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Really, I think our best bet with this issue is if our buddy jonstark can bring some pizzas to the DAZ offices and ask one of the developers to fix the cloth collision... :) :) :)
BTW, I just noticed that today marks the 2 month anniversary since stringtheory originally posted this concept. And that was after what he described as "months and months" of experimenting to find a solution.
And after 23 pages of discussion, I'm not sure that we have a workable solution on the horizon.
Anyway, if anyone from DAZ ever checks this forum any more, could you PLEASE put us out of our misery and ask a developer to get the cloth collision working again? :) :) :) :)
You are not an idiot, but that is an idiotic statement.
- creating a soft body envelope around a rigged figure works. Using softbody attach to the skeleton to move the panels works.
Repeat after me.
- creating a soft body envelope around a rigged figure works. Using softbody attach to the skeleton to move the panels works.
Furthermore, the panels can be created for custom Genesis shapes.
Repeat after me.
- Furthermore, the panels can be created for custom Genesis shapes.
Now we are just exploring convenient ways to construct and attach the soft body panels, which can be tedious. We are also exploring whether the method can work backward for people who have 8.1.
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Stringtheory's method works !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Just a reminder
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Just a reminder
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Sorry, I had no intention of saying anything negative about the idea or anything else. And I apologize if it was taken personally. That wasn't my intent. It was a brilliant idea.
My only point is that, while there may ultimately be a workaround procedure associated with this, at this point it seems, as you say, quite tedious and very difficult to get everything set up exactly correctly so that it works for everyone, if that's indeed possible. That was my only point. I've tried many times, and while there is a kernel of a workable solution in there, implementing it as a consistent and usable technique seems fairly tentative right now.
If I'm wrong I apologize, but I've tried just about all of the suggested techniques, and it just doesn't work for anything more that he simplest configuration of under armor.
If that's idiotic, then I confess...I'm an idiot :) :) :)
I was merely pointing out that the posts contained in the thread are inconsistent with the following statement.
Instead, the posts in this thread clearly and repeatedly report multiple people confirming...
- Fact: Softbody on softbody calculates much more quickly and effectivey than softbody on a rigged figure.
- Fact: Softbody attach can be used to move softbody panels as an envelope around a rigged figure
Thus, you are not an idiot, but that statement in quotes was an idiotic statement if expressed by someone following the 23 pages of the thread. It is not a matter of being negative or positive in general.
Nothing personal, ever. Familiar stolen pic attached.
Again, I have no question that the concept, at least, is workable. Recall I did this sim a while back that has a very nice result:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oz7HFWgI50
However, while the result did get a "thumbs up" :) :) ,that is a very limited result. And if you need to do something more comprehensive, like most of us do, I think the solution might be very elusive, or ultimately unattainable. That is nobody's fault, because the proposed concept was never assumed to be perfect or ultimately workable.
The only "fault" here lies with DAZ, for keeping some disabled software in the hands of their disgruntled users, who are spending a lot of their own time trying to fix what DAZ should be attending to.
And BTW, I suppose part of my skepticism lies in the fact that none of us knows what's going on behind the scenes with the Bullet cloth sim, what it requires, or how it works.
So if somebody comes up with a result for a particular configuration, a pronouncement of "it works for me" is not sufficient for a good, solid, overall procedure that will work for others. There are MANY variables with these sims, and trying to cover all the bases when you don't know what the bases are is virtually impossible.
Personally, I don't think we really know what the design requirements are for the under armor, which is a very basic factor in how you configure your sim. Can you use recycled mesh from your main character, or, as I showed, are those ragged meshes bad for the cloth sim? Do we need to come up with our own tubes or spheres as softbody attach collision objects? Is there a limit to how many objects you can use for your under armor, vs the mesh density of the cloth object?
I don't think we really know the answer to those, much less all the other setting and configuration details.
When you have a black box in front of you, and you can't look inside, and can only hit it and listen to it and throw it against the wall, it's really difficult to figure out what's going on in there... :) :) :)
Seriously though... I think the chance of finding a developer at Daz is as vanishingly unlikely as George RR Martin not killing off one of your favorite characters in the next Game of Thrones book :)
(edited to remove my first joke, which is just too likely to get me banned :) )
I do think it's valid to think that any casual Carrara user (especially a new Carrara user) might glance at this thread and it's massive number of pages and various testing and techniques and (incorrectly) come to the conclusion "whoa, waaay too technical and difficult and complex for someone like me to ever do".
