adosity posted at 1:59AM Thu, 19 July 2018 - #4333341

wolf359 posted at 2:49PM Wed, 18 July 2018 - #4333235

Lets be brutally honest, neither Daz or poser or arguably even Iclone Pro ,offer any compelling features as a general 3D/CG application to the 3D/CG generalist if you remove the base Characters from the equation.

I agree with that, and it's for characters that I turn to these programs. That's their thing, their niche - and it works well enough.

My post was perhaps worded a bit awkwardly: my point being, Poser has characters. A lot of them. And to take advantage of the moment of brutal honesty; how many people are hitting the limits of those characters rather than their own? A few - at most. I've seen plenty of stunning artwork with ancient (in computer terms) Victoria 3 while seeing some horrific things with the latest iteration of Genesis.

Now, is it easier to make good images with the latter? I don't doubt it - and I think that's the 'question behind the question' in many of these comments about Poser. The learning curve and time investment requirements are steep and high compared to others. This is a significant issue, because new users will likely go to the place where they can quickly get results. That makes a nice pool of potential customers for people who make content, two developments that can strengthen each other.

So back to the original point: I don't agree with those who keep talking about new figures as somehow a "fix" for whatever is wrong with Poser. I think the key will be in making it (much) easier for average people to leverage the possibilities of the program. That'll be difficult, but we'll see how they do. Others have given it a pretty decent shot, so it's not impossible.

You are correct that people despite tools available can make bad things, but I think you make a mistake with such approach. As Wolf already pointed out its somewhat misleading way to look at it. Because a program like Poser have lots of users at different skill levels, so making a decision that new characters is not needed as those with the lowest skill level are yet to be judged as being able use the current characters to their full potential. Because if we turn it around, a very skilled person can make amazing things with old content, but they would be able to make even better stuff with better content, but if new content is not made available, because those with lowest skill levels might never reach a level, where they are considered good enough, you have a problem.

I do agree with you that new characters are not a complete fix for Poser. But they are crucial, because its one of their main selling points and if Poser is going to be further developed they need to sell copies, plain and simple. Because if they can't sell anything, it will eventually stop being developed. And since characters is a huge driving force to why people would buy Poser in the first place and not go to Daz3d or Iclone, they can't ignore it. Also you have to remember that Poser and Daz3d are more or less 100% content driven programs, if there were no content available there would be no users or hardly any at least. So characters are very important content elements and in the same way as content creators improve and make new stuff available, so should the characters as these are merely content..

And character does get a huge amount of attention in general. while others might like a lot of other features. Which is perfectly fine. but my point of view is that identifying the key features in Poser is crucial, and making sure that these are of the highest possible standard is what SM should focus on, instead of for instant spending time to develop the bullet system for example.

Not because the bullet system ain't a good idea, but it shouldn't come at the expense of the key features. And obviously what these key features are in Poser can be different from person to person. But I personally feel that SM in some areas have ignored these when they shouldn't..

////////////////// The replacement of development teams has predictably slowed down releases (which is not the same as development), and the communication about what is being done has been less open than before. Understandable, too, as replacing a development team takes a lot of work that is rather uninteresting to the outside world. Work on Poser 11 has continued, with various updates and fixes along the way.

SM is requesting users share their wishes and feature requests on their own forums. You can pin-point a few common threads in these responses, but obviously a program will never be everything to everyone and choices will be made. Which those are remains largely unknown, but I'm sure the users aren't the only ones who can pin-point where Poser could do with (substantial) updates.

At the end of the day, Poser is a tool. What comes out of it has a lot to do with what the users can do with it. Photographers can make fantastic images on an iPhone, while tourists can make terrible snapshots on a Nikon D610. What SM can try to do is make SM easier to use, but that's still no guarantee. The internet is full of people who manage to turn a pre-made 3D model, pre-made materials, and pre-made HDR lightning set-up into a dreadful image.

