Hello,

I have started using VWD and am enjoying it very much.

Is there anybody else out there using it? I'd like to have someone to talk to about its intricacies :)

Ok… just me then :-D

I'm sure it's not just you and I. lol!

But since an illness to the VWD creator, things have been quiet around here.

I do dabble with it now and again.

If you click on "Virtual World Dynamics faq" near the top of the page, there seem to be no other threads than yours (Snarlygribbly), BUT if you change the start date to some time ago (eg 2020) and click "browse archives" you'll see there are dozens of threads and lots of people using VWD over recent years. I suspect you didn't get much response to your post because it is very open-ended! (and, as MikeO says, Gérald the creator of VWD has had some personal problems recently otherwise he would likely have replied. We wish him well).

fuqol217 posted at 6:37 AM Sat, 12 August 2023 - #4472407

If you click on "Virtual World Dynamics faq" near the top of the page, there seem to be no other threads than yours (Snarlygribbly), BUT if you change the start date to some time ago (eg 2020) and click "browse archives" you'll see there are dozens of threads and lots of people using VWD over recent years. I suspect you didn't get much response to your post because it is very open-ended! (and, as MikeO says, Gérald the creator of VWD has had some personal problems recently otherwise he would likely have replied. We wish him well).

Hiya - my post was quite deliberately open-ended. I don't have any specific issues or questions and just wanted to see if there was any kind of active community around this software.
I was lucky enough to have Gérald and his wife come to stay with me for a few days earlier this year, and I was pleased to find him in good spirits and we were even able to do some fairly energetic walks on the moors. It was clear from our conversations that the main reason (now) for any lack of engagement is the complete absence of any feedback - there are no images posted, no videos of animations being made, no vibrant community discussions. These things matter a lot to any creator, especially one whose talents mean that there are many other projects to which attention might be given, projects that would be more satisfying both in terms of financial reward and community engagement.
So, as I might be seeing Gerald again later this year, I was hoping to be able to report a resurgence in our love for VWD. 
Anyway, I'm going to carry on exploring its possibilities on my own, but it would have been nice to do so as part of a thriving community.

Hi Snarlygribbly, 

That's great news! I'm so pleased to hear Gérald is in good spirits. I'll see if I can find/make some VWD examples for posting in the future. Hopefully others will too.

Do you have any yourself?

fuqol217 posted at 8:41 AM Sat, 12 August 2023 - #4472419

Hi Snarlygribbly, 

That's great news! I'm so pleased to hear Gérald is in good spirits. I'll see if I can find/make some VWD examples for posting in the future. Hopefully others will too.

Do you have any yourself?

Not yet, but they are coming :)
I've been writing some scripts to convert Mixamo animations to be used with Poser figures. They're almost done, and then it'll be fairly easy to play with VWD effectively.

I just noticed this thread. Anyone have the x64 bit version working? Mine only runs in 32 and I crash anytime I try to do something more than a basic test such as a tail or thick long hair. It will not use more than 1Gb of ram without crashing and my workstation has 128.

I just came into this thread. Is the x64 bit version operational? Mine only runs in 32, and I crash frequently. geometry dash scratch

diaphragmplanet posted at 10:37 PM Sun, 17 September 2023 - #4474747

I just came into this thread. Is the x64 bit version operational? Mine only runs in 32, and I crash frequently. geometry dash scratch

Since no one replied to you I will give you what I have found from my research and testing.

It will only run in 32 Bit. If a single object like the hair seems to go over 1Gb it will crash, it was horribly infuriating because I really like VWD once you got used to some of the limitations. Works way better than Dforce IMO since no one will share their results with Dforce outside of PA's which they use a different dforce plugin that we as end users cannot.

Small rant aside, I eventually got VWD to behave itself and get pretty good results with it for my Anthro Tails and Long Female Hair. What I've learned is for Hair, you absolutely have to use the Assistant, without the assistant, any hair with more than 150k verticies will crash you without fail saying "insufficient memory". With the assistant I have been able to load hair with a maximum of 300k vertices but if the hair has that many vertices, it will crash either during the simulation or when you click send animation to host.

I have found the sweet spot for hair is ~250k vertices. If you can make your hair with that number or lower and you use the assistant everything should work very well. A good way to check how many vertices your hair has is to install "diffeomorphic", the blender addon. Diffeomorphic will add a mesh details option to File so that you can see poly and vertices count for base and high resolution meshes so you can see what you are at.