In reality though, this could be super easy for cloth solutions, the Only remaining barriers are:
1: Zeroing in on the correct cloth settings for various types of cloth
2: Having a soft underarmor rig that will work well for all poses and movements.
Really that's it though, and truly I am the embodiment of the 'idiot-proofing' test; if I can do softbody cloth then I surmise that really anyone can.
I feel like there are very similar issues with using Carrara dynamic hair, by the way. The perception (incorrect) is that it is very complicated to use and difficult to get realistic sims and good results (when just the opposite is true). I'm not so naïve as to think a few hour long tutorials from me would change the general perception, some will take the time to dive in and hear me out but most will likely say 'eh, why waste the hours on listening to this guy drone on, I already know from my prior experiences that the hair room is too complicated for me and the results I've gotten in the past are bad, so....' and moves on and back to using the same old slow rendering prop/character hair as before :)
But I think it's important that softbody cloth be put into the hands of the regular and newbie Carrara user in such a way that it's easy to use, right now, to get excellent results and fast sims (same as dynamic hair). I think the solution will be similar too, at least to what I hope will be the solution for putting Carrara hair into the hands of the average Carrara users and even attracting new Carrara users from Studio).
In short, a dead-simple solution must be devised so that anybody with even a basic understanding of Carrara can immediately slap on some cloth, run a sim, and render. After someone has slapped on a dynamic cloth (or hair) and gotten great results quick, then he or she may get curious about 'peeking under the hood' and learning the mechanics behind how It's done, and may eventually realize that this is so simple in the behind the scenes mechanics that they may end up refining their own cloth settings, creating their own clothing (or hairstyles) and refining methods, but the first introduction has to be so K.I.S.S. (keep it simple stupid, as the old acronym goes) that anyone wandering into Carrara for the first time to play around can do it with no problems. Thus we can change the perception and have more people using this to better effect, thus there are more examples of how excellent these dyamics are, thus less people will be too intimidated to try... etc...
For dynamic hair, my planned solution is to put together and release free hairstyles to the community, already set up with the correct settings/parameters for simulations and ready to sim and render even by someone who doesn't want to so much as ever peek inside the hair modeling room. Put it on a low poly proxy head (planning on using a slightly modified variant of the one Diomede was kind enough to donate for community use with his Genesis envelope) and with a 5 minute quick tutorial anyone can slap the proxy head onto any figure, whether it be V4/Genesis/Genesis2/Aiko3/whatever and slap in an animation (say with aniblocks) hit the sim button, hit the render button, done, excellent results.
I think the solution for dynamic cloth will be very similar. We need to figure out the best soft underarmor rig (probably will have to have a different rig for males and females but likely beyond that it can be fairly universal), then put it out there for the community's use along with a quick tutorial on how to use (again short like 5 minutes or so) and it's as simple as load the rig into the scene, soft attach it to the bones, throw on a cloth and hit sim and render.
I feel like we are in the endgame on this though, we now have a replicable approach that works, and works fast, and works well. It's all about figuring out what rig approach will work best, then once we have that ironed out, we can throw it out for community use (probably want to open a different thread when that's ready as I do think casual forum readers would be too intimidated by the size of this ongoing thread to get all the way to the end and see the simple solution when we've got it ready to go), and then it's off to the races for everybody.
I admit I love working in Carrara. Doesn't mean Carrara is the right solution for every problem, but it looks like there's a fast, simple solution in Carrara for great dynamic cloth, so that I don't have to import/export to any other program and that can be used right now, on any figure I like, so this is a big win for Carrara imo, at least on this subject, but the problem is nobody knows about it yet.
Hopefully we'll soon be able to throw wide the gates on this :)
And, BTW, with all due respect... :) :)
Your statement is, at best, rude and disrespectful, even with the clever dodge of "I didn't say YOU are an idiot, just what you SAY". :) :) :)
Come on now...my statements are based on many hours of testing by someone who is at least reasonably proficient with the Bullet sim. So I assure you there's no idiocy involved in my statements. Maybe overly skeptical, based on many years of experience with stuff like this, or maybe I unintentionally missed or misunderstood a key aspect in somebody's post. But even though I'm an idiot in other subjects, I don't think I qualify as making idiotic statements in stuff like this.