I just don't get this myopic focus on characters as somehow the One True Yardstick by which all software should be measured. It may be different if you're in the business of creating content for characters, or if you're in the business of making tons of nude renders. Environment and prop wise there also hasn't been anything I haven't been able to use in Poser. If anything, the success of Iray in other software has made it easier, as the PBR textures can easily be plugged into Poser and work wonderfully with Superfly. //////////////////

The characters is one of the main features of the program and what it is designed for, its what makes Poser and Daz3D for that matter what they are. Its no different than people really into writing programs are interested in features that improve on that.

If you go and look at Poser 11, lets say you wanted to buy it, this is the first thing you will see:

If they want to sell Poser with such description, I think it would be wise of them to sell it with good characters, I would even go as far as to say that it would be natural to do so. Obviously this is just a part of the program and sure you can use external characters and so forth and most people do, but I personally think its a key feature of Poser as much as being able to change font in a writing program.

Its no different whether you make content or not, having access to up to date characters is the main reason people use these programs, just try to imagine if Poser 4 character were still the only characters available for both Poser and Daz3d today, I would highly doubt that these programs would exist. So I see no reason why anyone should not expect new characters and assume that most people expect a new Victoria or similar at some point.

And you are right that Poser is just a tool and you can make good and bad things with it, but not everyone are professional CG artists and might not care to much about having to spend a lot of time learning to do all these things, but merely want to make some images that they like or enjoy making, but again what will people do if they have no access to decent content?, they would stop using these programs. And characters are simply a huge part when it comes to content. But besides that, even if people purely made bad stuff, Poser as tool should thrive towards being as good as it can despite how their users use it or how good they are. Because they will reach a larger number of users with different needs. I don't really think its that relevant to take the users skill level into a account, when talking about Poser development. Because they should focus on the key features of Poser and that doesn't really have a lot to do with how skilled a person is I think, because the professional user, might only use a very small part of Poser as they use other software solutions as well. And my guess is that its primarily the characters, that they can Pose, quickly dress and manipulate, export them to Zbrush to customize them. Before they export them to other software solutions where they do lighting, rendering, Post etc. Keep in mind that most 3d programs handles static objects very well. So Poser might be good for them to quickly build a scene with static objects and with the characters in them, but nothing that you wouldn't be able to do in an external program with ease, the character are the most complicated elements.

But a user not that skilled, will most likely do everything in Poser, so for them characters and how they look and work might be even more important where as the professional might be more interested in how good they are to manipulate as they change them anyway.

So focusing on character in Poser makes good sense I think.

////Okay so briefly, what I want to accomplish is a sort of ground hugging fog effect in Poser 7.

I've spent several hours playing with the atmosphere effects in the materials tab, and I can make fog be in the distance, up close, and even make it start above ground.////

Alternatively you can do it in Photoshop or Gimp, which have a lot of benefits over doing it in Poser as you can change it very fast and save you a lot of render time and also you have full control exactly where you want it. Also learning to use either of these will not be time wasting for pretty much anything you want to do in Poser as you can retouch you images here very easy.

Anyway should you want to try doing it this way, then there is a good tutorial here as well on how to do it in Photoshop, but im pretty sure you can do it in Gimp as well or something very similar. The reason I mention Gimp is that its free.

Add Atmosphere (Fog) To Your Images - Photoshop CS5

This might be easier.

Easily Adding Fog To Your Photos in #Photoshop

///The title says it all.... no news, no updates, no development for years. I know the Poser community isn't dead, but has development finally come to a definite halt? 2.5 years of nothing is a long time in the software development world. Am I too seriously look to the competition for future advancement now?////

I don't think Poser is dead, however I think that Poser before 11 have been slightly falling behind, meaning some new features were added, but they weren't really ones that I think most users were very excited about. Which gave the impression that nothing were really happening. I don't think that 2.5 years of development and not having heard anything is necessarily a bad sign, obviously it depends on what they are doing :) But I would actually be more concerned if they kept releasing Poser versions every year. Simply because its sort of what they have been doing until now and its obvious that if they do that, a lot of people will feel disappointed and might not bother upgrading, as buying new Poser versions with hardly any new features in, might not be very desirable in the long run.

