will be dragged down to the hip.  

Quote - When I published cloth sim test squares, I created five patterns, each with a name. See the image. One of them I called hex because they formed hexagons.

It looks diamond shaped.

Thanks  

Quote - If it needs to be good, i.e for a commissioned illustration, I export it back to my modeller and subdivide and smooth polygons until it's right. I am not so worried about polygon count...

I know Sculptris and Marvelous Designer create delaunay tris when modeling, but I don't think they can convert quads to delaunay tris. Any ideas on an affordable program...?

Try exporting the dress from Poser as a 3DS file. Poser will convert it to tris. When you import the 3DS file back into Poser your dress will be in tris instead of quads. That should fit the budget

I would like to thank all of you for tips and tricks posted here. I learnt a lot from this thread. Thanks!

I have a question about pokethroughs. Sometimes I get them, sometimes I don't. (Probably depends on pose and amount of simulation frames?). Are pokethroughs  common/"natural" thing when using dynamic clothes?

In this pic for example her feet stick out although I didn't have "ignore feet" option on, and she's standing on the floor...

Quote - I would like to thank all of you for tips and tricks posted here. I learnt a lot from this thread. Thanks!

I have a question about pokethroughs. Sometimes I get them, sometimes I don't. (Probably depends on pose and amount of simulation frames?). Are pokethroughs  common/"natural" thing when using dynamic clothes?

In this pic for example her feet stick out although I didn't have "ignore feet" option on, and she's standing on the floor...

That sometimes happens to me when the mesh/ cloth's density is too open/large.  Small things get sort of caught like that.

1)Try a sub-divide to increase the mesh density.  That way the toes won't 'catch' in between the mesh vertices.  Drawback: increased simulation times and more memory needed to handle the denser mesh.

2)Another solution is to put on (transparent) stockings which give a solid area for the cloth mesh to react against, but aren't seen over the bare toes.  (...If that is the look you want.)  Similar things can be done for the hands, if the fingers tend to catch: use a mitten mesh to protect them.

I've gotten that as well on highly angular body bits "colliding" with low-res mesh areas. And using the morphing brush is singularly unsatisfactory because it is a low-res mesh issue. I hadn't actually thought to add mesh for that reason, so thank you for that, Rosemaryr. I do increase mesh to allow for better sim folding and wrinkling, but I hadn't thought about that approach to resolve this particular problem.

This is a whole new concept, really: changing mesh to suit an image/sim need. And I don't want to necessarily increase the resolution of the entire mesh... just the problem areas. Completely different mindset to the conforming cloth workflow. For those of you using Blender, it would be nice if they developed some tools specific to this issue. BMesh might be an eventual answer, perhaps. 

In the sim settings you can try the "object polygon against cloth polygon" calculation.
Sometimes using more frames plus animating the figure can solve it. For instance in this case you could try tilting the character slightly forwards, at halfway the animation, and then returning it to it's end pose at the last frame.
You can attach primitives to hands and feet, and animate the size, so they disappear at the end of the sim.

Primitives are also very handy for sitting poses. If a woman with a skirt sits down, she alway does this thing with her hand, adjusting the skirt just before sitting down. So to make it look right we can mimic that in the sim using a cylinder.

@pardalegarderner. Delaunay tris are irregular tris, not the usual quads in half. There are not a lot of programs that create them. Marvelous Designer is one of them and I am seriously considering to get that for creating my dynamic clothes.

Thank you guys for your thoughts and advises :)

I'll go with a object polygon against cloth polygon. If that doesn't help I'll subdivide skirt.

Quote - You can attach primitives to hands and feet, and animate the size, so they disappear at the end of the sim.

So you hide hands and feet inside them and then decrease primitives size to 0 at the end of simulation/animation? Am I getting this right? It's kind of similar to mittens/stockings method?

If you turn off the visibility of a body part, the cloth room will treat it as if it's not there and drape through it as well.

Attached Link: Magistra

I actually took advantage of this in one image:  Used a large dynamic cape, let it 'ignore hands', which when draped turned it into a poncho-like mantle thing.  Used here in combination with conforming items.

