Happy to hear this news, but am worried that at this rate, we won't see Poser12 until 2029... is the dev team still being paid to revamp Poser or were they laid off by SM as part of this sale? Or is Renderosity paying their salaries now?

The even better news about the release of SASHA-16 2019 is it means Karina can now spend more time finishing the ultimate M4-compatible Poser figure, MISHA-16 (2020?). Been literally waiting for a great weight-mapped M4-type figure for years! :D

Thank you Gerald, yes I was thinking mainly of collision with the ground (but as well each breast colliding with the other breast possibly), and I suspected DynaChest was not going to handle such a collision, but it is good to know that this may be added for a future update of VWD!

@Gerald: Is DynaChest only useful for Poser animations? I do static renders, but as noted I think if V4 is hanging or lying down, and DynaChest can create more believable "breasts at rest" this would be useful to me too. I don't know if I fully understand the idea of wires, that seems like it is meant for a walking or running V4 than V4 lying still.

Yes, if Gerald can do some videos of bouncing breasts thanks to VWD, I think that will greatly help his sales

Always remember the old saying: "Sex sells... even if it's simulated!"

And yes, it would be great if there was a VWD tool which lets you paint folds onto clothes, like a "pinch the cloth here" type paintbrush or something. Dragging the vertice doesn't always produce the folds I hope to see, and the regular simulation can create folds in places where I don't want them, and no folds in the places where I do, lol. It's still very hit-or-miss.

Smaker1 posted at 12:17PM Thu, 25 January 2018 - #4322997

For someone stupid like me : what would be the benefit/application of softbodies? I imagine that the pillow sample could also be done with internal pressure, no?

@Smaker1 I wonder if softbodies might not be good for errr, simulating the soft part of a body (lol) for example breasts or the butt. There are some occasions when I think it'd be great if one is posing V4 and the breasts would automatically behave like real breasts and collide against V4's torso due to gravity or the angle of her pose, or perhaps rest against the ground if she is lying on her stomach. Similarly if V4 sits down, her bum would gently squish due to sitting down on the chair.

Seems silly but since there are still many people who render V4 in bikinis or skimpy wear, the realism of the softer parts of her body could be captured through VWD softbody simulation I guess.

Gérald, will there still be a 32-bit version in the future? I ask only because I am still on 32-bit Windows XP, am hoping that I can continue to use VWD (there are already many programs I use that are now Win7 only, and already that feels like I am old and ancient lol, I cannot use any newer versions now...)

I also got a chance to use VWD again last night (haven't had much time for Poser the last few months sadly) and I was thinking that there are 2 features that would be nice to have:

1. snapshot feature: sometimes I am watching a simulation, and I stop it, maybe change a few settings, then continue the sim only to discover that my changes made things worse, not better... It'd be nice if when a sim is momentarily stopped, I could tell VWD to take a snapshot of the state of the simulation. If I restart and things go bad, I can revert back to where I took the snapshot and try different settings to see if they give a better result.
2. ability to paint an area of the cloth to be stiffer or softer/silkier: since there is no presets for different materials like cotton, wool, etc. I am forced to always test out settings over and over again until I can get something that looks good. Sometimes I see the sim results are close to what I want but one or two areas of the cloth are too stiff or too soft, whatever. It'd be nice to have a paintbrush where I can paint over some vertices on the cloth with new spring settings, then continue the simulation and hopefully those areas will soften up or stiffen up more based on how heavy I painted that area (similar to a weightmap brush)

@Smaker1: That is one of the best cloth simulation results I have seen, it looks absolutely stunning.

takezo3001 posted at 9:35PM Tue, 19 September 2017 - #4313921

There's nothing wrong with constructive criticism, especially since it's done to better a product and expand its user base, this is not a battle against different teams about who is right, it's to help make a great product available for all users in this community as it's less about price (Simply using it as an example) as much as bundling the product...It is YOUR choice whether or not to take it as a personal attack.

I wasn't responding to those comments as though they were an attack against Gerald. Read my post again. I am responding to the unrealistic expectations by some that he can immediately cater to everyone's wishes as if he were a large corporation. This is just a side venture for him, and anyone who has been following his replies to past constructive criticism is aware that he wants to find a solution to doing presets. I've already raised the desire to see this on several occasions and Gerald has graciously acknowledged that it would be important to have. Right now though, he is focused on implementing GPU support and undoubtedly this is going to take a while.

And it doesn't help your case to refer to those of us who support his product as "sycophants" when you post. Don't interpret those of us who rally behind his product as blindly only lavishing praise without noting areas that need improvement. Even in my past posts, I've asked politely for improvements in certain spots, especially in lowering the learning curve, and he has taken note. I don't expect all of our requests to be addressed overnight. Perhaps there should be a master features request list that the forum admin could paste all requests into so that people won't repeatedly ask for them again and again. Presets was already one that has come up more than once or twice.

