Poke Away 3 For Genesis 3
Sigurd
Posts: 1,085
I would love to see a Poke Away 3 for Genesis 3 Male and Female. I do already have Fit Control, which is a great product, but I also enjoy using Poke Away for when you have just a small spot you need to fix and you do not wish to deform anything else while doing it.
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+1 I rarely have a need for this, but there are times it would be useful to tweak problems spots.
Poke Away works by using magnets/deformers to shrink parts of the figure back below the clothing, if I am not mistaken. Whilst this is obviously one solution to the problem, it does not give very good results if the clothing is translucent. I'm also not sure how precise the changes are. An alternative method is to simply make the body part, which is poking through the clothing, invisible. However this does not always work if the clothing only covers part of the body part.
A much better solution would be to make a morph in Hexagon or Blender or Zbrush and then apply that in DS. Repeat that untill all the poke throughs are gone. This works but is time consuming.
An even better solution would be to have a plugin for DS which provides mesh brushes so that in real time in DS you can brush away the poke through by moving, smoothing, expanding (as appropriate) the clothing mesh. It would take seconds and provide immediately visible results. Unfortunately, neither DAZ3d nor a PA has made such a plugin. A pity really!
This is how PA's make fits for specific body shapes of items they sell, though they actually export specific shapes to their modeling tools, then create a slightly modified version of the original mesh that fits without poking through and import that as a "morph" for the item mesh.
This is probably because the fine tuning of the mesh can already be done in DAZ Studio with existing tools, since poke-through is often a misalignment of the item's weight mapping compared to the non-standard (or unsupported) morph of the base figures.
Hi Daywalker03, there are indeed tools in DS which can be used to fine tune the fit of a clothing mesh to a figure mesh, each has its strengths and weaknesses:
1) Autofit: This is automatic and works well if there is not much difference between the morphed figure and the original figure that the clothing was made for. If the difference is large then autofit can cause considerable distortion to the mesh.
2) Apply a Smoothing Modifier: This is usually very good but cannot always cope with the distortions caused by Autofit. It does have two parameters which can be changed which generally improve things a bit, namely Number of Smoothing iterations and Number of Collision Iterations. Increasing these can help but also require resourses and can cause lag, so best only use them prior to render... if they achieve the desired results.
3) deformers: Useful for performing localised mesh changes. The problem here is that the region of influence is always a sphere witha fixed rate of falloff. This means that multiple adjustments (eg poke-throughs) requre multiple deformers. This is doable but time consuming and adds to the complexity of the scene which can affect the performance of DS. The deformer is limited to scale, move and twist. For most purposes this is ok, but if the mesh has been badly distorted due to "extreme" pose positions or Autofit (bless it's cotton socks) then a deformer may not help much or even make maters worse.
4) Weight maps; theoretically you could make a weightmap to correct poke-through. Good luck.
What is missing from this tool box is a set of brushes that could be used to directly paint away mesh distortion in real time. In addition to the usual "push and pull" brushes there are also a couple of brushes which could quickly solve problems that none of the above tools seem to be able to; namely a proper "smooth" brush to get rid of mesh distortion, a "shrink to target" brush to make clothing tight fitting in the places you want it to be tight fitting, a "loosen" brush which would do the opposite of shrink, that would be great for poke-through, and maybe a "Wrinkle/Crease" brush which would allow you to put wrinkles, creases or folds into clothing. Brushes would be quick and easy to apply and get instant results with no extra overhead for DS to cope with, as the brushes would create a new morph.
Actually, you would be modifying the existing weight map of the item to correct the poke through.
*sigh* All these will do is affect the item for the particular pose you have the character in, much like the "Zone Smoother" product that one of the PA's made does for the figure being morphed. Without editing the weight map, you will have to redo this for every pose change you make with a particular body morph and outfit. It's actually going to be less work to modify the weight map in the long run.
"All these will do..." ?? That would be one huge step forward on what is available at the moment. Sure, we would all like a tool which fixed all poke through, mesh distortions etc with one wave of the magic wand. However we are not there yet. If a distortion is small then certainly editing the weight map (if one exists) will be of more general use and work in a range (though not necessarily all) poses. Editing weight maps is a lot of trial and error. Mesh brushes would give immediate results quickly for the pose you are working on now. (Practical animation is another story and apparently a long way off for DS).
