Return to soft cloth

ManStan

I'm back to playing around with soft cloth. It still mystifies me why I can't use it for dynamic cloth considering the way it reacts to the model when the cloth is moving and not the figure.

For a scene I needed a covered body on a gurney. It was easy enough to drape the cloth then save out as a .obj.

http://youtu.be/KzgMTX69EsM

I'd put the video in the thread if I had the foggiest clue how to do it.

Kodiak3d

Looks really good, but the cloth seems a little heavy.

ManStan

It's tricky, but do able.
Here is Genesis, as a cute little character I spun up; now how to save it as a pose. She's in a V4 star trek dress by porthos{?} On the left you can see my gripe about auto fit, on the right is the cure, soft cloth and about 3 minutes of calculations. The dress was easy because it is simple, but you can always take the time to pin parts like collars and buttons.

Parameters. Scene physics collision distance 5%

the dress.
modifiers:Softness and bending still confuse me a bit. air drag 50% air lift 5% self collision smoothing of 1 and 25% quality.

effects physics properties. density .05 bounce 15% friction 75%

Kodiak3d

Som how exactly did yo udo that? Import the OBJ and convert to cloth?

WendyLuvsCatz

will post when I have something to show but FBX imports and softcloth looking a bit more promising
using iClone characters in my case but it appears to colide with the moving rigged figures slightly, not much better
still pretty crap though, arms go through.

stu sutcliffe

? .....What do you mean by "softcloth"? Do you mean "softbody"? Has the .172 beta changed something...... Have I missed something here?

WendyLuvsCatz

yes, softbody
still hardly dynamic cloth but it seems to colide better with objects than the production build
as Stan says though, it is odd how vertex movement and boned figue animation does not want to collide, it seems to need to do the colliding..
I gave up on my FBX import attempts, initally looked promising with collision from above but movements of limbs inside penetrates the "cloth" so a poncho may be possible but not clothes.

ManStan

No importing, no converting except for auto fit. It's really just soft body physics applied to conforming clothes. The simpler the clothes the better it works. Clothes with a lot of parts takes pinning; soft body attached, to keep the clothing from falling apart or parts falling off; like buttons.
Yes, I'm working with the last build of the beta and yes the physics work much nicer with cloth.
In scene physics be sure to set collision distance to 5%; nope don't know why it's a %.

Logically there has to be some way to get this to work for dynamic clothing, but I haven't found it yet.

Dartanbeck

So... do you think that this would work for animations as well... or just stills?
I'm certainly glad that they're making progress on it nonetheless!

ManStan

Just stills.

Kodiak3d

Something tells me that if it will work for stills, it's not far from being good for animation. What a breakthrough that would be.

Rareth

softbody in 8.1 works well enough, had some issues trying to get clothes to drape on poser figures without flying out of the scene.. but in and of itself, the softbody physics work pretty well.. I just need more patience with it.. but draping a cloth plane on a box.. looks great

ManStan

That issue is solved in the 8.5 beta. ;)

ManStan

This one i have set to extremes, so it is as soft as I can get it before it goes stretchy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdB9oaP1-1w&feature=youtu.be

cobusp

Hi ManStan

Nice samples! Please excuse my ignorance, but can you point me to a decent tutorial on how to use soft cloths in Carrara? Since I got version 8 Pro long ago, to date Daz has not produced a manual.

Can one make Poser dynamic cloting acytually work in C with soft cloth physics?

ManStan

Doesn't work in C8.1. Still wont work for dynamics in C8.5; which is a mystery. I did some testing and dynamic cloth works fine for everything but figures. Once I have this rendered out and uploaded I have a nice animation of a ball bouncing under a cloth, worked great.

ManStan

Well here it is, you can see the cloth reacts as you would expect. So I don't understand why it wont work with figures. I'm going to try some simple proxy objects to see how that works, but I believe I have tried that before.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJIXby_U2Fw&feature=youtu.be

Dartanbeck

Wow Man Stan, those example videos look great!

stu sutcliffe

ManStan, I think that ball and sheet worked because they were both part of the simulation.I think I tried something similar with a key framed object and it doesnt work. So as a figure would be key framed,its not gonna work.I also it is something to do with bones also.But as I know less than zero about programming,I am just guessing!
The 8.5 beta is quite good for the simple draping stuff anyway. I have been using 3dCoat to make a simple smock for Frankensteins Bride.It worked fine ,I didnt have to resort to pulling my hair out once.The stiffness/bending sliders do not seem to be that easy to work though.I find I have to take bending down to zero,and stiffness between ,about 2 and 12 for the best results.