For the settings, I have found that reducing both the friction and collision distance down to 0.1 have given me the most realistic results. Hair tends to want to bounce around a lot for some reason even with little to no motion is happening, so I am still trying to figure out why that is.

For long female hair in the assistant I have set the hair preset to Dynamic, Long, Straight, and Fluid / Soft (both seems to work about the same). For the springs that you select to "attach" the hair to the head. I generally will select only the part of the head that the hair is touching, then show the hair again, after, I will add a "neighbors" selection of 0.3 to try and get any vertices I've missed. After, I will turn on the "extended" springs and set them to around 10 - 15 for a gradual decrease in stiffness. Make sure that all of the hair looks like it goes from Red to Blue and that there aren't any strands / cards that are all blue as this will mean that hair has no springs and it will fall to the ground.

Last but not least. VWD will not work for Strand Based Hair in a traditional since, SBH has way too many vertices and a lot of hair made with SBH is just too much for VWD.

What I have started doing is using SBH to make "Hair Cards" and then using a Hair Alpha to create realistic looking hair from those cards. This gets the poly / vertices count low enough that VWD can simulate it.

I have attached an example of the first hair I have made using this method and it simulated with VWD without issue mostly. I do have to use "Decimator" on it to reduced the vertices by 20% to get it to not crash but the look of the hair remains the same so I don't mind that.

Additional Note, when designing hair or anything else for simulation with VWD or Dforce, make sure you have no dynamic geometry clipping with what will be your collision geometry otherwise you will get mesh explosions and distortions.

Hopefully some of this will help those who find this thread. VWD is a very very wonderful tool, I have enjoyed it but it just falls short in so many areas even though it's right on the edge of being so great for Daz3D users.

Example hair is not simulated yet which is why it is raised up off of the shoulders.

Something I forgot to add and I cannot edit the post. I have x2, 3090's in my workstation and they are useless for VWD as well. Any time I've tried to use my GPU/s the simulation objects like the hair as an example will not move and just stay still while my collision objects move. I have to use my cpu which is a AMD 5950x. With this cpu, to simulate the above hair takes around 15 - 20 minutes.

Snarlygribbly posted at 7:22 AM Sat, 12 August 2023 - #4472412

fuqol217 posted at 6:37 AM Sat, 12 August 2023 - #4472407

If you click on "Virtual World Dynamics faq" near the top of the page, there seem to be no other threads than yours (Snarlygribbly), BUT if you change the start date to some time ago (eg 2020) and click "browse archives" you'll see there are dozens of threads and lots of people using VWD over recent years. I suspect you didn't get much response to your post because it is very open-ended! (and, as MikeO says, Gérald the creator of VWD has had some personal problems recently otherwise he would likely have replied. We wish him well).

Hiya - my post was quite deliberately open-ended. I don't have any specific issues or questions and just wanted to see if there was any kind of active community around this software.
I was lucky enough to have Gérald and his wife come to stay with me for a few days earlier this year, and I was pleased to find him in good spirits and we were even able to do some fairly energetic walks on the moors. It was clear from our conversations that the main reason (now) for any lack of engagement is the complete absence of any feedback - there are no images posted, no videos of animations being made, no vibrant community discussions. These things matter a lot to any creator, especially one whose talents mean that there are many other projects to which attention might be given, projects that would be more satisfying both in terms of financial reward and community engagement.
So, as I might be seeing Gerald again later this year, I was hoping to be able to report a resurgence in our love for VWD. 
Anyway, I'm going to carry on exploring its possibilities on my own, but it would have been nice to do so as part of a thriving community.

This is an understandable situation for sure. I work hard on my 3D art but get very little recognition on it. Makes you feel like giving up at times, but it's something I am passionate about never the less, even if I only have 5 fans, those 5 are looking to me to make them some quality content.

Most of my work is NSFW and I think a lot of people who use Daz3D as a tool do use it for the same purposes, not everyone, but a lot of people do. So it's one of those things that unless Gerald would like to see some NSFW examples with Anthro characters in them doing adult things, it's hard to show him any examples I've made with his tool that he has created.

My current animation work has a Tail, Female Long Hair, and Male short hair all simulated using VWD. Let's just say they don't have cloths so no need for a fabric simulation lol.

With this said, it takes community engagement to get community engagement. If he is still making money on VWD then if he has it in him he should either pay someone to help him with supporting the product or start engaging again himself.

I do not mean this in a bad way, I really have come to like VWD but it still needs a bit of work in the background and would love to see support for it again so we have another option other than Dforce.