Image here:
http://artzone.daz3d.com/azfiles/gallery/m6/i4/nbpzwuprac6o302p6d61ztk93jhn33-full.jpg 

I do have to say, dynamic cloth is wonderful. I've had poser for a day and I managed to get this result. Maybe nowhere near professional quality, but I'd like to see conforming clothing do that. (okay, I cheated, I made the mesh in the days between ordering and recieving Poser, point remains though)

Dynamic cloth.

those are cool

Nice, BB - maybe Poser can offer a bit of competition to Vue... with this sort of capability!

So, the challenge continues. Obsession has its rewards, or so I've been told. There is a lot I'm still not clear on in this magical room, meaning: there's a lot I haven't really explored properly, but I feel I haven't reached the edge yet of Poser's cloth sim capabilities.

Some observations: the final pose of the character actually plays a significant role in your settings for a given cloth item, most specifically how much stretch/draping you want the cloth to do. For instance, for a figure bending forward, you might want extremely minimal stretch for the t-shirt cloth. And virtually no mass (density).

Those number in Collision Offset and Collision Depth are generally the first I play with, trying for much lower settings first, like .15 / .1 to start with, then going up from there. This is particularly important if you plan on "tucking" something inside something else.

Morphs (enlarging) and high stretch resistance values is a good way to keep things looking snug.

Sim quality: I'm usually setting steps per frame up now - usually at least 6, sometimes 10. And 60 frames. Well, think about it - how long would it take you to get into a certain position? Only a second? Comfortably two, right? So, 60 frames.

But there's no question anymore there needs to be a direct workflow between modeller of choice (in my case: Blender) and Poser... none of the pieces I work with go completely without some tiny mesh mod. But then, I'm weird. :biggrin:

I did toy with the idea of doing retopo to some of my favourite conforming cloth items with the new BSurface retopo tool for Blender but the results have been inauspicious, to put it mildly. Still need to get the hang of that. So, not really an option.

Quote - Nice, BB - maybe Poser can offer a bit of competition to Vue... with this sort of capability!

Yep, just missing a better render engine :tongue2:

When one works with dynamics, a modelling programme as an adjunct becomes more and more essential. I'm sure that for most the Poser group tool selector works just fine, but it doesn't like me. Get too close with my camera and it fails to select anything. In Blender, it's easy to do edge-loop selects and give then a vertex-group name. And Poser's happy to use it!

There are so many things to try once you're in the cloth room (cloth prop parented and sim setting done) - I'm referring to groups. This is still a very grey area... and I'm only doing constrained groups using Blender's polygroups. Wow, what a concept. Kobaltkween very patiently explained what she was sure was already a concept, because I'd mentioned this some time ago. For some reason, because I'd never been able to make use of Blender's polygroup (vertex group) feature in Poser when I was using Blender 2.49b: it wasn't something that even occured to me to try to use.
So, I'm very curious how to really take advantage of that whole dynamic groups thing.

Side note: the whole process from importing that mesh to setting it up in cloth-room/parenting/material assignment etc is quite laborious - would be cool if one could write macros (in Python, maybe?) to automate a lot of this stuff. My only regret with all this is my lack of time to be playing with it all: automation would be such a cool thing, here.

Are there any tips or rules of thumb to getting the dynamic calculations to run faster?  I have noticed the more I use dynamic cloth that the simulations can run for 20-30 minutes, even on my 6-core Phenom II.  I leave the cloth settings pretty much stock, except sometimes drop the collision offset and depth to .5 to get better results.  I even went so far as to export a cloth item as an .obj, import it into Max, optimize the mesh from several ten thousands of vertices down to around five thousand, but that didn't have much effect.

Quote - Are there any tips or rules of thumb to getting the dynamic calculations to run faster?  I have noticed the more I use dynamic cloth that the simulations can run for 20-30 minutes, even on my 6-core Phenom II.  I leave the cloth settings pretty much stock, except sometimes drop the collision offset and depth to .5 to get better results.  I even went so far as to export a cloth item as an .obj, import it into Max, optimize the mesh from several ten thousands of vertices down to around five thousand, but that didn't have much effect.

It probably depends on several things.  I run cloth simulations with clothing that have over 30k polys and have very little problems with it. A bit slower, but not 20-30 minutes unless it's a very long animation, then it can take quite a while. And I have slower processor than you. 

I think BB already mentioned somewhere that the cloth engine doesn't take advantage of multiple cores?