Diomede

Hmmm, the recent experiments with softbody on softbody makes me wonder if the settings used by Manstan for the scene physics or the other observations about keyframed and rigged figures could be of use for undersuit tests.

Jonstark

diomede64 said:

Hmmm, the recent experiments with softbody on softbody makes me wonder if the settings used by Manstan for the scene physics or the other observations about keyframed and rigged figures could be of use for undersuit tests.

I think so! Another great thread from the past that I never knew existed. Stan did a ton of softbody experimenting, I never realized before. Stan if you're out there lurking, thanks! And now that we have a working animated cloth sim prototype, refining settings is what's needed most. That and figuring out the best possible rig for the undersuit. Thanks for finding this thread Diomede, it's another hidden gem, with yet more pieces to the puzzle.

Rashad Carter

I'm just a little confused so hopefully someone can fill in some blanks for me. I've read a million times that Carrara lacks dynamic cloth. However, the soft body physics experiments I see in this thread are fantastic. Is this the equivalent of dynamic cloth, or does dynamic cloth offer something that soft body does not?

Considering ManStan's experiments I then have to ask if anyone has ever tried this sort of thing before with Soft body physics? Were the soft body physics implemented initially as a cloth solution?

So many questions. Any feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Diomede

Rashad,

Just to catch you up. For the purposes of this conversation, I am going to distinguish between rigid body physics to softbody physics, as distinct from conforming boned skeleton cloth to dynamic cloth - but they are related. It might be useful for this conversation to think of dynamic cloth such as Marvelous Designer or Poser's cloth room as a subset of physics for objects that are soft, thus the term softbody physics.

So Carrara's latest releases have had a softbody physics modifier that easily makes things like blankets and tablecloths. It also has a softbody attach function that can be used to attach the cloth to another scene object, such as a flag to a flagpole. However, for meshes that are enclosed, like the typical shirt or skirt, there have been a lot of problems to make the item drape nicely on a boned figure that has keyframed movement. Some of the problems have been a roughing up of the shirt/skirt mesh during simulation, or in some cases outright explosions. Other problems involved such a long calculation time to make the method impractical compared to other options (like Poser or Marvelous Designer).

Stringtheory proposed a concept in which the bulk of the physics interaction would be between one softbody object (the shirt or skirt) and another softbody object (an undersuit softbody attached to the boned base figure). The base figure (V4 or whatever) would have its collisions turned off. Simulations using this approach have been very successful in greatly reducing calculation time, and further progress has been made on addressing explosions when a mesh is fully enclosed and colliding with limbs moving in different directions.
Here is a post by Stringtheory with some illustrative videos.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/49954/P195/#753927
That same thread has the bulk of the tests.
This post tries to provide links to enough posts to illustrate the concept.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/49954/P210/#758192

And here is some other basic information

General concept of cloth and undersuit process
- the softbody undersuit and the softbody cloth do NOT need to be in the same vertex object.
- the softbody undersuit and the softbody cloth SHOULD NOT be in the same vertex object because then you can preserve self collision for the cloth but turn off self collision for the undersuit
- the different softbody panels corresponding to figure bones CAN be in the same vertex object with each other (different from clothing), then turn off “self collision”
- the different softbody panels corresponding to figure bones SHOULD be in the same vertex object (different from clothing), because you can simultaneously turn off self collision but preserve collision with the cloth.
- As long as you can turn off self collision, it is OK for the softbody attach panels to intersect when joints move if they are in a single vertex object.
- There are still some imperfections (eg. minor poke through) in some cases because there is still no weightmapped blending of the panels during joint rotation. In the future this might be addressed with innovation in undersuit design at the joints.

General approach to underarmor construction
- you can create your own panels if you want - best to have in single vertex object (EDIT: try to match shape of bodypart)
- if you are not a modeler, for a given figure, you can export and reimport (twice!) the figure mesh to get an obj with separate grouped bodyparts. You still need to name the vertices because the import process will name polygons, not vertices
- you may want to increase scale on particular axes to give a bigger margin of error around bodyparts (X and Y for shin, for example)
- if you use the export/import process, you probably CANNOT share the mesh. You probably CAN share the undersuit mesh if you create your own.

General approach to clothing construction (settings for different materials, different styles, etc.)
- not my department, said Verner Von Braun
- see Marcus, Joe, Stringtheory, and many others
- I would note that you can still softbody attach a portion of the cloth to the rigged figure (such as a belt)