Hi VWD.

I think making your software available without protection is an honorable choice. It reminds of the old Bethesda Softwork policy: "we don't need protection because we are confident our products will be hugely successful and most people will buy because they perceive value". The real problem is convincing people that there is value.

Your product already works very well, but there are some quirks and limitations that limit perceived value. Crashes are not bad per se, but VWD should offer an option to save the current scene at launch (and maybe a "always save" checkbox). Working on more than one clothing item at once should be possible. If that's not possible, you should be able to convert the current cloth to a collision, and load a new cloth without leaving VWD. A pane where only the imported collision and cloth/hair are listed would be handy. A "Refresh Host List" and a "Clear Scene" button should also be provided. Instead of throwing an error when you open the Vertices Tools/Groups with nothing selected, VWD should offer a "pick an object from this list" dialog. These are small changes, but would raise perceived quality substantially.

Frequent updates are not a priority, unless they address very popular demands or widespread bugs.

The included documentation is quite detailed already, but I suspect a lot of people would prefer watching videos. Instruction videos would also easily become fast-to-share marketing material. I know making good instructional videos is quite hard and time consuming.

Your presence on the official Daz forum would serve as a reminder that VWD exists and is valuable.

Another measure would be active action against piracy. While you won't be able to get rid of it entirely, you can usually report copyright infringements and make the pirated version more difficult to find. Alternatively you could enter the pirate forums and try to persuade people that your software is worth the money.

50 seems an adequate price, it's not cheap, but it's good value for what it does. IIRC Octane started at 100 and went up as it gained popularity. Both Garibaldi and LAMH, which are more comparable to VWD in their structure, are sold for 50.

Hope you'll find this useful. I'm really looking forward to the next version.

Would it be possible to add a "reverse subdivision" function to VWD, for the meshes that are too dense even at base resolution? The implemented subdivision engine is very clever, adding vertices only where distance is too far. An option allowing to remove vertices that are too close would be a nice addition to VWD flexibility.

Speaking of subd, when it is enabled, sometimes the timeout when inporting a mesh is too short and VWD reports the obj doesn't exist before D|S is done converting it.

Thank you for the clarification on gravity (the tip on neg values is very useful and also solves most of by buoyancy requests). I tend to use Gravity to control how heavy a cloth is, if the mesh is too dense or too sparse for Softness alone.

Some performance and various tips follow. Just a FYI, maybe you already noticed, maybe not:

As per the documentation, disabling self collision vastly improves simulation speed, especially on meshes with many polygons, wether the cloth really collides or not. Disable it for any cloth that you don't expect to crumple on itself (leave it on for a scarf, disable it for a T-shirt).

Setting Resolution to Base (disable SubD) prior importing the cloth to VWD has 2 advantages: faster sim due to less calculation, and more accurate cloth behavior. Many new clothes are so dense that they behave as they weigh a lot and are very soft, because the vertices are too close to each other and their deformations add to each other. You can add back both SubD and Smoothing Modifier, complete with collision, after sending the result of the simulation to D|S. Optimal spacing between vertices in VWD seems to be circa 3/4 inch or 2 cm.

Previous versions of the bridge automatically disabled the collider SubD, not the latest one to date. On my system the SubD applied to the collider doesn't seem to slow the simulation much. Its impact is way less than self collision or the density of the cloth.

Disabling the Floor collision leads to minor improvement in performance, just enough to justify leaving it off unless required. As with self collision, simulation slows down even if the Floor is not touched. Leaving it on is better than importing a mesh as your floor. You may have noticed that you can adjust the floor location along the Y axis, I find this very useful. It could be even better if we could set it as a "buoyancy limit" for scenes with people in water, but that would get limited use I suppose.

The Gravity parameter is not to be intended as a real world parameter (although you would lower it for Mars and increase it on Jupiter), but as a measure of the weight of every vertex on your cloth. So Jeans tissue would get higher gravity than a polyester one, but lower gravity than a carpet. If you have to simulate the Magic Carpet, turn off Gravity and use Stiffness/Rigidification to move the cloth according to its nature. Clothes with higher gravity require less Softness to hold together. Valid values seem to range between 1 and 0.0001. Could the authors confirm this range?

I'm nowhere near to full understanding and mastering VWD, but the above may be useful for anyone, so here you are :)

IDK, I didn't bother installing VWD on the General release. I thought that was the default plugin behavior, although that passage not being automated felt strange.

Anyway the new bridge behaves better than the old version :)

The delay on exit is still noticeable, but waaay shorter and as such not a nuisance anymore.

The occasional crash will still happen, but being always on exit it's predictable, and since VWD doesn't lock the D|S interface, you just save, than exit the bridge.

All in all, good work so far :)

@ Writers_Block You just need to click Accept, that will allow the cloth to appear in VWD. For the sake of precision, after the first, another identical window will appear. Accept that one too.

Hello VWD,

Thank you, your reply was very helpful, especially the neighborhood part :)

I know programming takes time, I'm not demanding immediate changes. I'm glad you liked my suggestions so far. For the scissor tool I was thinking of something quite easy (draw a line or a lasso and the cloth is split where the line passes or at the nearest vertice). Physical interaction would be awesome, I couldn't think of that.