One thing you can do is to check that your cloth is not set to collide with unecessary things (like feet for a shirt etc), and other objects in the scene, like hair, jewelry etc that are not needed.

Also check how the character goes from start/zero pose to final frame. Make sure the anim graph doesn't have crazy splines between the poses. Also, check that your character is taking the optimum path. Some poses I've seen have the body or hip rotated 355 degrees instead of -5, which is hardly efficient for cloth simulations. :)

You can also pre drape the cloth, if it has a lot of fabric that needs to settle. (Like wide skirts or fluffy clothes in general) Pre-drape it to your zero pose, let the fabric settle, then just export the obj, import it again and run the simulation. You may have to set constrained, decorated groups again.

But... 5k polygons shouldn't have to take very long, so something else may be wrong.  People here love screenshots, so don't hesitate posting them and describing them!

I've just completed a conversion of Jan019's Little Dress from conforming to dynamic... in the process of which I've made the mesh much denser. It now weighs in at 73703 faces (up from 2772 faces: a significant increase!).

On my i3 with 4 gig RAM, the sim takes roughly five minutes 45 seconds, of which 10 drape frames take 50 seconds for the skirt - oh, and I had a wind generator to sort-of blow the skirt a bit for that out-of-doors effect. I make sure that nothing collides with the skirt that is going to be calculated (like the stone walkway - I have it come up from the bottom during the sim) and tick ignore hands, head and feet. The collision offset and depth are actually .18 and .12, respectively, and I have but minimal pokethrough... in this pose, I need to emphasise:

The bodice and skirt are each a dynamic group: the bodice has more rigid fold, shear and stretch resistance than the skirt - the skirt has a higher cloth density value than the bodice. Still playing with all this, but having an incredible time trying new stuff.

As with PP2012, the focus is with making content we already have work in better, more exciting ways. The cloth room is doing that for me. PP2012 with weight-mapping and SSS is going to revolutionise the way I render and work cloth. Exciting times to be doing Poser!

Over 70k faces is quite a bit. Never worked with more than 40k or so.  Very nice dress, too. :)

Yes I agree....70k is excessive. And that was with only selective mesh increase. Might need to rethink what I'm doing. Point is: even with that, and not the fastest processor in the world, sim times are really not that long - @ 5 minutes.

If your simulation doesn't take long, it's not really excessive if you get the detail you want. :)

I create my outfits with Marvelous Designer 2, i never need to run drape frames since the cloth never intersect with the figure, and it's easy to change the density of the polys.

That's VERY beautiful, Jack.

Lovely outfit, Rjjack...

Thank you, i am still using Aiko3 and started to make cloths for her when the support from the MP vanished somewhere in 2008, learn to modelling with Silo in summer 2008, made some conforming clothes and jumped in the dynamic things, i will never go back to conforming cloths.

Started to use MD2 on december 2010, i don't have used Silo since this day, i don't think to go back to polygon modeling to make a dynamic cloth.

Quote - It probably depends on several things.  I run cloth simulations with clothing that have over 30k polys and have very little problems with it. A bit slower, but not 20-30 minutes unless it's a very long animation, then it can take quite a while. And I have slower processor than you. 

I think BB already mentioned somewhere that the cloth engine doesn't take advantage of multiple cores?

One thing you can do is to check that your cloth is not set to collide with unecessary things (like feet for a shirt etc), and other objects in the scene, like hair, jewelry etc that are not needed.

Also check how the character goes from start/zero pose to final frame. Make sure the anim graph doesn't have crazy splines between the poses. Also, check that your character is taking the optimum path. Some poses I've seen have the body or hip rotated 355 degrees instead of -5, which is hardly efficient for cloth simulations. :)

You can also pre drape the cloth, if it has a lot of fabric that needs to settle. (Like wide skirts or fluffy clothes in general) Pre-drape it to your zero pose, let the fabric settle, then just export the obj, import it again and run the simulation. You may have to set constrained, decorated groups again.

But... 5k polygons shouldn't have to take very long, so something else may be wrong.  People here love screenshots, so don't hesitate posting them and describing them!

