hear ye hear ye dforce outfits for diffeo
Padone
Posts: 3,688
http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/2021/04/dforce-simulations.html
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/410/better-dforce
Yep Thomas finally did it.
It's far from perfect but it's a good start. Please let us know your impression or ideas to improve things. I also recommend to read the bitbucket discussion since there are interesting tips and tricks. You need a good cpu to run the simulations in blender since it's cpu based. I have a ryzen 2200G and a gtx 1060. Here blender takes about twice the time of dforce to run the simulation with a similar quality, since dforce is using the 1060 that's much faster than the 2200G. Then threadripper users will fly away.
Again this is a first start, not perfect and to be improved.
edit. There's an important fix, please get version 1.6.0.0179 or later. In this version you can choose the daz settings instead of the blender presets. It's experimental by Thomas but on a first try it seems to work fine enough here.
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Comments
Great news! Is it the native Blender cloth simulation that is being used?
I read that yesterday and shared as well. It was super interesting! Thanks for the hardwork of going through the struggle of trial and error to approximate similar and nearly identical results.
@Paintbox yep
Excellent news!
Oh nice, will try to get in and try it out soon. Sounds like another game changer, in a long line of diffeo game changers lol.
My LInux box is now a Ryzen Threadripper 2920X. Can't wait to try.
Hey Padone, you asked me to leave some thoughts. I'm a bit confused as to what Diffeo is accomplishing with this. For example, I understand that Diffeo's default skin shader is doing a great job of mimicking how a character will look like in Daz. Is Diffeo trying to mimic Dforce behavior in Blender or is it just trying to find a good starting point for all dforce clothes to not completely break in Blender?
I loaded in Victoria 8 with a Dforce Retro Romper. This is what it looks like unsimulated.
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First thing I noticed is that the cloth has a collision modifier which confused me.
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I baked the default settings to 30 frames and got this result, which is okay but creates some material overlap in the cleavage area.
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Removing the collision modifier and enabling self-collision on the garment itself (leaving the default Diffeo settings as is) seems to give better results.
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Here's the quick way of how I would have tackled this type of garment myself. Note I'm no expert in cloth sims but get by well enough to where it's useable for my projects.
This garment's topology is actually not ideal for simulating and it's default position is already wrinkly and somewhat overlapping mesh.
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The bottom half of the garment seems to be autofitted well enough in Daz so added it to the pin group and excluded from the sim. I then only simulated a few frames just to get the straps to sit on the shoulders. I then applied this as a Shapekey and reassigned the pin group to only contain the area I want to do the rest of the simulation on. (Highlight the simulated area and do ctrl+i to invert the selection).
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This is the 30 frame sim using Simply Cloth's Silk preset.
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If this was a personal project where I would spend more time on it, I would edit the topology and add some additional vertex groups as well such as trim. These would be utilized in this section to further control the overall shape and simulation.
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I may just not be understanding the goal here but adding this dforce feature to Diffeo seems like it's a lot of extra work with very little benefit. Other than setting the collision distances to 0.001 by default, all the other settings are very scene specific. For example, cloth having a collision modifier on by default may cause a lot of frustration for users not understanding these settings well. I normally try to simulate layers of clothing one at a time rather than having multiple cloth/collisions running at once. Even the Quality Steps value is so very specific not just to the garment and simulation settings, but also to the pose and rate of change. If I have a pose that's significantly different than the prior or resting pose, I need to either raise quality steps to match my minimum fps (24,30,60) or keyframe the pose over a long range of frames to make it stable. Whereas more subtle changes even a low value of 5 can be more than enough.
Overall these default settings seem fine as a starting point but I imagine it will be a source of frustration for Thomas since there's so much room for error and there may be a lot of posts of users having issues with cloth sims. Perhaps rather than it being implemented as part of Diffeo, the Diffeo manual can simply have a section on best practices when using cloth sim and how to address common issues? I can provide the presets that come with Simply Cloth as these tend to work better in my experience.
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Edit: Looks like I'm unable to paste images into the body of text so I've saved and attached the finish product instead.
@tapanojum
Thank you for your reply. I'm trying to collect comments from advanced blender users who may give suggestions to improve the simulation in blender.
The purpose of importing dforce outfits is to make them work in blender similar to how they work in daz studio, with little intervention from the user to eventually edit the cloth type to personal preference. For example a user may want to use silk rather than cotton or rubber for a particular garment. Other than that the simulation should work fine enough without the user intervention.