Are some people really that cheap that $10 more is considered a dealbreaker? I know times around tough right now (for myself included) but Gerald has lowered the price more than once and even for me, $50 is a fair price for his tool considering all that it does. The lack of a built-in hair and cloth solution is the fault of Daz, not Gerald, and given that users get the Daz software for free, while Poser users are paying $$$ for their program then I'd be grateful any solution exists at all if I were a Daz user, not whine about it.

It's not as if Gerald is a multi-million dollar corporation and has unlimited resources or time. The type of criticism above is more likely to push him to abandon the product if it isn't going to earn enough money to justify the effort and especially so if people make demands that he can't fulfill (he can only work on one feature at a time e.g. GPU support). The only thing I'd agree with is that presets would make things much easier to use (less experimenting and simulating over and over to guess how to achieve a certain cloth behavior) is important. Ease of use is more important than saving $10, to keep the learning curve from being so steep.

I did a google search to learn more about Blender's cloth simulator. I was watching this tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uW5PasvZPFg

Around 4min15 I see that Blender has presets for cloth types e.g. they set it to "cotton", so I wonder how they get around the issues that Gerald mentioned about not knowing the properties of the mesh in order to correctly set up the springs and forces...

edit: for anyone who is curious like me, this tutorial shows Blender being used in a Marvelous Designer way to stitch arms to the torso of the clothing... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q06lPp2PNG4

My hope is that maybe 2 or 3 freebie creators might allow their clothing items to be included with VWD... it is of course possible to mention a download link to the free cloth item on renderosity (in the manual or in the install instructions) but for more convenience, if the items were installed with VWD, it would be more ideal. I hope someone would be willing to volunteer some of their basic cloth items for this.

Also, maybe to improve sales, is it possible to make VWD compatible with Blender? I know almost nothing about Blender except that it has a huge number of users (probably because it is both free just like Daz, but also has many powerful features... I assume it does not yet have a cloth simulator). If it has an open API that would allow a "Blender bridge" to be created so that VWD can run inside Blender, surely it would entice those users to also consider buying VWD (especially with the lower price now).

edit: I should add that since Gerald is already very busy, if someone from the Blender community were interested and had the skills, they could take on the task (and charge a reasonable cost to buy the bridge, similar to the Daz Bridge is selling for now).

This is great news and I hope it leads to more Daz and Poser users adopting VWD! I agree about the learning curve, it still feels very intimidating to use because there's so much functionality to understand and then customize to the outfit that is to be simulated.

One idea I had was that maybe VWD should come with some standard wardrobe content? Similar to how when you buy Poser, you get a few gigabytes of free 3d models and figures and basic clothing so that the customer can start rendering right away. Then once they feel confident they can go on to learn about morph brushes, the material room, etc.

So VWD could include a basic business suit for a man, for a woman, a casual shirt and pants, a dress, shorts, socks, cape, tie, perhaps sci-fi outfit, or Victorian-era outfit, etc. The idea is that the wardrobe would be available for the new user to fit onto M4 or V4 or Genesis, Genesis2, 3, etc. simply by scaling it to match the body mesh. Then, each outfit would have a preset that VWD can load, and this will configure the outfit to simulate nicely (instead of making the user read the manual, try out various settings by guessing, retry again and again... the presets let them create a working, impressive simulation instantly without the long learning curve). One outfit might have 2 or more presets so that the user can load each one and see how changing the settings would make the outfit more stiff, or more silky...

Anyway, when there's no clothing included, then the user must begin learning VWD by relying on an item in their own clothing library. By including some standard clothes, it makes it easier to create a more universal tutorial, and gives the user a quick start to getting a working simulation.

I just receive the new version of VWD. I must say thanks to Gerald and WimVDB for the updated manual!!! It is a major improvement, the english is very understandable and the tutorials are excellent. Chapter 12 Fundamentals also does a great job explaining the basics and providing good visual examples of how different values affect the simulation result. I'm more excited by the manual than any of the new features :)

I do wish to point out that some pictures in the manual are very dark... because the background of the page is white, then when the picture on the page is dark (for example, the inflate example using C19 Jeans) the high contrast of the white page background with the dark picture makes it even harder to see the contents of the picture. I could not even see the buttons of the jeans in the second photo unless I look very very closely to the screen.

@VWD: I really wish that Poser or Daz would pay you some kind of royalty or maybe a large one-time fee so that VWD could be integrated into those software programs. Piracy will always exist and yes, protection is no guarantee that someone will not find a crack anyway to bypass it. Then the protection only makes the true customers of the product frustrated.

In terms of a more basic version of VWD, it is too bad you cannot have a basic version of VWD that emulates the Poser Cloth Room more closely for its user interface so that it can be swapped into Poser (get rid of Cloth Room... it is so ancient and should've been updated a long time ago). This way existing Poser users do not have a big learning curve, the interface would look and behave very close or identical to the old Cloth Room. Then maybe Smith-Micro can pay to get the new VWD-Cloth Room upgraded every 2 years with features that are passed down from the standalone VWD product... migrate the features bit by bit, add more functions to the ClothRoom interface... etc.