Zone Smoother is similar to deformers. (note the term Zone)
There is no "if one exists"; if a clothing item is rigged, it has a weight map. Ask Arki, or SickleYield, or any of the PA's here that work on clothing items for DAZ figures. Heck, Arki has an entire video on doing custom rigging with templates that I own and am using for some things I'm working on now, so that's how I know that the weight map brush will deal with the poke through problem. It's also in one of the tutorials on the wiki here for creating clothing for the Genesis figure.
Technically, it's a script that does the same thing as a deformer or groups of them, from what I understand.
That is how the original Poke Away for Genesis worked, but with Poke Away for Genesis 2 you have the option to modify the clothing or underlying figure mesh. Move the slider in a positive direction, and the figures body part is modified, move the slider in a negative direction (left) and the "clothing" is modified, not the figure geometry.
I find Poke Away extremely useful with Genesis 2, but a little less useful with Genesis 1 due to the noted deformation issues. I would buy it if it were available for Genesis 3.
Dustrider, thanks for the info on the mechanics of how Poke Away for gen2 works. However, this still sounds like the same concept, namely a spherical deformer acting on a mesh, only now you can choose to appy it to the clothing or the figure easily (which of course saves some time compared to placing the deformers manually).
Hi Daywalker, please note that I never said that modifying the weightmap can not solve poke through, it certainly can. I just voiced an opinion that using mesh altering brushes such as are present in Poser, Blender, Zbrush and many other programs, to directly modify the clothing (or figure) mesh would be easier, more intuitive and be able to deal with a greater range of problems. If you feel that modifying weightmaps is an easier or better solution by all means say so. Though I wonder how you would suggest dealing with mesh distortion caused by autofit modifying clothing to fit to a character that has been significantly morphed away from the base using only weightmaps?
The weight map tool has the ability to manipulate the vertices, paint on the existing weight map, or smooth the weight map shape. It's often used to adjust weight maps when creating shape morphs for clothing items that need to fit differently sized characters like going from Teen Josie 7 to Karen 7, or Teen Josie 7 to Eva 7, for example. It's also used to fix situations with skin tight outfits tearing in the inner thigh region when posed in certain ways.
Hi Daywalker03, I'm sure you'll correct me if I'm wrong
but surely smoothing the weight map is not the same and does not have the same effect as smoothing the mesh. If verticies in the mesh have become distorted due ,for example, to autofit trying to fit clothing to a morphed figure, smoothing the weight map can only level the mesh to some extent and not remove polygon shape distortion which results in eventual distortion of the textures applied to the mesh.
As an example, I apply GaoDan's dress 18 for G3f to a G3f figure with a Youth morph. This results in autofit causing considerable distortion to the mesh and therefore to the texture, as shown in the attached image. Can changing the weight map smooth out this kind of distortion? I do know that a mesh smoothing brush can go a long way towards correcting the problem.
Hello again; yes, the weight map smoothing does something similar to what directly editing the mesh with a smoothing brush does.It takes longer to do because it's also modifying the way the underlying rigging is affected by the weight map.
Hi daywalker, could you show an example of a distorted mesh (such as in my examples) being smoothed out by a weight map. I'd be interested to see what the weightmap looks like, so as to see how it is smoothing the polygons back towards their original shape.
If you have poke through on the breasts dial up a tiny bit (like 0.01) on the breast implant or breast size morphs in G3, that will transfer the morph to your clothing. Then select the clothing, go to currently used (make sure show hidden is on) and dial up that morph as much as you need. Can be used to help layering, general poke through, whatever. If your clothing doesn't have an expand all morph you can get one by using the body size shape in full body/real world. All sorts of adjustment possibilities that way, no modeling program, d-formers, or add on purchases needed.
I like your suggestion Fisty, however it does assume that the poke through is due to a figure distortion which is comparable in shape to a pre-existing morph in the clothing. Probably this is true quite often. I think this is a good work around, along with hiding the body part below the clothing. Both ideas can work but each has disadvantages. In the case of applying an existing morph in the clothing, this might end up changing the shape of the clothing a bit too much. I guess the best thing is to try it and see if it works. However, would it not be wonderful if DAZ brought simple tools like brushes into DS, which could be used to solve these annoying problems easily and quickly. Other 3d programs have these tools, some have had them for years. I'd just like to see DS brought up to date in this area.
Yeah, morph brush would be really nice.. or failing that, even just having the d-former placement not be totally weird when you're trying to use it on an already posed thing. Using a d-former to adjust a skirt over a thigh on a sitting character... the field is like on her face and rotated 90 degrees, kinda messes with your head.