I think the choice of integrating or making use of cycles from Blender was a very good idea and in general they should and I hope they work very well with the Blender community to help improve on this, both for Blender and Poser users. Obviously the biggest mistake with Poser 11 were the lack of decent new characters and im not really sure how a decision to release a new version with such flawed character were made in the first place, but guess the deadline came in the way. No matter how you twist and turn it, characters and content in general from a economic point of view is probably the cheapest form of marketing they can invest in and use to spearhead selling their product, heck its what the whole program is based on, they won't be able to compete with Autodesk should they want to venture into modeling and everything else that you can do in those programs for that matter. The one thing that 3ds max, Maya or most of the other big 3d applications can't do, is to work with 3d characters as easy as you can in Poser.

So I hope that for the next release whenever that will be, they have realized that its important and therefore deliver a complete set of new characters, Males, females, kids, babies, maybe even some of the animals. So they bring them into the next gen. Again it will be a really cheap way to promote a new version, compared to the cost of disappointing their users again and honestly without sounding to pessimistic, I don't think Poser as software would be able to survive that, it will still have users and a community etc. But the amount of work it would require to make a new version after that, would be to much. Unless someone is extremely keen on keeping it a live and throwing a huge amount of money into it, I just don't think it would happen.

But on a brighter note, if they keep improving Superfly and get it better integrated or updated so it follows along with Cycles development in Blender, meaning denoising feature, Adaptive sampling, changed to ACES color encoding rather than sRGB (Which im pretty sure is used now) and improved the features for working with HDRI maps. They have a really good chance. At least when it comes to rendering I think.

Secondly they need to update the UI of Poser, especially how you control lights and cameras and in general get stuff updated and Integrated a "physical based" camera. Both lights and camera need to be easily controlled in the viewpoint, working with them as it is now is very poor and annoying.

If they simply focus on those three main areas (Content, Superfly/Rendering, UI/Light/Camera) I think they could really make a strong comeback for Poser. Ohh and some better documentation of what exactly different settings does, like Superfly, cloth room etc. I think it would do quite fine.

I see what you mean, in my examples from what I can figure out, its simply because there is to little light to really show the effect clearly and that the HDR lighting can cause the effect to not really show that well. But excellent examples you made.

I use PhysicalSurface 99% of the time, which is the same as CycleSurface, its just Cycles nodes combined into an easy to use setup, which is very appealing to me, The only time I use the actual CycleSurface are for some specific materials where I think its slightly easier to use. PoserSurface I only use for Firefly.

The materials are created for PBR.

I don't know if its one of those Superfly things :D So I tried changing some things, so for instant setting minimum bounces to 250000 and maximum bounces 500000, Diffuse bounces and Glossy bounces to 150000 each. Based on the tooltip the higher the settings the longer the render time. Now with these insanely high settings, I would assume that the render would never be finished, since I have a fairly low end computer. But instead it have near to no effect on render times, if any. As if they are completely ignored. The diffuse bounces have an effect as shown above, but whether its 1 or 150000 is of no importance apparently.

I know what the min and max transparent bounces does, and why there is even a min setting for this im not sure, but the rest is a bit of a mystery to be honest and can't seem to find any explanation to what exactly they do, are there any logic to these settings or how they work, if at all?

The way I understand it, it controls the indirect lighting, so any light that bounces off other objects. So direct light hitting a wall for instant would then bounce to other objects or maybe a hidden light sources like light from underneath a door etc, so its basically what controls the global illumination as I see it.

The total amount of samples are the same (At least when looking at the render window, if thats what you mean), which I would expect as its controlled by the pixel samples as far as I know. As to what goes on behind the scene, I assume that there is an increase since each ray would have to calculate these additional diffuse bounces.

