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Cool... I like the 3 bowling ball pic
No, starting a simulation clears the existing simulation (if you want to preserve a simulation you can set the surface/object Visible to Simulation to Off, but then it won't interact with any new simulation).
Or use Freeze Simulation, which had slipped my memory. That will allow the object to be used in effect as a static object whichj can interact with the items that are draping live.
Is there any possibility you'll do a tutorial for the dforce wind node? I'm stumped and can't find any info on how to use it. DS consistently crashes on me, so I know I must be doing something wrong. I'd like to make things blow, like scarves, curtains, of course clothes. And I'd like to make things like a simple plane blow up against a figure's chest and stick there similar to what the 'for sale' sheets here in the store do.
Thanks.
That was clever! Can you export it as an obj and reimport it, then simulate?
For the bed test, what settings were you using?
I haven't tried wind yet but next up I was going to try hanging my blanket on a clothing line. I'll try out wind on that and write it up when I'm done.
11. Hanging Towel.
In this section we’ll create a towel and drape it from a clothes line with clothes pins. This section introduces the concept of weight maps. In the next section we’ll add wind.
a. I used a laundry dryer and clothes pins from Laundry Day Mega Set. Place two pins on one of the upper lines. If you don’t have this set, you can use a long, narrow primitive cylinder and some cubes instead.
b. Create a flat plane by going to the main menu and selecting Create/New Primitive… Set the primary axis to Z-positive, size to 3 feet, and divisions to 100. Scale X-axis to 55% so it’s a rectangle.
c. Position the towel so the upper edge is inside the two clothes pins. The towel needs to touch the pins inner surface, otherwise it will fall to the ground.
d. If you simulate now, you will see most of the towel falling with just a few polygons attached to the pins and stretching way out. Sometimes they will hold and the towel will be held by tiny strands as shown below. Other times the strands will break and the towel will fall to the ground.
e. To keep the towel in place under the pins, you need to add a dForce weight node and weight map. Select the towel in the Scene pane, then from the main menu select Create/New dForce Modifier Weight Node. Afterwards you will see it parented to the plane in the Scene pane:
f. With the weight node selected in the Scene pane, go to the Tool Settings pane and from the drop down menu at the top select Node Weight Map Brush.
g. Next you need to add the weight map. On the Tool Settings pane, in the middle of the pane, check that dForce Simulation::Influence Weights is showing and click on Add Map.
You will now see a map listed (Influence Weights):
In the viewport, the plane (towel) will turn solid red. A red color means that area of the map has a value of 1 and that area will participate fully in the simulation.
h. When the Weight Map tool is in use, you will see a paint brush with two concentric circles. Move it around and it will add weight (add color) to the map. In this case, you won’t see any added color because it already fully red.
Hold down the Alt key and the brush removes weight (color). How much it removes depends upon the size of the circles and the Sensitivity slider setting. A blue color means those areas will still participate in the simulation but at a much lesser or slower rate. A gray value means it won’t be affected at all. The map below shows the small area that has been modified: gray right around the clothes pin with a little blue surrounding it. The influence is on the vertices, so if you have too few polygons, you have to paint over a larger area.
In the image below, you will see two small areas of blue at the top of the plane. Those are areas where red was removed (described in the next step) so they are less involved in the simulation.
i. Now when you simulate, the area of the towel under the clothes pins will be held in place and the rest will drape under the influence of gravity.
Edit: By the way, after adding the influence map you no longer need the clothes pin, rope or other object to hold the towel. That small area of blue/gray influence weight will hold the towel in place.
A finished render of the towel:
This thread is just getting better and better! Great work, RGcincy
Thanks MelanieL! I think I need a new title for this as I've gone beyond my original intention. I'll be updating the PDF soon - it's now up to 44 pages.
12. Wind!
You can add a wind node to give a slight nudge or a heavy blast to your items. To start, I’ll describe the basics of the wind node.
a. To add the node, go to the main menu and select Create/New dForce Wind Node…
b. The wind node is not parented to anything and loads at world center on the ground. When selected, it can be hard to see against a white background, so I set the background to a dark gray.
c. You’ll see that the node looks just like a fan blowing down a tube. It has a long cylinder surrounded by three perpendicular circle pairs:
d. This shows the wind parameters.
e.The inner circles represent Diameter. This image shows a larger diameter than the default view.
f. The outer circles represent Diameter Falloff. What this means is the wind is at constant and full strength across the area of the inner circle. It then falls to zero as it reaches the outer circle. In this image you can see a much large distance between the inner and outer circles than in the default view.
g. The first circle pair near the fan is where the wind starts. It remains at full strength until you reach the middle circle pair. It then falloffs to zero at the circle pair opposite the fan. This image shows a longer Falloff Start which means a longer full strength wind region:
h. This shows a shorter Falloff length which means the winds dies off more rapidly:
i. To use the fan, position it to blow on the towel. A watch out is if you blow the towel towards these clothes lines, the mesh blows up or Daz Studio crashes because of interaction between the towel and the prop. To avoid, I set it to blow the towel away from the dryer rack.
