made a little progress learning how to use soft cloth.

seems to miss the hands in collisions. any theories on how to sort it out?

seems okay if i don't mover her arms, but i want the soft cloth to move with the body

thinkin this could be a kewl necklace. physics jewelry

Carrara's soft body Bullet Physics can do great things in the form of drapes, curtains, flags, blankets and many other objects made into soft body.

Like , I think, all cloth physics simulators there is the possibility of poke-through and/or explosions. It seems to depend on bits of colliding meshes being in the wrong place during iterations of whatever collision calculation is taking place. (A calculation could, I guess, be looking at vertices colliding or faces or edges but collisions aren't always detected for whatever reason and one mesh passes through another or else gets tangled up).

A work-round for the problem with hands is to attach another object, such as a flattened sphere, to each hand, in a parent-child relationship. After the simulation is run, make the objects invisible. It might take a few tries to get the right amount of protection from poke-through along with the spheres' outlines not being obvious on the covering cloth.

The major flaw in Carrara's soft body is it's failure to work where an animated mesh is being collided against (such as with the legs of a character walking). There will almost always be entanglement or explosions.

Thanks/ i cant find a setting for collision distance

i see material properties, like rubber or plastic margine i pused to 100 quality pushed to 100 bend and stiffness. i don't see how to push collision distance?

the great thing i luv about carrara simulations it can save the simulation with the cloth, to be used later. my memories of poser, the sim had to rerun every time the prop was loaded. dunno if ds dforce stores the simulation

ever try using the point force to simulate a summer breeze on a skirt?

Hi Misty,

I haven't tried using point force for wind, I'm afraid. Gravity's direction can be changed, however, and it's value needn't be real-world. So a flag can look like it's blowing if gravity is set sideways. In Carrara, I don't recall there being a collision distance - I used to know this stuff quite well but forget now.

OK I just opened up Carrara - I think it is the 'margin' slider in the soft body modifier but you tried that already.

I used to generally try simulations of V4 sized cloth starting with stiffness around 27% and bending to zero or just above. The mesh would be well-tessellated.

If the mesh stretched like goo I would increase stiffness first, then bending. That was just my way, though, from trial and error.

Ultimately, I think soft-cloth in Carrara will always be time-consuming. A member now banned from DAZ once said that one of the Beta versions of Carrara 8 actually had better physics than the version that was released. Animated figures could be draped without messing up the simulation. It's a shame if that was true - Carrara would have had results like the cloth room in Poser.

Regarding Poser cloth sims, I found that I could use the dyn_to_morphs utility for Poser to send cloth-room animations to Carrara. The utility sends the whole Poser scene out to where it can be opened in Carrara complete with animation and simulation.

Two things I found:

(1) I found it best to go on and export the animated, simulated figure from Carrara as .fbx and then import it into a new Carrara scene. Otherwise the figures were starting out at point (0,0,0). Once I had it saved as an independent .fbx, I could scale it, duplicate it and place it anywhere giving it a starting point other than (0,0,0).

(2) I had to set the frames per second in Carrara to be the same as Poser's. Otherwise the clothing and figure got out of sync.

The best cloth sim of all is VWD, I would say.

thanks. i've never played with the fbx , i guess is better than collada, lol i bought the animate importer for carrara, havent tried it yet.

i seeing many softcloths dems on youtube,they mostly dont tell what they did for the results

All I know about the .fbx file format is that there have been different versions over the years and the different softwares which can import it may or may not do so with issues.

I use the format to export/import whole objects with rigging, textures and animation. I can export such a file from Reallusion's Character Creator and it works perfectly imported to Carrara (apart from texture tweaking being required) but it imports with big problems to Poser - the animation gets messed up.

Please excuse me if I'm not around for much longer - I generally don't get to posting until the end of the day.

The soft-body settings I spoke about above for stiffness and bending - with self-collision on - are really about all I used.

If you want to drape garments then making your own, very simplified meshes might work better than bought PA items. Try a well-tessellated flat disc with a hole in the middle to clear the figure's head and see how it falls over the shoulders and drapes into a poncho.

I often used to try fitting a kind of baggy vest made from a cylinder. The vest from just above the waist ended as a wide flat (or slightly sloping) disc - like a ballerina's tutu. I would paint soft-body-attach vertices where the base of the vest became a disc and maybe a few under the bust. You can create the beginnings of interesting garments and tunics from the resulting drapes.

If you try with a disc only to make a poncho, the mesh will be much like a flat spider's web with a hole in the middle. Try deleting some of the edge-loops within the 'web' so that a loop of faces is twice the size of the others and note how these faces stretch more in the simulation. Or else add in a few loops to tighten the drape at that point.

Try taking your disc and tilt it at an angle before simulating and see how that works.

I wasted way too much of my time with all this in the past (wasted because Carrara's Bullet Physics is incomplete or flawed) but it has helped me enormously with getting to grips with other solutions when I tried. I haven't even looked at Dforce but I imagine I'd have a head start in getting to grips with it from Carrara experiments. But, who knows? I might be wrong there.

Edited for clarification.

on my first cup of coffee this morning

a dozen experiments to try. but have to learn the forces first

th s was flow force experiment on dyn hair