I think whats confuses me, is as you say, the amount of firefly this single setting adds, however Im not sure why I wouldn't be surprised to why it adds so many? Because logically the diffuse bounce light would have to be dimmer than the direct light source, but still it adds lots of very bright fireflies, so personally I would actually assume the opposite to be true as more effort is spend on calculating it. Obviously it makes sense that it would add more fireflies than if this setting is set to 0 which based on the description means its not being calculated, but in that case I would expect a huge difference in lighting quality.

So I did another test, where I added 3 light emitting spheres and a single non emitting sphere at the top to receive the diffuse bounces. Also I cranked up all the settings to 16 bounces for everything, except for the pixel samples which is still 15. But looking at the two images its very difficult to see a difference I think, I would assume with all the surfaces in the broken concrete, the effect of the indirect lighting would be easily seen. But honestly the only way I can see a difference is when I quickly click between the images. Which shows that the image using diffuse bounces is slightly lighter than the one without.

Test sphere

Zooming in on the sphere at the top, shows the effect of the indirect lighting a bit more clearly. In this case I have disabled the HDRI map so the only light is coming from the 3 spheres.

So the effect can be seen on the top of the sphere where light from the roof bounces unto it.

So it have an effect, but I thought of feel like something is not 100% correct here with this setting, it might be my tests that are not good enough to clearly show the effect of it. But taking into account that leaving this setting above 0 will double render times with very little to show for it. As it can be seen in the small thumbnails where the HDRI have been turned back on again, the effect of the indirect lighting is very easily removed, if just a slight amount of light interferes with it.

You can save the material to the library and reapply it to the other character by double clicking it with the character selected.

You can try to turn off Hardware shading if you haven't, that boosts performance on my computer at least.

Otherwise a couple of these might do the trick :D

Here are some information about Superfly, which I hope is helpful for someone finding it a bit confusing. I will try to explain how I work with Superfly as easy as possible and what to look out for and not as a technical document, its purely to help people that might have problems with it.

What is PBR?

PBR stands for Physically based render and is way to render materials using a more accurate handling of light, which in the end adds more realism to a render. It does this by working with two types of materials, which are metallic and non metallic ones. For these examples I am using the Physical surface node in Poser. Which is basically a collection of Cycles nodes combined into a very easy to use solution, which can be used if you are not to much into all the cycle nodes and will work for almost all materials..

Besides a metallic value all materials have a roughness value, this indicate the amount of surface imperfections a given material have. The higher the roughness value the less clear the reflections will be, you can see this as a blur effect.

For instant Chrome as a metal will have a high metallic value with a low roughness, whereas brushed steel also being a metal have a high metallic value but with a fairly high roughness.

Depending on how metallic an object is the color of the reflection is decided by the specular color. As an object gets more metallic the specular will have less effect in Poser.

Why you can change the color of the specular, I think is purely to create a special effect as most material will reflect the color of the light rather than the color of the material. From what I could find out some metals like gold, the specular will be the color of the material rather than the light. But changing the color of the object to look like gold, will also change the specular color accordingly. And since the specular color have little to no effect on an object that is fully metallic, this setting seems to only really impact non metals or materials with very low metallic value. But maybe someone can explain how it works?

So ignoring the specular color settings, a Superfly material at its most basic form, is made up by a color, metallic and roughness value. Obviously this wont be enough for all materials and therefore you can add stuff like normal, transparency and emission map and so forth.

I think a good way of thinking about PBR materials is to just focus on these 3 base settings and then add everything else on top of that.

Setting up Superfly

These are the settings, I use for test rendering and is a good starting point. Obviously this depend on how good your computer is as I don't really have a good one. So for a low end computer these settings should work I think.

I will quickly go through the most important settings and what you should be aware of as I see them. This is what a render looks like with these settings, so its not perfect. but it gives you a fairly good indication of what it will look like and the ability to spot potential problems before rendering the final one.

