Dynamic Clothing Control questions

bwise1701

Does anyone know if it's possible to pre-pose a dynamic garment before draping? I've tried do a zbrush morph and that translated the garment wierdly when applied, I also tried D-formers but the fields don't seem to see the mesh.

The garments rigs are from M4 era and don't pose well with the gen3 character once they are fit to it, so I have to do a l ot of manual garment posing to get it to line up roughly with the character pose and it's just hard to control.

Anyone have a workflow or suggestion? Thanks

Richard Haseltine

No, it isn't possible to rework the rigging and certainly not to work dierctly on the emsh before draping - this is a limitation of the Optitex system, which is more procedural than modelled.

SpottedKitty

bwise1701 said:

The garments rigs are from M4 era and don't pose well with the gen3 character once they are fit to it, so I have to do a l ot of manual garment posing to get it to line up roughly with the character pose and it's just hard to control.

I'm afraid that is the "easy" way to pre-pose dynamic clothes. I use it a lot when I add V4/M4 clothes to other figures, or if the figure's using a pose that I don't need to run an animated drape for. A bit fiddly sometimes, but the results can be just as good as if you were using the proper figure.

mindsong

It might be obvious, but worth mention to those who don't know that one typical workflow with the dynamic clothes is to use the animation mode first to get the clothing item from a t-pose to the desired pose (I do it over around 30+ frames), then fine tune the drape at the target pose. The not-so-obvious implication is that you can easily stop/cancel any drape sequence, change settings at that point, then drape some more, repeating this cycle as needed - to get 'there' at the end.

Sample:

 - drop in your character - tpose, keep the figure selected

 - open the Daz Studio animation 'timeline' (not animate2), set scrubber to frame 30

 - set the figure's desired pose at that frame (30), save/set a keyframe

 - set scrubber to frame 40, set key frame (no changes in pose, this is to let clothes settle for 10 frames from 30)

 - scrub back to frame zero

 - add/merge clothing item and manually fit it as closely as you can (don't scale dynamic clothes, doesn't work, scale the figure instead if needed... many forum threads on this)

 - being sure the clothing item is selected...

 - open dynamic clothes tab, set to animate-mode, select clothes being draped, adjust clothing and simulation settings to taste (many options) press 'drape' button. wait for 40 frames...

 - (optionally, save the scene file here in case you want to 'play' with multiple varations of what follows)

 - at frame 40, you can now set drape mode to static, add some 'internal pressure', thicken the material, etc.

 - drape some more (static mode) on frame 40, doing as many things as you like, 'cancelling' the drape anytime you like the way it looks, or cancel and clear and start again (or revert to the last saved scene too, and continue from there)

 - save the scene and render when it's right!

 - note that you can 'freeze' the drape animation frames via the upper right tab menu, which makes the cothes static (non-dynamic) at that point. You'll have to reload another clothing item to drape again, or revert to your saved versions, if you saved before freezing. This can be handy if you want to save the cloting and move it around or place it on another character, or... any non-dynamic/draping use.

I hope this is helpful, as it's kind of like sculpting once you get a feel for how the drap/stop/tweak/drape-more/stop/tweak cycle works. Note that while up-above I say to drape 40 frames and wait, you can stop/tweak anytime in any of the drape sequences as you see things you like (or don't like) - but to let an animated drape run and settle is useful as a starting point...

cheers,

--ms