Hi folks,

I am trying to make a plains indian bowcaser & quiver with dynamic cloth in order to have the straps drape correctly along the archer and the many fringes drape realistically as well.

This is the version of the model (made in Pegasus 2) I am using at the moment for the cloth experiments.
 

 http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y113/lookoo/Quivertest0.jpg

The basic design is fairly simple: A longer, narrow, slightly bent tube wiill contain the unstrung bow. Below that the shorter and wider quiver for the arrows. At the bottom of the holding strap and the two tubes there are lots of fringes which can be dynamically draped.

Imported into the cloth room, the empty quiver rapes quite nicely so far.

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y113/lookoo/Quivertest2.jpg

But now comes the tricky part: I need to have a solid bow in the upper tube and a bunch ofsolid arrowsinthe lower ones. The solid weapons will follow the draping of the soft leather of the container but also cause the two tubes to remain pretty much in shape.

How do I do that in Poser? I want everything to drape physically correctly. Until now I have only worked with dynamic and constrained parts. But making the twotube constrained in the group editor causes themto stay in their zero pose position. I could make the tube (and later weapons tobe added) choreographed, i. e. move them to the position I think they would sink to during draping. But that's cheating and will mostly look like cheating as well.

I therefore opted for rigid decorated tubes. That's how I marked the groups...

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y113/lookoo/Quivertest3.jpg

and that's how the simulation turned out.

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y113/lookoo/Quivertest4.jpg

Hmmmpfff...

My suspicion is that the few vertices from the tubes which I welded with the straps to keep it from falling apart in the cloth simulation now make the whole thing crash because Poser might get confused to which group the shared vertice should belong.

So, what should I do?

Make another model for this type of simulation where the tubes aren't welded to the strap?

Has anyone experience with larger rigid decorated groups or any project where the dynamic cloth object contains larger rigid parts?

Thanks in advance!

(BTW, I forgot, how again do I insert images into posts here?)

starting with the last question: you can attach one file (image) per post so the above would have been fours posts then.

the other questions in general: I've got a shipload of tuts on hair and cloth dynamics on my website www.book.artbeeweb.nl. For the moment, use the !Download Fix! menu to reel the files in, as the sites download manager itself seems to be broken and sends files in a corrupted way. Sorry, will be fixed once.

in short:

Panel 1: Cloth Room can handle one or more sims (although recalc all cloth sims is in the Poser Render menu :) ).
Panel 2: Each sim consists of one or more clothified objects, each of them must be single sided well welded internally (preferrably). You can have a shirt and a layered ballroom dress in one sim, you can have two girls with interacting ballroom dresses in one sim too.
Panel 3: Also, each single object in the sim can consist of one or more dynamic groups; usually the various material groups make good separate cloth groups as different materials are made of different stuff. 
Panel 4: Each dynamic cloth group can have its own parameters, to make leather and lace in one piece of cloth.

The sim then runs the rest. You have to avoid poke-through, and you have to realize that the simulator thinks "real time", so when a move for some clothing requires 5 sec in reality, don't try to get Poser doing it in 5 frames (=1/6th of a second) because it will rip the cloth apart, given applied forces.

If I might make a suggestion, have you checked the online Library of Congress photo archives for an actual picture of how a Native American quiver looks?  When you find a good, clear picture of an actual NA quiver, I would suggest downloading the pic and fiddling with it till you can map it so you have a correct item.  Also, each Nation has different traditional forms for all their gear.  Please don't go with the television "Injun" look, we find it insulting.  For a generic fantasy quiver, it looks pretty decent so far.

Quote - If I might make a suggestion, have you checked the online Library of Congress photo archives for an actual picture of how a Native American quiver looks?  When you find a good, clear picture of an actual NA quiver, I would suggest downloading the pic and fiddling with it till you can map it so you have a correct item.  Also, each Nation has different traditional forms for all their gear.  Please don't go with the television "Injun" look, we find it insulting.  For a generic fantasy quiver, it looks pretty decent so far.

