Blender Cloth Sim Help Needed

Starkdog

Hello all,

As I'm just learning and tinkering with Blender, I saw an awesome tutorial, on how to make a dress from essentially a flattened plane, similar to a flat dress pattern.  I was able to build the rough shape in Hexagon, bring into D|S to make sure everything was to scale, and then exported the obj over to Blender, in addition to G8F.  I've experimented with several collision and friction settings, but it still looks jagged in some areas and super-tight in other areas.  I've attached a picture below.  Anyone have any ideas or suggestions?  Also, once the dress is the way i want it, do I then "weld" the dress together post-simulation?

Thanks,

-David

 

Starkdog

I've also included a picture of the base mesh I made in Hexagon, as well as the pre-simulation setup in Blender.

Thanks,

-David

Richard Haseltine

The trouble is a dress isn't mde by stitiching two flat pieces of fabric together, however they are shaped. They need darts and so on to have enough fabric to go over the wider or projecting areas without leaving loose sections bagging out in the narrower areas. It looks as if the video goes some way tow ards that by using different segments, but if Blender can't do true darts (a V shaped incision) then I don't think you are going to get far.

felis

How does it look if you scale the dress a bit bigger, before simulation?

TheMysteryIsThePoint

The jaggies are because the edges of your quadsare not perpindicular to the direction the cloth is trying to bend, i.e. they are bending against the "grain". Try a triangulation modifier above the cloth sim modifier in the stack. That will also fix the typical shading artifacts cloth sims cause because the quads are no longer coplanar.

Do yourself a favor: Become more confortable in Blender and its sculpting tools. You'll probably want to fix a lot of things with the cloth brush.

Also, you might also want to apply the simulation, and apply a Subdivision Surface modifier.

Just for completeness: If you can, just use Marvelous Designer.

Good luck!

SDev

Md is now subscription only. But have a look here:

and here

 

The first addon uses initially bezier curves instead of meshes, that's the trick. You can transform the cloth into a quad mesh later on, and depending your base model use this geometry directly with your model in blender or bind it to any rig if needed.

TheMysteryIsThePoint

This is only my opinion, but these preview videos always seemed a bit misleading to me. When you start to animate, there's always some problem... Blender's cloth sim is very finnicky; ask anyone here. And the default settings are sometimes waaaaaay, as in two orders of magnitude, off of the reasonable values that work.

Marvelous Designer, on the other hand, works like Black Magic, every time, intersections be damned. That's the only reason why I would even touch subscription only software.

Krys Kryngle

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

This is only my opinion, but these preview videos always seemed a bit misleading to me. When you start to animate, there's always some problem... Blender's cloth sim is very finnicky; ask anyone here. And the default settings are sometimes waaaaaay, as in two orders of magnitude, off of the reasonable values that work.

Marvelous Designer, on the other hand, works like Black Magic, every time, intersections be damned. That's the only reason why I would even touch subscription only software.

I'll second that.  Blender cloth sim is very difficult to get good results.  Marvelous Designer sim is pretty amazing.  Import the character, import the pose, make/import the clothing, run the sim, and watch the magic unfold.  I really wanted to get away from MD since the new subscription pricing, but it just works so well and my old version will work for a while.  I was lucky enough to buy it before they got greedy.

wolf359

Hi,two major mistakes people make with cloth sims in Blender that sadly are rarely mentioned in many video tutorials

First: IMHO ,learn to model clothing garments to the general shape of the intended figure and avoid this nonsense of stitching two flat planes together etc.

 

Second:

If you have scaled that clothing mesh at all and not chose: .object>apply>scale, it will NEVER SIMULATE PROPERLY in Blender.

No.. Blender is not a purpose built,one trick pony, $$rentware$$, cloth simlulator like MD ,so yes you will have to learn what parameters to change from those defaults that are likely designed for draping table cloths .

For moving characters ,I would suggest starting with the "inner& outer" thickeness and friction settings on the target items collision physics settings and experimenting from there.

Starkdog

Hello all,

Thank you for all the suggestions.  I forgot to add in my original post that I'm frusterated with the limited tools in Hexagon, and am in the process of learning Blender.  Half the battle is learning and not confusing all the keyboard hotkeys... I'm getting more comfortable with the UI and tools in Blender, and currently going through the "Donut" tutorial series.  I do think that MD is awesome creation tool; however, it is out of my range, especially now that it has gone the subscription route.  I like the aspect of creating "flat panels" and stitching them together, as it helps to minimize UV unwrap warping.  Seeing that Blender could do something similar is amazing to me, as I've always fought UV map tools, especially in Hexagon.

Wolf359,

Thank you for the hints and screenshots.  Yeah, while stitching flat patterns sounds interesting, I'll try modeling a near-shape garment and cloth-simming it.  Part of the pain was box-modeling a dress or garment in Hexagon, getting a wonky UV map, and then transferring to D|S to setup and run multiple dForce simulations to see if it worked, then go back to Hexagon and make the higher poly version, and go through the same crazy process.  In your second picture with the bent knee, is there a solidify modifier added, or is that effect from the thickness/friction settings?

 

Thanks,

-David

wolf359

I have applied both a solidify & smoothing modifier to the dress.

TheMysteryIsThePoint

Another trick is to rig the garment to the character, nothing fancy... with defaults weights, and then only sim the parts of the garment which must move in order to be convincing.

SDev

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

Another trick is to rig the garment to the character, nothing fancy... with defaults weights, and then only sim the parts of the garment which must move in order to be convincing.

 

As I said: "You can transform the cloth into a quad mesh later on, and depending your base model use this geometry directly with your model in blender or bind it to any rig if needed."

And again, I never said Blender is an out of the box solution. The result always depends on the creator/artist.

 

TheMysteryIsThePoint

SDev said:

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

Another trick is to rig the garment to the character, nothing fancy... with defaults weights, and then only sim the parts of the garment which must move in order to be convincing.

 

As I said: "You can transform the cloth into a quad mesh later on, and depending your base model use this geometry directly with your model in blender or bind it to any rig if needed."

And again, I never said Blender is an out of the box solution. The result always depends on the creator/artist.

It didn't seem like you were saying that a rigged garment can also be simulated, which was my point.

And I never said that you said Blender is an out of the box solution.

SDev

 

It didn't seem like you were saying that a rigged garment can also be simulated, which was my point.

 

English is not my native language, perhaps I miss something?

I was the opinion this is obvious.

OT: Wish you guys a nice x-mas and sucessful progress with Diffeo and your stuff. 

Krys Kryngle

Cloth simulation in sculpt mode.  Thought this was pretty awesome...