How to adjust dforce simulation manually?
peninshullahorn
Posts: 26
Hi, I'm new to dforce, and have qustion for it. When you're pretty satisfied with the simulation, but still want a slight adjustment,
is there any way to do that adjustment manually? ( like pinching the cloth and slightly raising it )
it would be nice if there's an tutorial movie for it.
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dForce does not have that feature, but you could use Mesh Grabber to grab the cloth and move it a little after simulation.
or if you know Blender, send the simulated item to Blender, tweak it there, then import it as a delta morph with Morph Loader Pro.
In many cases you could use a weight-mapped dForm, or for some things a Push Modifier.
I'd second this method.
The original post highlights one of the major shortcomings of dForce. Some other cloth simulation alternatives are able to adjust the drape while it is simulating - that's why a lot of people buy Marvelous Designer but either exporting to Blender or simulating in MD should not be necessary.
There is also https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-magnet
It's possible, and normally useful, to create objects that are visible only in the simulation; in the objects parameters pane look at the "Display" settings and turn display "off" in Render but leave it "on" in simulation. This then allows you to move the object to move the simulated surface away from other things. It's also possible to build complete planes to do this or you can duplicate a complete node (e.g. a chair) to create a ghost and have it slightly displaced from the actual chair so that that penetration of the ghost does not effect a penetration the real object.
Remember to simulate on the time line; using "current frame" and/or "simulate from memorised pose" is a recipe for explosion. Turning off "mesh smoothing" is extremely important. It may be necessary to turn it back on after the simulation to eliminate poke-through and it may be necessary to turn it on during the simulation to prevent penetration of a character, which can result if the surface (garment) is rigged (and most, maybe all, Daz products are.)
When I want to move a garment away from a character I just use the character's hand; think about how you would have a model do it IRL. I have used dForce magnet to do this in the past but it isn't doing the same thing. I don't know what it does but it looks like it rigs a specific vertex to the "magnet". It did work on one garment but no where near as well as the simple hand approach.
I do this too. Sometimes, I think like you (?), creating items that would not be in the scene at all - planes or cubes - to help better simulate actions like a character "quickly crouching" and what would happen to a lightweight, loose garment (when the resulting timeline would be too quick to produce results). Sometimes tweaking "gravity" is also useful.
With a bit of practice, you can get decent results - However, as mentioned previously, Meshgrabber is great for fine-tuning of the results.
I've not tried "magnet", but do have it in wishlist and at some (price) point will probably give it a go.
Dear senior members,
Thank you all so much for the various pieces of advice!
It's surprising how dForce, despite being such a powerful tool, can be quite tricky when it comes to making fine adjustments. I found it really interesting that many of you have faced similar challenges.
Of course, exporting the mesh to an external tool (I'm a ZBrush user, so I'm quite comfortable with that) and creating a morph to tweak the shape is definitely an option. However, the issue I was asking about is more on the minor side, so that approach might be a bit overkill for what I need.
What I was looking to do was more along the lines of "the simulation itself isn’t broken, but I just want to tweak the look a bit to match my personal preference." For example, let's say I've simulated the movement of a woman's skirt with dForce. The result is fine, but I feel like "it would look nicer if just a bit more of the knee was showing, so I want to nudge the skirt slightly to the right." It’s that kind of small adjustment I'm talking about.
Among all the suggestions I received, "Mesh Grabber" seems to be the closest to what I need. However, I’m curious if it can be used like the move brush in ZBrush, where you can "move the mesh as a whole." In ZBrush, if you increase the brush size, you can lift or shift the mesh, and if Mesh Grabber can do something similar, that would be fantastic. From what I’ve seen in the promo videos, it looks more like it’s used to pull or stretch the mesh (like stretching a rubber band), so I’m wondering if it can be used for finer adjustments like "moving the hem of the skirt slightly to reveal a bit more knee."
Yep, I know what you mean and I use Mesh Grabber as well. So, in general, you can "move the mesh of a skirt slightly to reveal body parts" with Mesh Grabber but sometimes it depends on the garments you use.... Mesh Grabber has no capability of Mask, Symmetry, Smooth etc. so in some cases, you have to cumbersomely manipulate the mesh before getting the good result.
So that was why, as a Blender and ZB user, I suggested sending your items out to more stronger software for tweaking, like using GoZ is very neat and quick... because in some cases, even a tiny distortion or mesh manipulation may be tedious for you to fix them with tools in DS...
Moving something like a hem-line (up), or part of a hem-line, is pretty easy to do with Meshgrabber - providing you carefully select the faces/vertex that need to be shifted and you don't want to shift them too much.Getting a good-look depends on the "material pattern", pose and how much movement you want to make ... If the material has a complex pattern you might find the result doesn't look too good, but otherwise little tweaks are usually okay, and especially if the result doesn't need to be "close-up" will look good in the render.
If export to other software, with better "scuplting", is an option then that would definately work better for "drastic changes"