How good is Carrara Soft Body with cloth draping?

will2power

First let me say this --I'm not interested in animating anything. I want to know how Carrara is with cloth for draping when it comes to a still render. I would like to be able to use more realistic clothing when it comes to building a scene. I've heard a lot of for and against when it comes to soft body physics for animating, but I'm more interested in things like the drape of clothing when a figure is standing or sitting or even laying down on a couch. Can someone give me a little insight on this?

stu sutcliffe

I have had limited experience with this technique. I have made a simple clothing model and draped it over my figure.It actually worked quite well from what I remember. I applied a force to blow a few wrinkles into it ,then just saved the best frame for my still render . I did do it in the 8.5 beta... I think in 8.1, it just goes haywire. I'm looking towards doing similar things in Blender in the future ,the dynamic stuff appears to be a lot more robust. So basically you will probably need 8.5 to have a chance.
Go to my blog ( below) and find "Ghost Girl" this is the one I draped.

Headwax

simple meshes are good - complex meshes? not so good - definition of complex - a typical clothing piece available at daz store

will2power

I'm talking more like a shirt overtop a figure with maybe a tshirt on underneath. Or a business suit, or maybe slacks or a dress. I'm not really doing complex clothing with a lot of buckles or ruffles or anything. Most of what I want to render are just people in everyday wear. I'm thinking that if it can't do that, I might content myself with Marvelous Designer imported as an obj or something like that.

wetcircuit

I started playing around with it this week.

I had some unexplainable explosions,..., but I also got attractive results, imho.

In my opinion, as always with Carrara, is try to start with as few polygons as possible while you are learning the controls. It seems counterintuitive but sometimes I got "better" results with very low settings. Also some settings work together in tandem, so you will need to experiment. It's Bullet Physics which is used in game engines so don't overload it and it seems to do well. I also got better results using quads.

I feel ambivalent towards the Scene Forces. Quite a lot of work to get them to "sculpt" and fold the fabric (multiple oscillating tweeners). I also experimented with cranking up the air dampening and dragging the fabric across the scene, which looked very nice.