But back to the point of that old Daz thread, I know you don't care for Daz Studio at all, but that is the software that Auto-Fit/Auto-Follow was developed in and for, so that is the tool that contains a plethora of fixes for the situation.

When you see products, like the one mentioned in that thread by Sickleyield, those are most often products made for people as an easy parameter dial fix built directly onto the figure. Sickleyield devotes a lot of time on that stuff, and if we buy her fixes they also come with a lot of extra information on going further - but she also offers a lot of free advice on the subjects a s well. Anyway....

So here is a page I've made with a bunch of the resources I use to figure out how to correct certain situations. I don't put all of this stuff to practice all the time, so I need to keep it somewhere so I can go back and look when needed.

Content Creation Tools

Scroll down to the Josh Darling videos and you'll start to see fixes for many things. But there's a lot more. We can even add custom behavior to the clothing according to specific angles of a particular joint. This isn't stuff that we ca expect the content artists to do because it would introduce too many nightmares - everyone has a different opinion of what should happen when....

That's actually part of the magic with some of those shaping products that we can buy. For example: Poke-Away 2 for Genesis Male and/or Female (sold separately) allow us to tweak the collision distance for many parts of each joint of the figure. Negative values push the clothing out without changing the shape of the figure, and positive values do the opposite - shrink the specific part of the figure leaving the clothing item intact.

This can make for a pretty dynamic method of working with clothing across a whole animation sequence because sometimes negative works best, other time the other way is the key - even within the same animation of one figure.

VWD is an interesting way to deal with it, but not all clothing work out-of-the-box.

Remember my Carrara 8.5 Pro cheerleading during the beta phase? I was all-in with Genesis. I had a bunch of Generation 3 and 4 clothing and accessories so I bought the Generation clones for Genesis right away. Now that I'm actually using Genesis 1 again for Rosie, I'm discovering that Aiko 3 stuff autfits pretty darned well to my stylized figure. I can do the auto-fit and then run VWD if I want, but auto-fit always distorts the mesh in funky ways - easily (but sometimes time-consuming) fix as a conformed object on the figure, using Carrara modeling tools. But for VWD cloth simulations, I prefer to not use auto-fit, remove the mesh from the conforming rigging (before conforming it), just scale and position it to somewhat fit, and run VWD.

If It's not working for a specific clothing, we can go into the model room and fix the issue of it's something we really want to use. For example, the V5 Shirt by HongYu isn't welded at the seems so the whole shirt falls apart in a simulation, but works great as a tight-fitting conformed object. Well, if we really wanted it to drape/simulate instead, we could always just go in and weld all te seams. It takes a while but I used that product as an example because it's one of those that might be truly worth the extra effort.

Also, by removing the rigging, we're no longer confined to topology. We can add or delete buttons, snaps and zippers, for example. Delete anything we don't want - completely make it into something unique to ourselves.

The workflow video above begins to hint at these possibilities. The first simulation is the J-Suit, which I've already converted to a static object. But then when I bring in M4's Steam Cowboy jacket, I go through the whole process. Just keep in mind that, before simulating either of them, I can go into the model room and add or delete vertices all I want!

manleystanley posted at 4:48AM Sat, 05 December 2020 - #4403193

How about a flash back and why I was banned from the DAZ forum 3 times. old news 4 years later and DAZ has done NOTHING to fix this.

Well, that's not entirely true. Daz 3D has done a LOT for that. And it's free - built into Studio. Like Richard said early on in that thread, it's not an Auto-fit issue at all, it's the clothing itself - which also isn't to say that the actual artists is to blame either, because in this world of 'Choice' so many shapes exist to have to create for for these sorts of specific, individual user needs.

I've been tweaking customized versions of clothes for my characters for years, and then just store the new versions to my Carrara browser.

I recently got the awesome VWD Cloth and Hair simulator, and now just use that as my conformer for clothing that should have a more natural drape as well as for a better shrink-wrap, because sometimes I need that too!

Here's an example of my new workflow for this

Written Support Article

Video

Did you see that Fenric and DCG plugins are now free?

Carrara Plugins

I'm still loving Carrara!

VirtualWorldDynamics posted at 9:03PM Fri, 04 December 2020 - #4406152

Just a small info,

I would like to give the ability to create clothes with VWD and FreeCAD. This workflow will need a full videotutorial. This solution will not have the same possibilities than Marvelous Designer but it could allow to create simple clothes with their UVMap informations. The meshing method will use GMSH to create a perfect meshing for VWD.

Give me your opinion on this ability of the program. I've never tried FreeCAD, but would love to grab it and try this!

I've never used MMD clothing, but I use Carrara's modeling tools.Here's a workflow that I've been getting Great results with for some clothing - thanks to VWD V2!