About the XYZ scaling, yes, it worked as you say (X and Z together, Y). Since in VWD we can select vertices to our liking, separating the X and Z would not be necessary: for Z we can select the sides of the cloth, for X the front and/or back. IDK why in DDC the values were just named X and Y, maybe because dynamic dresses start as flat meshes. All I know is the X/Y directions were inverted on some clothes. You never knew what was going to happen. Also in DDC, simulation would often crash if you went to negative values (to relax the cloth around some areas, e.g. pregnant woman or to make the cloth bigger altogether). I didn't yet try values higher than 100% in VWD's scale, but I think it would respond better ;) .

@ ANYBODY listening:

On a side note, I need suggestions for items that are _not _cloth. VWD has huge potential, I'm just not very good at harnessing it yet.

1. I'd like to make a cuirass appear beaten by an axe, but the distortion propagates too far, or stiffness isn't enough?

2. I'd also like to simulate a person sitting with his cheek resting on his hand. I know the trick of using an invisible glove or an empty geometry shell as the collider, but I can't control very well how far the deformation travels or avoid crushing. Is there a way to apply some pressure coming from the inside of a cloth? I think that would help.

If anybody can give some directions or hints it'd be much appreciated.

Thanks Mythico and VWD for your replies :)

I'm sorry about the L and V keys, I must have been blind lol.

I forgot to mention I went for the full version of VWD, but I work with stills most of the time and use dynamics only when absolutely necessary. This is an habit carried over from the Optitex DCC plugin. I watched Biscuit's videos and I need to adjust my workflow to the VWD plugin and take advantage of its new convenient options.

Point 3 was related to what in documentation is called Dynamic Positioning (page 13). If you do a Static Simulation, then do Dynamic Positioning and then reset the simulation (Alt + Start Static Simulation), the simulation resets to when you started Dynamic Positioning. It doesn't go back to the shape that came from D|S.

I know the neighborhood option is second tier quality (the documentation is clear about it), but i'm finding it very intuitive and good so far. It could get some more potential through a scissor tool. It could allow rigidification of fairly distant vertices and separation of nearer ones. This came to mind playing with a zippered jacket. If you set rigidification by neighborhood to 1.0, the small strings of the hood won't fall through the mesh (good!) but the zipper would be locked further than where it should (no good). If you set rigidification to 0.1, the zipper behaves perfectly (good!) but the strings fall through (no good). I found workarounds to this, but getting scissors would be the most straightforward option: rigidify at 1.0 and then cut the zipper at the appropriate length. IDK if this is clear, maybe I'll post images later.

Another big use for a scissor tool would be for action scenes: katana and sword fights, jaguar attacks, Hulk going green... being able to shred the cloth to your liking would be a killer option.

Another option I'd like to see is making the collision objects 50% transparent (I often start my simulation with clothing partially inside my models because of some D|S limitations. I like working this way because VWD is excellent at removing poke-through). I know I can hide an item from the scene viewer with Ctrl Click, but IDK how to make everything visible again.

Finally, the only thing I'm missing from the DCC plugin: what in VWD is the Scale(%) option was able to shrink indipendently along the Y and X axis. This allowed to shorten a belt without making it too narrow. It's not essential, but it would be useful.

Thanks again :)

Hello developers, I'm getting the hang of your software and it's really impressive and way more convenient than the old Dynamic Clothing Control.

A few issues I'm facing:

1 - Closing the VWD bridge locks D|S for 30-40 seconds, even if I close it immediately after starting it. Most times it's just an annoyance, but sometimes D|S crashes without any trace left in the log file.

2 - Once the simulation is started, I cannot open the Collision parameters or the Dynamic parameters tabs. These menus remain inaccessible even after stopping and resetting the simulation. IDK if this is by design, but being able to adjust the friction of the collider after a first simulation would be very useful.

3 - If you use the mouse to drag the clothing item, the simulation gets reset to when you started clicking instead than resetting to the original imported shape. This could be useful, but having a full "reset to import/re-read obj shape" function would be a major improvement.

Now a few suggestions for incoming updates:

1 - When VWD/the bridge creates the new mesh, materials are set to 3DL instead of Iray. This would be a minor annoyance if the material names were not changed for the new object. As of now, you need to restore the Iray parameters and then copy/paste every single material because names don't match. If they did, you could copy/paste in a single move.

2 - Implementing a scissor tool to separate vertices that were welded at import would be great (it's easy to "go too far" and weld vertices that weren't meant to using the vertices neighborhood option without a preview).

3 - Please add an option to select only visible vertices instead of all vertices in the square.

4 - Please implement a round/oval vertice selection tool (click to set center, drag and release to select size, move around mouse to set eccentricity and click to confirm would be awesome).

Useful info: Core i7-5820K, RAM 16 GB, Rampage V Extreme, 2x GTX 980Ti, 1600 W PSU, OS and D|S on Samsung Evo 840 SSD (250 GB), Daz Library on a 3 TB WD Red. Windows 10 Pro 64, latest available drivers, D|S 64 Beta 4.9.3.71, VWD 1.0.408.2976 (can't say about the bridge, is there a version history available?)

Thank you for your time and efforts :)