Branched path tracing

I always turn this off as I see little gain in spending time fine tuning these settings as it not that easy to actually figure out what to turn up and down to solve a given issue. Instead I control the quality of the render using the Pixel sample setting, Which is easy to remember, the higher the value the better quality, but keep in mind that this will also increase render time. This is rendered using a Pixel sample of 40.

Filter settings

I very rarely touch these settings as it seems to cause more problems than they solve. So i suggest leaving these as default and adjust the lights in you scene instead and make sure that your materials are correct Superfly materials.

The right hand settings

These are the settings that are the most important in my opinion and where you need to make changes depending on your scene. However default settings in the above screenshot seems to be able to handle most things, but will go through them in more details and point out potential problems and what to look out for.

Progressive refinement

This checkbox tell Poser to render the whole image in one go, which means that it doesn't use buckets and therefore the size of the buckets are ignored, however regardless of you turning this setting on or off, it have no impact on whether the right hand settings are enabled or not. These are always enabled. One issue you might experience using Progressive refinement is that your render fails before it even gets started and you will get a memory warning. As seen in the image I have chosen my graphic card for rendering since its faster than my CPU, however the graphic card only have so much memory, so it might not be able to load all the data into the memory in which case the image will render black. The solution to this is to change from the graphic card to the CPU.

Min / Max bounces

These are somewhat confusing as you would assume that these control the overall total amount of bounces that is allowed, which the description also indicate. However this doesn't apply to transparency, which can be seen in the following image..

This image even though it might be difficult to see, is 6 thin transparent boxes standing in a row. And looking at the render settings all of them have been set to 1, except Max Transparent Bounces, But its clear that the light goes through all the boxes. So just keep in mind that min / max bounces doesn't control transparent bounces.

A good way of thinking about these settings, is how many times a ray can bounce before it dies I think. Looking at the next example its fairly clear to see what happens and how bounces works. As an example there are mirrors opposite each other so they keep reflecting each other.

Lowering the Max number of bounces to 1, the light ray bounces 1 time and then the reflection turns black. So should you run into a reflection suddenly turning black, its most likely due to having to few maximum bounces.

The same applies with transparency where max transparency bounces determine how many layers the ray can penetrate before it dies.

Caustic refraction / Reflections

These should be turned on whenever you work with water or glass.

Tips for working with Superfly

Last i just want to give some quick tips for working with Superfly.

1. Use a HDR map for lighting, it gives your scene a lot better overall lighting and your objects something to reflect. Its quick and easy to setup and can be saved as your default setup whenever you start a new scene. All the images above are rendered with no lights in the Poser scene except for a HDR map, but you can always add your own lights as well if you want to.

If you have no HDR maps there are lots of free ones available to get you started.

The one I have used for these images can be downloaded for free here:

https://www.viz-people.com/portfolio/free-hdri-maps/

1. Always turn off the Ground plane in Poser!!! I can't stress this enough. Leaving it turned on, will not only block the HDR lighting but also increase render times by a huge amount. Why SM have left this on by default is a mystery to me, as it will make Superfly unnecessary slow for no apparent reason. Superfly is quality over speed, there is no way around it, but there is no reason to make it slower than it needs to be.

2. Make sure you are using correct Superfly materials, simply putting a check mark in the Superfly for a Firefly material, doesn't make it a PBR material and can cause a lot of noise and other artifacts, that can increase render times, when trying to rid of them. In some cases you can transfer your texture maps to a Physical Surface and it will work. But always remember that Superfly as a PBR render works with Metallic/Roughness and Firefly doesn't.

3. Should you experience noise in your renders and not wanting to increase pixel samples, just render you image slightly larger than what you need and scale it down to the correct size, its a good way to reduce noise without loosing to many details.