I'm sorry if you take my comments personally, but there is no reason to assume the worst and lash out. Although that's a fairly common practice here :) :)
Good point...I hadn't thought of that.
I can certainly imagine jonstark walking into DAZ offices with arms full of pizza and Coke, and asking to talk to the Carrara developers. And the response from the befuddled staff, looking at each other with puzzlement..."What's Carrara?" :) :) :)
The result of this thread so far is the confirmation that Carrara can be used to model and drape an ankle length softbody dress around a moving Daz figure. So far, Aiko3, Victoria 4, and Genesis have been confirmed in the thread.
If the time and tedium to set that up in Carrara isn't worth it to someone, then that person should not use Carrara for that function. There are people who edit terrains in other programs, vertex model in other programs, uvmap in other programs - it is no big deal if this method of dynamic cloth isn't worth it under all circumstances. Use the other programs any time it is more convenient.
My theme song - Carrara is a Jack of All Trades, Master of None. Use what you want from it, and turn to other programs whenever convenient.
I stand by my statements about the two propositions that the posts in the thread have confirmed thus far (softbody upon softbody physics calculations and softbody attach boned-based movement), and therefore the inaccuracy of the quote.
Nothing to take personally. No fault to assign.
It may be insensitive of me, but I often use the forum search function if I get stuck with a function in Carrara. Blanket statements about what Carrara can't do waste my time if in fact Carrara can do what I want to do. What the poster really means is that some other program (which I may or may not have) is merely more convenient. Therefore, if I know that Carrara can do something (say model and uvmap a spring with 5 coils), it can waste a lot of reader's time if a thread entitled "Can I make a spring in Carrara" has a post asserting that you can't make a spring in Carrara, but what the poster really means is that it is more convenient to model a spring in Hexagon. I try to correct that. Nothing personal. It is no forum participant's fault that Hex can make and uvmap a spring in fewer steps than Carrara, and no one need take it personally. Similarly, no one need take it personally if upon coming across a post that said Carrara can't make a spring with five coils, that post were corrected, even while recognizing that Hex can do it in fewer steps. But what if someone had just demonstrated making a spring in Carrara, although with more steps than in Hexagon, yet someone immediately posted that the problem of making coils in Carrara would likely never be fixed? It is certainly OK to correct that post. I think, objectively, such a post could also be characterized as idiotic in context, as long as we all remember that we all make mistakes, live in glass houses, and that making one mistake does not an idiot make. I am wrong so many times per day that I have learned to live with it. It is OK. Error is good. I have reported my own failures and continue to encourage others to report failures - as well as successes.
Or, I suppose you could just apologize and move on...y'know, like I did...
Oh, wait...wrong forum :) :) :)
Familiar stolen pic attached
!
Well, in an attempt to prove myself wrong, and reinforce my status as an idiot (oh, wait...I forgot...Andy 3dAge promoted me to "village" idiot), I gave it another try.
And yes, I was wrong. And an idiot. :) :)
I recycled the mesh of a V4, kept the hip, abdomen, chest and both thighs and shins, and converted them to under armor. I attached those to their corresponding V4 bones/body parts by both attaching to the corresponding tree item and selecting all vertices.
I then inserted a directional force, and a very high density cloth object (a vertex plane with "definition" of 8, with 4 levels of smoothing, but not converted).
I did a very simple animation of the base character moving forward and rotating her legs.
And it works wonderfully. No poke thru whatsoever. And even with seven separate pieces of under armor the high density cloth, under the influence of the directional force, drapes fine even when the character is moving.
I'm running the sim now and will post the results and the settings I used. :) :)
Okay, here's the video of the results...
All you see is the cloth and the underarmor. I turned off visibility of the underlying V4 character because the important thing is how the underarmor acts relative to the cloth. But the underarmor is moving as a result of the motion of the underlying V4 rigging.
http://youtu.be/2eaNDD6Bsjw
And here's the Scene Physics settings.
Notice the Accuracy is cranked to maximum, which makes this solve VERY slowly but very accurately. And SCENE collision distance (aka Margin) is set very low. This setting will be automatically applied to all of the underarmor pieces. BTW, it's important this is very low or else the adjacent armor pieces with explode when the come in contact during the motion. However, as you'll see, the cloth itself will have a VERY high margin setting of almost 100%, and it will override this scene setting.