To achieve this goal the basic dforce structure is imported into blender, so to get the dforce area of influence and its strength for blender to know where and how to simulate the garment. Then I'm trying to find both good presets for the various cloth types, and a good simulation quality preset that should work with every cloth type, even sacrificing performances. Because having to tweak the simulation parameters for every simulation may be a main pita for the general user who just wants the simulation to drape. Then the advanced user can always tweak at will.
At this stage I'm relying on blender default presets for the cloth types, and on a quite strong preset for the simulation that's exposed in the global settings but can be changed by the user. This seems both good and flexible enough to me.
Then to reply to your other questions.
1. The extra collision for cloth is needed for multiple cloth layers, for example a jacket over a gown, that's not uncommon for dforce outfits. Again the purpose is simplicity so the general user just runs the simulation to get the draping. Then the advanced user can run multiple separate simulations and/or tweak at will.
2. As for simply cloth I'm trying to stay away from paid addons to get something that everyone can use. But if there are good presets around that can be used and added to blender for free that would be a good addition.
3. You can add pictures to your posts by saving the post first with the linked pictures, then edit the post and copy and paste the image links. Or use a host service for the pictures and link from there.
Also please look at the links below and let me know what you think.
https://developer.blender.org/T62631#1126709
I guess I'm not understanding why Dforce needs to be recreated in Blender and why there needs to be little intervention from the user. It seems incredibly optimistic to believe that a one-size fits all default setting can ever be implemented. Sure, you might get something that sort of works a lot of the time... but what's the point? For example, this was my one and only attempt at using Diffeo for cloth sim and the result was unuseable (I ran the default sim again and attached the results this time). This of course is of no fault to you guys, it just seems like a very unrealistic goal. Sometimes I have to tweak parameters in between poses of the same scene, let alone having it work across the board for all dforce clothing. The power of cloth sim here is that you can incorporate weight painting, sculpting and vertex groups into the simulation to get very specific results which would otherwise be unattainable.
I think this sort of approach has a high chance of things going terribly wrong for the user or simply providing subpar results at a subpar performance. I commend your efforts on making Blender as easy as possible for the general user but my opinion is that by virtue of leaving Daz for Blender, that user should be considered "advanced" enough to invest a few hours into learning how cloth simulations work. Diffeo can be of great help in this regard by putting together a section in the manual offering useful resources, best practices, etc. I'd be more than happy to provide the Simply Cloth presets and what little I know that may be of use. (Simply Cloth is a paid addon but the presets are for vanilla Blender and don't require any addons.)
Again, I don't mean to discourage you or sound pessimistic. I'm only providing this feedback because you requested it. I just don't see how this could possibly work but I'm not a cloth expert so perhaps you have a better vision for this than I can wrap my mind around at this time.
Thank you again for your reply.
I agree it is hard to get the blender simulation general purpose and easy to use. For example marvelous designer is way better. But this doesn't mean we can't try, and/or provide a starting point for the general user. Then again the advanced user can choose to completely ignore this. You can turn off dforce simulations in the global settings.
As for your example I'd like to see the dforce version. And the version in blender with simply cloth presets. Also yes please if you can upload the simply cloth presets, if the license does allow it, this will be great for more options to try. Thank you.
Maybe not the best comparison wth Dforce in texture view vs the clay view in blender, but even here you can see that the cloth shouldn't intersect like it did in blender since self collision isn't on by default.
The presets have the files named exactly as they are in Simply Cloth.
Thank you for the presets. Self collision is on by default in the latest version. There was a previous version where Thomas disabled it, but that also had issues with dforce weight maps. May be you're not up to date and you may like to test 1.6.0.0156 or later.
I tried this the other night (I randomly went on the diffeo site to see if there were any new blog posts and the new update was posted like minutes before I signed on) and I think this is wonderful! It's so great to not have to go through and set everything up for cloth sim on the items. Thank you, Padone, for pushing to have this be a part of the tool, and thank you, Thomas, for knocking it out. I look forward to playing around with this more this weekend!
@benniewoodell Your input will be particularly useful since I know you use blender for actual productions. As @tapanojum says, and I agree, the blender cloth is not particularly fit for easy and general purpose use. But I believe it doesn't work too bad either, it seems good enough here for draping. Then animation may require some care.
Yeah, I'll absolutely give you input once I play around some more this weekend!