As a final note:

The settings used in this quick guide or what to call it :D Are not meant to be the "correct" settings, adjust them according to what you need.

I have only done very simple key framing when it comes to movies and music, so might be wrong, But I think animation works a bit differently, especially when its a character. Because you usually key frame a single attribute like fade in / fade out in a movie, which doesn't affect anything else. Whereas if you key frame a character you might add keys to some part of the body and it might look good and all, but then later you might key frame another body part and suddenly it affects the rest of the animation. and at the same time you work in 3 dimensions, both when it comes to position, rotation and scale and on top of that you have to add timing, whereas you only work in 2 dimension in movies and music as far as I understand. (But might be wrong :D)

I have gotten the reaction a few times about beating once head against the wall when it comes to animation, I don't really understand why people say that about learning, especially a trial and error approach. My guess is as you also mentioned in your first reply, that peoples approach to animating in Poser and most likely Daz3D as well, is that because you have a fully rigged character available, which is easy to pose then animating them must be equally easy and when it ain't they get frustrated, which i think is a natural reaction. But there are no "this is the one true way of doing it" kinda solution, if you just add this key here and that key here, then everything works. So when im talking about starting simple and do a trial and error approach, its to learn what the different key does and what effect they have on an object, changing the curves etc. to me it just makes the most sense to start with a simple object to reduce complexity. And once that is understood you can start working with characters, which to me will be a lot easier if you are not fighting the animation tool at the same time and not really being sure what it can and can't do. So for me when I look at these tutorials, i don't really care what buttons he is pressing, but where he put his keys, which workflow he have, like starting with the hips, then the legs and adding more and more details. And sure it will go wrong a lot of times, but hopefully every time it does, you can figure out why and improve that way. I really don't think there is a lot of other ways to learn animation than trial and error. Because you never know what type of animation you are doing, what objects might be involved etc. So to me the bare minimum or best help is to get the principles and theory behind animation correct and learning the tool for actually doing something will come automatically as you practice and try to apply these things.

I don't hope you take this as an attack on you, because its not meant as such, more like a wondering, to why people wanting to animate (especially) always refer to it as being like banging once head against a wall. Animation is an art form just like learning to draw or creating an image in my opinion, you simply can't read a book and suddenly you are good at drawing, only practice and learning the theory behind it will help make it easier learn. I do agree, that its valid as you started out in your OP, that you were interested in getting help with the tool, because that is important, so nothing wrong in that. I just wanted to offer you another approach, should you fail finding someone.

Will just start by saying that I don't live in L.A., just to get that sorted :D

But animation is very difficult and as you say there is not a lot of good tutorials available for animating in Poser, as far as I know. But I think you can get help by watching tutorials made for other programs, as the basic concept of animation is pretty much the same regardless of software. Obviously these applications might have more advance tools than Poser, look differently etc, but the overall concept remain the same and you should be able to do all of it in Poser. So hopefully this won't scare you off.

Also I think a lot of people might underestimate how long time it take to animate and expect cool animations in a very short time, not saying that you are like this, but I think its healthy to always keep that in the back of once head, because it can be very frustrating doing animations. I have only worked a little with it my self and are not an expert in the Poser animation room by any means. But i know the feeling of adding key frames here and there and then suddenly everything screws up. From the description of one of the tutorials, it is estimated that you have to spend approximately 1 hour to make 1 second of character animation, this obviously depend on what you are making, but just to make it clear that it takes a long time to do.

I know that what you are seeking help with, is the Poser animation window, but I think you are going about it a bit wrong. Because its a tool, which is crucial to master, if you want to make anything, but animating have a lot to do with principles and knowing the theory behind it and if you know these and how they work then at least from my understanding, the tool you use to do it, is less important. Because all these different 3D applications share a more or less common way of working with animating, and its no different in Poser.

So what I would suggest is to start very simple and go from there.

