Hi, encouraged by ynsean and a few others I have been making a more concerted effort to learn Poser 5. In particular, I have been working with the cloth room, which as of the last SR now works okay for me. I have tried all sorts of items, including some older conforming figure items I reworked the mesh on so that I could use as dynamic clothing. Once you get the hang of posing the clothing in the cloth room, I find you can get some really amazing results. Which leads me to wonder what others think about dynamic clothing? Do you have a preference? Do you think some items do better as conforming clothing and others as dynamic clothing? Or do you think dynamic clothing is the way to go for everything? Mostly, just curious to hear other people thoughs on this. Rob

Attached Link: http://www.poserpros.com/store/viewitem.php?selitem=3280&start=0&selcat=0&selsub=0

But conforming is certainly faster, so I guess it has its place, too.

Is it possible to mix conforming and dynamic elements? As an example, Dodger's "David the Giant Slayer" outfit. (At PoserPros.) I love it, but the kilt isn't very posable. Since it's conforming, he wasn't able to make the top part of the kilt movable. That means David's thighs cut through the kilt if you bulk him up too much. And you can't pose him sitting. (A common problem with "skirts" in general.) Seems like the natural answer would be to make the belt and harness conforming, but the kilt part dynamic. If that's possible.

Edited to add link to the product, so you know what I'm talking about.

Message edited on: 08/09/2004 09:33

If soneone figures this out that would be pretty cool. The jabba slave girl outfit would look really good as a dynamic figure.

I think the Cloth Room is great, though both dynamic and conforming clothing has its benefits and uses. Dynamic cloth is great for long skirts, drapey cloth and loose clothes. It is easy to fit to morphed figures or even re-fit to other figures. Dynamic cloth tends to lack some of the finer details of conformers due to limitations of the Cloth room. Conforming cloth gives quick satisfaction in that it poses with your figure and you don't need to recalculate with each pose. Conforming cloth meshes can carry more detail, but often have poke through, and can be troublesome to fit to morphed figures. Conforming long skirts or loose garments can be quite tricky, though some folks are getting quite skilled with adding body handles and 'ghost' bones.

I haven't seen the kilt but try this....export just the hip then start a new scene and import it (uncheck all boxes)....now use this as a dynamic cloth BUT constrain ALL the vertices at the top, (the join to the abdomen) and done have it collide with the abdomen......then do your cloth solving and export the hip as a morph target for your kilt.....oh another thing to remember is if your using a pose from the library, parent the hip/skirt to the figures hip then delete the key frame where you want to export the hip, that'll bring the hip/skirt back to the correct position for a morph.......Steve

My 2 cents on the initial question- it all depends on how much time you have to invest in your current project. Change the pose drastically and with dynamic, re-calculate, conforming follows but with the possibility of poke through. So, it comes down to what's easier and faster, calculations or postwork. Choice is yours.

Randy, you beat me to it. I've been thinking exactly the same thing about Dodger's outfit ... if only the kilt were Dynamic, you could do some amazing things. However, IIRC there are some posing morphs that you can tweak. I've only had Poser 5 for a couple of weeks, most of my time with it has been spent experimenting with the Cloth and Material rooms. I love Dynamic Cloth, even if some of my sims have thus far gone haywire. I really appreciate that many of PhilC's recent releases have included both conforming and Dynamic versions, I wish more merchants would do that. As regards "versus," I agree with what others have said ... it's all about need and bandwidth. It's going to be awhile before I actually complete my next render because I'm having too much fun playing and learning in the Cloth Room.

If the clothing is loosely fitted and "flowy" like a dress or a long jacket, I'd say dynamic, but when you want something skintight like a catsuit, conforming seems to be a better choice. my 2 pennies. JV.

" If the clothing is loosely fitted and "flowy" like a dress or a long jacket, I'd say dynamic, but when you want something skintight like a catsuit, conforming seems to be a better choice." Yep, I agree, although i've been working with some dynamic pantyhose for Vicki that work out really well (no poke-through problems like I had with conforming ones). Also, don't forget the other great benefits of the cloth room that don't include clothing use (drapes, sheets, tablecloths, flags, etc). I'd say for animation in particular, the cloth room is the better choice, and can in fact be invaluable. For stills, I'd still use conforming most of the time I imagine, but I don't do many stills. :-)

If the conforming cloth is grouped right you can make parts of it dynamic, then the skin tight parts stays skin tight and the frills drape just like they want. If its not grouped for that, export the part you want dynamic (as .obj) and import. You may need to do some not so advanced grouping, but most of you have seen what this room can do. My vote is for the dynamic conforming cloth.

Note that you cannot clothify confoming figures. They must be props. I believe that there is a great value in both, and that neither is necessarily superior to the other. However, that said, I'll agree with the previous assessment -- dynamics for drape and flow. Dynamics also animate better :)

Would it be possible to make a conforming belt, say, with a dynamic skirt as a sort of smart prop to it? Dynamic works so much better than morphs.

Oops, had myself fooled. The export, import thing must be easier than it sounds. I dont remember doing it on the last dress but I obviously did, theres the prop.

I like slapping a dynamic coat or shirt on Casual Don to good effect, and dynamic dresses on nudie Judy. Tight fitting pants aren't really worth the extra effort in the cloth room.

I like dynamic clothing when you've got the time to get it 'right'. But sometimes it's not easy - I find often dynamic clothing setting get corrupted when you save and re-load, and you need to go back and set-up the sims again. And if the dynamic clothing doesn't fit your model well - it can get tricky. Check out http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=736586 for an example of using Choregraphed Groups (I seldon used feature I suspect). Joey's skirt has 2 vertices choreographed to a placement where her hands are at frame 10. More experimenting required I think....

I've noticed that too - that sometimes you have to re-do the simulation. I've gotten in the habit of exporting the dynamic cloth item as an OBJ when it's shaped the way I want. So I can re-import it already draped. Just in case!

note that the simulations are supposed to be run everytime the cloth is used "new from runtime" The *.dyn file that is created to hold the dynamics is actually supposed to be erased after closing, but isn't always. So while don't necessarily always have to, you should pretty much expect to run the simulation everytime you load a fresh copy of the garment.

I'm not talking about loading a fresh copy. I'm talking about a file saved with the blanket or whatever draped. Sometimes it works, sometimes it gives you that "can't find OBJ" error message, and you have to start over.

um, yeah -- we're talking about the same thing -- it can't find that object when the dyn file refrence is deleted, and that's important. Saved dynamic objects have to be saved in their default state.

Well, I haven't been able to figure out why it works sometimes, and why it doesn't. The only thing I change is where the object is. You kind of have to do that, if you're dropping the hi-res square onto a table, say. Since it comes in on the floor. But sometimes it can't find the darn thing when I open the file again.

It's that damnable *.dyn file (the magic bullet, lol) -- I haven't figured out the whys and whens of it's removal or deletion yet, but it pretty much has everything to do with that aspect. I believe that the same solution that applied to the dynamic hair works for it, though -- remove the reference to the *.dyn file in the figure/prop itself.