In the top view below, note that I have the towel (located at the bottom of the image) in the falloff zone. The fan blows hard even though set to the default 5 mph and the towel will whip around and crash Daz Studio if it’s in the full-strength region.
j. This image shows a front view so you can see how the wind node is positioned. Note that I only have the lower portion of the towel being impacted by wind.
k. A comparison of the simulated towel without wind (left) and with wind (right):
l. For this next case, I increased the wind Diameter and moved the node closer to the towel. I also decreased Strength to 0.2 mph (as 5 is just too intense).
Here you can see the wind caused the towel to pull in on itself more than the previous settings:
When you create a new wind node, you can select "Show Options" just like when creating a new light source, which means you can pre-position a camera to point the way you wnat the wind node to blow, and use those transforms to direct the new node, BTW, this is a fascinating thread
Wow! Thanks to all. I am so tied up right now. Will bookmark this.
Sorry, Im a newbie and I got lost in so much info. This was made with dforce or just with push modifier? thanks.
I presume MrReclusive used dForce on his bed test based on what he said. Everything I've posted is dForce. In a couple of spots, I mention adding a smoothing or push modifier after the dForce simulation
This is incredible! Thank you so much for taking the time to do the Wind node tutorial, it really made it click for me. I'd like to print it out, but at 44 pages I'm going to need a new ink cartridge.
Yes, it will use a lot of ink with all those images.
By the way, I haven't updated the pdf yet so hang on a bit - I decided to go back through it and give it an index and some other enhancements for easier navigation..
This alone makes dForce worth it....
:)
JD
Moved to combine with other parts of the same section. You can find it here.
Has anyone tried using the wind dForce on https://www.daz3d.com/autumn-leaves ?
What a nice tutorial! Thank you for all the time and effort you put into this.
RGcincy - thank you so much for your awesome tutorials!!
Yes, thanks for that, draping it over the neck with the character laying face down, then explorting that simulation as an obj, then import it, stand that character up, and simulate again worked perfectly, never thought of that.
Ill have to reload the bed scene here soon and see what my settings where, but what I found most usefull after allot of experimenting (for me anyways) is to set the "dynamics strength" to between 75 and 85 on the cube. this allows the cube to retain most of its shape, but still allow gravity simulation of the ball to effect and interact with the cube. again, my goal with was to "simulate" the ball drop, not animate it in the time line.
this gave it a nice bounce that looks realy good if you let it run through the timeline.
i am close to making the same principle work on a Gen3 character for things like being hit in the stomach by other characters or objects, just cant keep it from destroying the face.. to manny wholes in the face, it melts, I have the rest of the body stable.
that was all dforce.
This is excellent. They should pin the thread.
If you're working with a low-poly prop, you could Convert to SubD, set to High Resolution and up the SubD in parameters, hide everything else in the scene, export as a Wavefront OBJ and then import it back in. The imported object will have the higher poly-count, without needing to use SubD. (I found this out accidentally, when I forgot to set a button, of all things, to Base resolution before exporting.)
ETA: Thank you for this thread, @RGcincy. I've been struggling to understand exactly what the properties do for materials. (I've got a dress that will drape with the pose, but it ends up stretched very tight, where in reality, it would slide up her legs and wrinkle in places. After more than a week's worth of tweaking, I've yet to get it to do that.)
thanks for the positive comments! I'll have more test results early in the week
Good to hear. I'll have to try that myself to get draping around a more complex form.
Good idea - thanks for sharing
I still don't understand how most of the surface properties work. A few have clear effects but others are either very subtle or don't work as I would expect from their names. Some seem to have more effect if the simulation is short but disappear if everything settles down. We're all learning together!
Great tutorials!
So many new techinques, but... There is a way to loop a simulation animation from frame 0?
Only way I found is add a sec at the beginning and then simulate the loop. It works pretty well, but DAZ Studio got the nasty habit to totally wipe keyframes from timeline... Often I have to redo a whole animation because I saved the scene and forgot to slide the timeline to the end!
EDIT: New PDF update is available, get it from the link at the top of this post.
Attached is an updated PDF. I went through and reformatted the entire document to have it read and look more consistent. I also added a hyperlink index on page 1 of the PDF so you can more quickly jump to the section you want to read or review. The topics to date are:
1. Creating and Draping a Blanket Over a Figure
2. dForce Global Environment and Duration Settings (Gravity, Air Resistance, Stabilization Time)
3. Cast Off Blanket
4. Adding a Smoothing Modifier
5. Using dForce Surface Smoothing Settings (Velocity Smoothing and Velocity Smoothing Iterations)
6. Draping Clothes on Furniture
7. Friction
8. Creating a Clothes Pile
9. Various Methods to Correct Poke Through (including Push Modifiers)
10. Getting a Figure’s Head to Sink into a Pillow
11. Hanging Towel (introduces use of dForce influence weight map)
12. Wind Node
13. dForce Surface Parameter Tests
All except the last topic is posted to this thread. I'll get the rest of #13 added in the next day or two (done). And more topics are on the way!
Thank You so much for doing this in a PDF