 

Sorry to bail on my own post guys, I've been too busy and actually forgot about it.  I didn't know about dynamics not using multiple cores, but I'm not surprised.  I have it running at 4 ghz anyway.  I have problems fitting the clothes, actually, since I like to stray from the out-of-the-box characters.  What I do is zero the figure at frame one, have it restored at frame 20, and run the simulation to 20 with the entire dynamic mesh constrained.  I spawn a new morph target, then clear the sim and run it again without being constrained to eliminate where the cloth "sticks" to the figure.  I'm thinking maybe using the morph target is somehow complicating the calculations.  Now this isn't the ONLY time I have problems, just brainstorming.  And when I run cloth sims on an actor of a comforming item, like the hip of a skirt, it works perfectly fast, so I don't know what's going on.

When you "run the simulation to 20 with the entire dynamic mesh constrained" - is this where the slowdown occurs?

No, the constrained part works just fine.  It's when I run the true dynamic simulation that I have problems. 

If you have a lot of pokethroughs that the simulation has to try to correct, that can slow things down a lot, too. I've had some extremely slow simulations when I tried to convert some conforming clothes, due to the way the mesh was built.

I am working on a Dirndl outfit, this is a traditionnal outfit from germany and austria, a long gown with a sleeveless bodice, a blouse with puffy sleeves and an apron, sometime with a lace petticoat.

In my first try i was not happy how the dress was falling along the body, so i started to experiment some ideas. i have added a petticoat and played with the Collision Offset and Collision Depth settings for the dress colliding the petticoat.

For obvious reason the petticoat must start below the waistline.

Left : i have just added the petticoat and the settings are 0.1 my usual start point, the petticoat poke through the Dress, i probably need to set 0.2 or 0.3 minimum

Middle : settings are 1, a good balance, the effect show but not too much.

Right : settings are 2, effect is exagerated and no more pretty, the waistline is pushed too up.

i think i will lose my f... mind right now. its like when they made the dynamic clothing they made it so that you would have problems everywhere you could.   

i was creating a workflow where a low res cloth would drive the detailed cloth. so you would calculate the low res cloth and the high detaild cloth would be in the same position.both cloth objects were merged together. i am using softdecorated groups.

of course the biggest problem was how to make the lowres cloth invisible for rendering. if you use transparency(material room) it is invisible when rendering. but the rendetime is very long. LONG. if you use on top of that IDL its not practical anymore.

so i found a way to remove the lowres cloth. i made a morph object. in blender i imported the clothing and i scaled down the lowres cloth. i scaled it down 90%. that way  we wouldnt see it and it wouldnt take a lot tim to render

but when you use the morph target on a dynamic clothing things go wrong. it doesnt change the object how it should based on the morph target. why? because this is poser. because it has to go wrong. everything has to go wrong in poser when you try to use advanced dynamic clothes. 

i was very close in  finding a way to use advanced techniques like modern 3D app have . but no. it has to  have problems with morph targets. its insane.

i have this tshirt. the green objects are sofdecorated groups. they folow the blue shirt. after cloth calculations is over i want to render. and i want to render it WITHOU THE BLUE SHIRT. so how would you remove the blue shirt from the rendering?

blue shirt and green objects are one objects in the scene. how do you remove the blue shirt. if you know the answer then haleluja.

"so how would you remove the blue shirt from the rendering?"

make it transparent in the material room.

Yes, make that material zone transparent. That's the only way I know of.

Laurie

when you have a complex scene with a lot of objects it will take a lot of time time to render if you use 100% transparency.

of course this wouldnt be a problem if morph targets would work how they should on dynamic clothes.i am so angry right now.

Poser 9 and Pro 2012 is realesed and they didnt add what i asked them for years. to have an option to make material groups invisible for rendering. every modern render has this. material groups are based on polygons. so making a material group invisible for rendering is not hard because the software only looks up the polygons. BUT NO. poser 9 is out and they didnt add it.

Oh well. You can't always get what ya want...but if you cry sometimes you might find...you get what ya need

Just thought a little Rolling Stones might be in order :P.

Laurie

Are you scaling the blue shirt down with your morph, and that is going wrong?

 Try translating the blue shirt high above the figure, or way down below the figure, as a morph . That way it should be out of the frame,even if it crumples up.

yes when using a morph that scales the dynamic cloth then everything goes wrong.

Ian this is an interesting idea to make a morph that moves the cloth.