quietrob posted at 1:55PM Tue, 19 November 2019 - #4370687

The legs are definitely crossed. How would scaling affect things? Are you saying I should reduce the size of everything? That would be possible for everything save her shoes. For some reason, there was no parameter to scale down her shoes. Not even in the hidden parameter menu. Easily fixed. That model has more shoes than me.

One thing. In the final crossed leg pose above. Will I need to be certain that the cloth is not touching the model in the final pose as well? I won't be draping as I want a snug fit that befits a pencil skirt. I am thinking from the advice above, that the skirt will stop a micron above her skin. Soooo does the cloth ever touch the skin a simulation?

Scaling the body parts is a way to be sure that the body does not intersect with the cloth at the start of the simulation. So if there's an intersection problem at the legs, you might start with the legs scaled down (x and z scale, make them thinner not shorter) to say 90% on frame one. However, on the last frame of the simulation (frame 30 if you are going 1 to 30), you have the legs set to 100% or whatever the scale is that you are using. The legs grow during the simulation, and the cloth moves to accommodate the leg growth.

In a successful simulation, the cloth and the collision objects never touch. There is always space between them, as determined by the collision offset. If the cloth cannot maintain that collision offset distance, the simulation tends to break.

With the legs crossed, that might call for two simulations, or at least two steps in one simulation. First simulation or step would start with scaled down legs, cross them in a standing position, and end with normal scale. Second simulation or step would bend the legs to seated position. The potential problem of doing it all at once is that the skirt could get pinched between the thighs while they cross, and I'd want to be careful to avoid that. There is another potential problem with the skirt getting pinched between thighs and pelvis in seated position, but that's easier to deal with if addressing it independently of the potential leg-crossing pinch. (Plus, a potential pinch between thighs and pelvis may not even matter in the final render.)

Here's why pinches are a problem. The simulation is attempting to keep the cloth at a distance (determined by collision offset) from each of the collision objects (each body part, and the furniture if you are including it). If the cloth gets sandwiched between two collision objects (i.e. left thigh and right thigh), and the collision objects are too close to each other to allow the cloth to be at the collision offset distance from each, then it becomes impossible for the simulation to do what it's supposed to do and frequently breaks the simulation.

The skirt is going to mainly cling to the body, but then stretch between the legs. So start from zero pose in first frame to sitting pose in the last frame (the default 1 to 30 frames is probably fine). There's no draping, so choose zero drape frames. For the collision objects, choose the parts of the body with which the skirt will collide. Do not choose the chair as a collision object, because the skirt isn't going to drape over the chair. Uncheck the "drape from zero pose" because you aren't draping the skirt. Set the collision offset to 0.1, same with collision depth. Set the cloth density to the lowest possible (0.0001 I think) so gravity isn't a factor. Keep the Fold/Shear/Stretch Resistances at medium numbers I think- you don't want the skirt to lose its basic shape, but it is going have to give a bit to accommodate the pose. Maybe 5.0 for fold, 25.0 for the other two. (The numbers are a mystery to me.)

If you suspect the dynamic part of the skirt is too close to (or touching or intersecting) the figure, then scale down the figure's body parts a little on the first frame until you are sure there is no touching, and then bring the parts up to normal scale by the final frame. If the skirt still tears in the simulation, try lowering the static friction first (to 0.1 maybe?), then possibly try lowering the stretch. If you watch the simulation as it breaks, you can kinda get an idea of what the problem might be. Does it look like it snags? That's a friction problem. Does it look like it's stretched to breaking? Maybe lower the Stretch Resistance.

Everything I know about the cloth room is through reading the manual, then trial-and-error. I've never figured out what the different numbers are supposed to mean for the various settings, and there might be better methods of doing things than I use.

Don't delete the dynamic version of the skirt yet. You may find potential uses for it. Just save it as a last resort.

I don't always find the Poser manual to be helpful. But the chapter on the Cloth Room has a little section on dynamic vs. conforming clothes, part of which reads: "Items such as socks, bikinis, or tights don’t need to be dynamic since in real life these types of clothing tend to be close-fitting with little to no room for independent motion." A pencil skirt isn't quite the same thing as tights- but nevertheless it's close-fitting without much room for independent motion.

Depending on how the conforming skirt is constructed, it could be a challenge to get it to fit right around the crossed legs, then maybe you'd want to reconsider a dynamic simulation. (But in that case, I still wouldn't do a full-fledged simulation- I'd just do one to sort of shrink-wrap the skirt around the crossed legs.)

With a skirt that tight, I don't know what you achieve with a cloth simulation. That would naturally hug the body (conform) without being altered much by outside forces. A simulation is going to be more useful for a looser, more flowing garment. For something tight, you probably want something conforming.