For instant start with a simple Sphere which you make go up in the air, let it hang there for half a second, go back to the ground and do a couple of bounces, wait for 1 second and then roll off or something like that. Even though the animation doesn't make any sense, I think it would help you get used to the different keys, timing etc. And just keep expanding from there. And leave the characters for a while...and when you feel that you are somewhat familiar with that, then make a walk cycle.

But anyway that is just my advice, here are some tutorials that I think explain the workflow well, keys and so forth. As mentioned these are not done in Poser, but in other applications such as Maya, which I my self have no experience with either, so I don't base this on me actually knowing these programs either and therefore have an easier time understanding them.

Tutorials

1. The basic principles of animation, I think this is crucial just as a base knowledge.

12 Principles of Animation

1. Basic Walk Cycle

Basic Walk Cycle

1. Basic Character Animation

Basic Character Animation

I think you might be right, and its not a huge problem I think, I do actually like that you have a huge range to choose from. Its just that its not very obvious what these settings should be. And think that image you linked works well as a guide. But I do find my self actually using a lot higher values for certain dials. And actually think its a strength in the cloth room as it give you more flexibility. And now that I think about it, it might actually not be the range of the dials that are the issue, but merely that it would be nice if there were a drop down list with those basic material settings in the cloth room. Because its not easy to remember them and it would be fairly easy to simply copy the settings to the dials through such functionality. But maybe the cloth room will get an overhaul in a new version of Poser (crossing fingers) now that Daz have added Dforce. Which as far as I can see can handle Poser dynamic cloth as well. Even though it at least from my quick tests, seems to have a lot harder time actually calculating cloth than Poser, meaning that its very sensitive when it comes to poses and therefore "fails" the simulations more than Poser does. But I haven't worked that much with it, so maybe you have to set certain settings. But regardless, I think its great that they have added this functionality and hopefully it will start a trends for the companies to put more effort into dynamic clothing....but guess time will tell :D

rokket posted at 1:54AM Sat, 14 April 2018 - #4328244

I've had this for awhile, since Poser 8. It comes in handy every once in awhile.

She looks like she just pulled grandpa's finger! Nice render

Never thought about that, but can see what you mean... could make a great image with that theme :D

Anyway, that image are the settings I meant. But I think its sort of shows why the cloth room settings are a bit confusing when it comes to values. The highest stretch resistance in the image is 80 for denim, yet you can turn it to 1000 at max. So if 80 is suppose to be leather, what type of cloth material would have 1000? It make you wonder if you use correct setting, design and material if you could make a dynamic metal looking armor and its even more extreme with fold resistance where the highest value is 10 in the image, but again you can max it at 1000.

Yeah the settings can be a bit confusing, I agree.

I think the most confusing though, is what the correct settings are. Especially because the default values for stretching for instance is 50. But you can scroll it all the way to 1000, which is a huge range. So you would expect a setting of 50 to be close to no resistance at all and 1000 to be like leather. But it highly depends on the cloth density as well. So if you turn that up a lot the stretch resistance have little effect. But also as you increase Air damping which is how much the cloth will be slowed down by air as far as I understand, it starts to be complicated. I don't think they did a very good job at giving examples of these settings. I know there used to be some images showing the different effect. But still some standard materials which could be chosen from a drop down list or something would be a great help.

But regardless of that, unless you make animations, I guess. You can just try different settings until you are happy, if it looks the way you want it to in the image, it doesn't really matter much about the settings I guess :D

But this might be useful for you:

Leather settings

High fold resist

High stretch and shear resist

Fairly high static and dynamic resist

Low Air damping

You can increase cloth density slightly, but usually seems to work best if you don't go nuts with this, as it affect all the other things as well.

Silk

Low fold resist

I don't think silk stretch or shear a lot, but might be wrong. :D

High air damping

Low static and Dynamic resistance

a bit lower cloth density

I haven't written any specific values, because I really don't know what they should be. But I think focusing on these settings will be good. Cotton and denim etc should be somewhere in between these I think.