Which is one of the achillies heel's of this method. You need the cloth to have a very large collision distance/margin setting, but that means you can't turn on Self Collision for the cloth. Why? Because self collision also checks the distance between adjacent vertices, and especially with a high density mesh, if you set a collision distance greater than the existing mesh distance, the cloth will explode. Which is bad. Cuz you usually want clothing to collide with itself and not explode or it looks goofy.
You can see in the video how the cloth passes thru itself since self collision needs to be turned off.
And here is the setting applied to each piece of under armor. Note there is no self collision, and high settings for stiffness and bending, and SB Attach has both the corresponding tree item selected as well as all the armor vertices selected for attach.
And finally, here are the Bullet settings for the cloth object. Notice that the Collision distance/Margin override is checked and in effect. Instead of the Scene default of 5% or whatever, the cloth itself has almost a 100% distance
Oh, and I almost forgot...
Here's the Effects settings for the underlying V4 character....
Notice collision is turned off
Also, notice that I did a very simple export/import of the V4 .obj mesh to obtain the under armor, then deleted the pieces I didn't need, like the eyes and hands. No other modification of the mesh pieces. No need to shrink them or tweak them. I think the critical setting though is the scene collision distance has to be very small so the pieces don't interact with each other.
And here's a more nicer animation with the base character visible and the armor invisible. The only issue is some poke thru on the butt, but that's solely due to a piece of armor that needs to be moved a tad.
Well, of course, the other issue is the unfortunate requirement of no self collision on the cloth object, and therefore it passes thru itself and looks goofy.
Oh, and another refinement I made was to cut the sim time in half by bringing the Scene Accuracy down from 1,000 to 500%. You can keep tweaking that to see what you need in your case to get a decent solution.
http://youtu.be/g6LAVr_M2ZI
Oh, and this 3 second sim took almost 10 minutes to calculate...
Painful, I know...but that's pretty much a function of the high Accuracy setting. If you can tweak that down, it might be less painful, but still this is going to take some time I think. Unless someone can figure something out.
And here's a slightly nicer animation where I attempted to make the cloth more form fitting, which is a more rigorous test of the methodology, and amplifies the minor flaws and details. If you use big, wide skirts, for example, you might miss some of the problems and defects in the collision performance. Basically I just cranked the Stiffness and Bending down to the 5 to 8% range.
As you can see, the placement of the armor becomes more critical when the cloth is more form fitting, and any flaws in the method are clear to see (like the right knee and the butt). But it clearly is working fine, no serious poke thru except a little bit due to armor placement.
http://youtu.be/tQzk1xnTN4w
Oh, and I just realized something that is probably obvious to the rest here, but the seam between the thigh and shin meshes is NOT thru the center of the knee, it's well above the knee. Strange. So when the shin rotates, the joint is offset.
Well, that just makes things very tough for this procedure...you need to do some tweaking to the leg armor first... :(
Oh, and as I mentioned before....
This stuff is VERY complicated, and there are interactions which occur that you'd never even consider as being important. For example, I mentioned before that when calculating rigid body collisions, high Bounce values can be very bad because they give more collisions, therefore more opportunity for errors in the calculations, and instability.
Another issue I found in these simulations is that any non-zero values of Air Drag can cause unstable cloth solutions. No idea why, but I tried to tame the "Bullet jitter" that is very evident in Carrara cloth solutions (since they haven't implemented the all-important damping), and when I crank Drag up above 0 the cloth becomes very unstable.
Who knew? :) :)
It could be the fact that this Bullet is still in beta (or whatever) phase, maybe Drag isn't fully implemented, or maybe it doesn't like these particular softbody attach collisions...who knows.
Interesting what you've done there, joe :)
What happens if you move some limbs while all this is going on?
I'm getting some promising results using .dae imports with your rather extreme settings, no underarmor - will post them when I get some certainty.
I couldn't mimic your settings exactly, because some options were changed in 8.5. It also appears that in 8.1, painting soft body attach verts actually pins to a point in space, as well as to the figure to which it is pinned and that takes priority, preventing the cloth translating with the figure.
Does this work differently in 8.5, thereby allowing the cloth to move along with the figure?
One thing that is becoming very evident is that what I'm doing works pretty well on a simple skirt, but when the body is fully enclosed in a dress that encases the shoulders and arms, things start going very wrong!
Something else that is very obvious is that universal scene physics settings are not such a good idea - in Blender, these settings are done on a "per collision item" basis, so you can have different settings for different collision subjects, which give more flexibility.