In a simulation, the dynamic part of the cloth should not touch anything with which it is set to collide. The collision offset is the gap of space that the simulation maintains between the cloth and collision objects (figure body parts and chair). When the cloth starts closer to the collision objects than the collision offset, or touches, the cloth tends to get torn up. It can also rip if the friction is too high between the cloth and the collision objects. Stretching out of shape can be due to a combination of the stretch and the density parameters.

I'm amateurish, but to me, for a skirt like that, I'd like to be using a conforming skirt, and then tweaking it with magnets or the fitting room as necessary.

I have recently done a dynamic simulation with a skirt on the figure sitting on the chair (in Poser 10).

One thing to remember is that you don't need to do the whole thing in one simulation. I did the sitting pose without the furniture first to get the skirt generally folded over the lap; saved the results as a morph and deleted the simulation. Then I did a new simulation that put the figure close to the right place on (but not touching) the furniture; saved the results as morph and deleted the simulation. Then I did a final simulation just for a final drape (saving as a morph).

Splitting it up into separate simulations lets you change settings and change constrained/correographed groups for different pieces of the simulation. It also reduces the chances your computer will choke on a simulation that tries to do too much.

Be careful of how the skirt will get pinched between the figure's bottom and the furniture. It probably helps to set the friction numbers for the furniture low so the skirt doesn't get snagged on the furniture.

So it's deformation, simulations, and collision where the polygon density matters. But I take it that if I am doing none of those things, and perhaps only scaling and putting a texture or procedural shader on it, there is no difference between the two.

I did ask not only to determine which prop to use, but also because I am modeling basic walls, and simple furniture like tables (which are comprised mostly of flat planes). I'm trying to get a sense of how may polygons a wall really needs, or how much time I should be spending decimating the geometry on the furniture.

Thank you.

Everything seems welded properly. The Blender export options I have checked are: Apply Modifiers, Include Edges, Write Normals, Include UVs, Write Materials, Objects as OBJ Objects. Importing into Poser I checked only Centered and Place On Floor.

Playing with grouping tools in Poser, I was trying every option with which I was not familiar. Using "Create Perspective UVs" fixed the problem.

However, I don't know what "Create Perspective UVs" actually does, or what specific problem it seemed to fix.

If you figure out using Blender to do morphs, let me know. I still have problems with it.

One piece of advice, when making clothes or props. Poser doesn't use normals. I use UV Mapper to strip out all the normals. It not only reduces the .obj size, but takes out a lot of stuff that would just confuse you.

Hmm, now reading the thread backwards, I see some possible solutions to the problems I had on morphing in Blender. I will try again.

Message edited on: 03/06/2006 10:01

I should probably add the disclaimer, when I mention that the interface isn't much of a problem for me, that I don't even try to use all of the features of Blender. I only use it to make meshes to be imported into UVMapper then Poser. But I've used it so much now that many of the hotkeys, and the uses of the different screen and nodes, just come automatically now. (And sometimes I have trouble using Poser, because I uselessly try using the Blender camera keys to manipulate the Poser camera.) And I figure that anyone who can learn to use something as arbitrary as the QWERTY keyboard can figure out any interface, no matter how alien it seems at first.

I have never had a problem with the interface on Blender. It's the first modeling program I tried, so I didn't have the problem of encountering a difference with what I was used to (being used to nothing else). Like any other program you use for the first time, it becomes easier the more you use it.

By the way, I didn't find it hard at all to use the interface. I don't think Blender has a weird interface per se; but I suspect that most people who get it have tried other modeling programs before, and the prior experience with a different interface makes it harder to learn a new one. I was a blank slate when I started with Blender, and that's probably why I didn't think it was too hard to learn.

I'll try to remember to check this forum every day. I've been using Blender since July I think, making things for use in Poser. I would say that I'm not very good with modeling in general, but I've figured out enough to do my simple Poser projects.

I have started to model the boots. I haven't gotten too far yet though, only about maybe a third of the way through the .obj portion. I hope to get back to doing more this weekend. Just to let you know my take on it, I don't think all those small details should be accounted for in the .obj. As Starkdog noted, it would create a huge number of polygons. More than that, though, it would be on a scale that gets too small for Poser to handle. My rule of thumb is that anything that would be destroyed by a "remove duplicate vertices" is too small for an .obj. I think those small details are better handled through bump maps and/or displacement maps. Poser is much better at handling pixels than polygons. So what I'm working on won't be terribly elaborate, though it will be designed (hopefully) to make the mapping easy. If Starkdog takes a look and has an idea to do it better, I have no problem with that. (I'm not doing this as a Marketplace item, but I'll put it in freestuff.) I could also post my progess to this thread and take comments and suggestions.