I have looked up a lot of references on plains indian quivers, I own two museum quality replica sets of those and I know how they were worn and used and how it feels to use them and shoot with the bows. Thus, at the present stage of the project, I'm pretty sure that I got everything right as far as authenticity goes and nobody in their right mind would have a reason to feel offended when in 2013 someone makes the first attempt to create an authentic plains indian quiver for Poser. But thanks for the library of congress tip, you can never have enough reference material.

@aRtBee: Thank you very much for the links, I`ll see if the materials somehow answer my question.

lookoo, I wasn't trying to be combative.  Just checking.  I appreciate that you own the museum grade replicas and actually know how to use them!  So very few of our fellow 3D artists take that type of care and attention to detail.  Also, check with Rena here, I helped her with some materials back when she was working with her own N.A. project.

Keep up the good work, and I'll be looking forward to seeing the finished product. 

Hi cedarwolf, good to know and thanks for coming back to me! ;)

So far, I haven't found any answer to my problem:

A dynamic object (shoulder strap) ...

has two rigid objects (bowcase, quiver) attached to it...

which in turn have dynamic zones at their ends (fringes).

I'm ripping my hairs out so far...nothing seems to work... Isn't this possible somehow in Poser?

okay, one step at a time, I'm thinking with you.

The rigid objects havig dynamic cloth at the ends are similar to a pole with a flag attached. Each piece with fringes becomes a clothified object, entirely put into its own main dynamic group, except for a few top rows of vertices which are put in a Constrained group which means that these vertices follow the movements of the rigid objects they are constrained to. See my Covering Up tutorial halfway, about the Finish Flag.

The shoulder strap is more of an issue, because if yu do the same as the fringes, the strap is meant to follow the movements of the rigid objects. If you're happy to do it that way, all is fine but the strap will tend to loosen while moving. In real life things are the other way: the rigid objects follow the movements (stretches, bends, etc) or the strap while putting a weight the the ends. Poser doen't know about weights - except for clothified elements, and I disadvice very much against clothifying the bow itself :-).

So - by heart - I would try using an intermediate object, a rod (cylinder) with each end attached to an end of the strap.

1. the rod is visible to the camera but invisible to render. Note: Cloth Room skips everything which is invisible to the camera (but deals with voids when the have a fully transparant material, and does not now about rendering).

2. the rod is clothified and makes one sim with the strap, and is assigned extremely stiff cloth parameters (as it represents a rigid object), and a density which makes it match the bow etc. Note: the rod will collapse in due time it's cloth after all), but the construct might hold long enough to get the animation done.

3. the bow itself is parented to the rod

When simming now, the strap/rod moves properly to some extent. The bow follows the rod closely, and the fringes (which can be in a second sim) will follow the bow.

So yes it can be done, the magic is in separating the bow and the strap with some kind of construct to make a rigid object follow something clothified as Cloth Room only support things the other way around. For now I leave it up to you to make up something, we can rainstorm further after some experiences in this situation.

have fun (I like to do bows in my animations sometime later, so I'm learning from this too).

Cool!  I'll have to bookmark this thread so I have the response available.  Just downloaded Hex2.5 and think I may spend some of my down time this summer figuring it out as there are some bits and pieces I want to create.

Love to see the end result in your project, lookoo.

Hey, thanks a lot for the advice and feedback,I'll try that out next week as soon as I have time!

Soft and hard decorations follow cloth.  They're not rigid or soft body dynamics.  Hard decorated groups over multiple polygons of cloth can actually bend to follow the cloth.  They don't move around their own center or some such.  They just follow the cloth underneath them.

I don't have a grip on exactly what you're trying to accomplish (I could use the references myself), but I can tell you what I do when I want something to sim a single rigid body, like a pendant on a necklace: I create a one poly dynamic piece that goes underneath it with an invisible material (0 diff, 0 spec, 1 trans, no trans falloff).   The limitation is this doesn't work for other things colliding with it, because that one poly doesn't actually have thickness.

Also, you might want to make this a figure with dynamic and rigid parts.   IIRC, bopperthijs has a free beach chair in Freestuff that shows how that can be done.  Yep, he does.

If you have the money to upgrade to P10, then the answer is rigid body dynamics.