• Load clothing that is meant to be conformed to some other figure then my target figure
• Remove the rigging from the clothing item - converts it to a single OBJ
• Use simple scale tools to get the size of the garment close to the target figure
• Beginning at frame 30 (1 Second mark) animate the figure
• Send to VWD Cloth and Hair V2
• Set Simulation as normal - paying close attention to how close I want the cloth to the character, and which items to nail or rigidify
• Run Simulation

It's amazing!

I'd love to try FreeCAD to make some custom clothes, but this method has been working very well for many clothing items.

An Example: I could give my Genesis 1 character Genesis 8 female clothing. Perform the above steps and, even though the base shape is all wrong, and it's not even conformed to the character, it often yields a wonderful result - but not always.

Many clothing items are not modeled in a way that simulate nicely. Using the above method, we can intervene the workflow after scaling the garment. This time, use the modeling tools to 'fix' what's wrong - fix why it doesn't simulate well, whether that's welding edges, removing a second layer of cloth mesh, deleting sleeves or other reshaping/editing the mesh.

I Love VWD in Carrara!!!

Here is a result from the same suit used in the last two videos above. This is mostly using VWD Cloth and Hair to fit a static clothing object (no conforming rig) that doesn't even fit her shape. With Inflate set to -100 it stretches the leather to conform at a distance set by me, the artist. In this method, I have the incredible ability to add/remove any vertices I want, change anything I want, and make it work using VWD!

The Zipper, Zipper cloth and Zipper tongue are all held to the cloth via the Rigid group. The red leather on the sides is its own, separate material zone. I nail that with an extension (falloff) of 20. Stretch = 1, Softness = Default

GIF link (can't seem to get it to load to the post)

Good luck to all participants. This looks Awesome!!!

More examples include:

A breakdown introduction of the creation of my main Hero character

A Character Creation primer

A Volumetric Lighting, basic scene setup tutorial

These videos are only a part of it all. The many pages of the site go quite deep and are beginning to cover a Lot of topics.

While my work is quite Carrara-centric, I do feel that all of this would adapt well to virtually any software of your choosing with some exception - like that fact that Carrara is the only actual 3D Modeler software that I know of that can offer Poser Runtime/Daz 3D Library browser support almost as if the content was made to work for Carrara. Of course, Poser and Daz 3D products still need some shader (and possibly other) tweaking to be ready to render, as described in the above Character Design video, but it's still a much more organic workflow for performing custom animation - since we can work the mesh directly in the same software space.

Still, many of us may not need to actually 'model' within our workflow - meaning that all of this can be done directly within Poser and/or Daz Studio as well.

As shown in the Workflow demonstration video in the first post, VWD Cloth and Hair can allow us to use ANY clothing for our characters, no matter which platform it was designed for - as long as the software we're using can open it as a 3D mesh. So I'm really excited to (eventually) get Poser and give this all a try in that as well!

My Daz Studio tests have been going pretty well too, but I only just started with the new 4.14 release which is still kinda buggy on my machine (crashes). But it's showing lots of promise!

New Video and Article: Character Design for Carrara 01

Support Article with Free scene file download (dB's Character Template)

_Developing characters for our work is vital. Without characters, we have no story.

Early on in my adventure in all of this, I've felt that I needed to decide upon a method of building and storing my characters so that, when I bring them all together they appear consistent within the scene.

This video briefly demonstrates some of my most used techniques at the basic level. Characters are constantly being tweaked as we progress, but since I have a system that I use for all of them, right from the start - it's incredibly easy to get predictable results time after time._

The article has links to a Lot more information on creating and customizing our characters. Explore away!!!

New Video and Article: Character Design for Carrara 01

CharacterDesign01.jpg Watch Video

Support Article with Free scene file download (dB's Character Template)

_Developing characters for our work is vital. Without characters, we have no story.

Early on in my adventure in all of this, I've felt that I needed to decide upon a method of building and storing my characters so that, when I bring them all together they appear consistent within the scene.

This video briefly demonstrates some of my most used techniques at the basic level. Characters are constantly being tweaked as we progress, but since I have a system that I use for all of them, right from the start - it's incredibly easy to get predictable results time after time._

The article has links to a Lot more information on creating and customizing our characters. Explore away!!!

Very nice!

Cool. Thanks for the heads up!

Promo image, especially the thumbnail image is key. If the thumbnail can get us to click on it it has a chance to sell. If it doesn't... well... it doesn't. But once clicked on, the promo images and descriptions must 'sell' the product. In the case of coflek-gnorg - he can really render. But that's not all. He also spices up the images into art that we really like to click on.

My pleasure!

Xerxes0002 posted at 8:12PM Sun, 07 June 2020 - #4391151

Have they been removed? I get 404 error

Not Removed, but moved. Sorry about that. The 404 error is still in my site. Just go to Gallery > Downloads

I've been working to try and make everything make a bit more sense and to fit better, so I moved the Downloads section into the gallery.

Sorry about that - and they don't let me edit posts after a while here. It's going to take some getting used to for me.

Very cool! Congrats!