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.