General Questions On Dforce & Rigging

Faeryl Womyn

I have a pair of pants, or 2 actually, one for G2F and one for G8F. I am considering making G3 and G9 versions as well, not sure about G1, Gen4 & 3, tho probably will.

When it comes to these pants, the earlier model versions I assume I can only do rigging, tho for the later versions they can be rigged or dforce or both...correct?
I'm trying to decide on my best options for the variouis models to wear them, with an option for the earlier one's to use in Poser, hence why I said rigging only, tho could probably do 2 versions of those for Daz and Poser, with the help of a couple people who use Poser.

I know it seems like I'm doing a lot of work for myself, however, these pants are a learning tool for me to do rigging (thanks to Sickleyields & Mada's tutorials) as well as learning how to make them dforce.

Once finished they will be made available to everyone.
Does anyone have any suggestions or know what options I have in my choices for each generation?

Matt_Castle

Any generation can use dForce; it's a feature of the clothing, not the base figures. There's minor limitations in whether the figure is set up with a memorised pose (to avoid needing to do a timeline simulation to sim it into place) and that you can't rely purely on dForce if Poser is also involved, because Poser doesn't use dForce (I believe it has a different dynamic clothing system, but I know little about it), but you could use dForce to drape clothes over Vicky 1 if you were minded to make such a thing.

Faeryl Womyn

Oh that's great and I know Poser has a different dynamic system, once had P6 and now have P9 or 11, can't remember at the moment lol.

I will be asking my friends, after it's made, if they can save it in Poser for me, since I still have to learn that program.

You have answered the main question, I can use dforce clothes on any model version. Still plan to rig since not everyone updated their Daz and can't use Dforce.

One things I'm not sure of is if you have both rig and dforce on clothes or does it have to be separate and is it better to be separate?

Matt_Castle

Faeryl Womyn said:

One things I'm not sure of is if you have both rig and dforce on clothes or does it have to be separate and is it better to be separate?

An item can be both conforming and have dForce parameters, and indeed it's beneficial to have reasonable conforming posing on a dForce item:

1) Drafts of the scene can be set up without requiring it to be resimulated each time.
2) You can sometimes get away with simulating from the posed position rather than having to simulate from the memorised position.
3) It often allows minor reposing of a simulated scene without having to completely resimulate.
4) It sometimes means dForce is unnecessary, and makes it usable to those who can't or don't want to use dForce.

However, it's worth noting that if an object is fully dynamic (i.e. it has no dForce weightmap or zones set to partial dynamic strength), a dForce object completely ignores its rigging during its simulation. And that is sometimes exploitable - it can be used to fade in large bust shapes to get more natural fits, you can shrink the figure inside the clothing if you need to make it looser for part of the simulation (I've had to do things like shrink the torso to make the hem of a shirt loose enough for a character to grab without mashing the mesh through their torso).

I do reiterate though, that is during the simulation and fully dynamic. So while it's helpful to understand that an simulating object may well be essentially unrigged, there are a decent number of cases outside that where rigging is beneficial (indeed, some of which is the capacity to use partial dForce strengths*)

*Which themselves are confusing. While logically you'd think "well, a 50% weight just means it moves half as much, right?" that would mean that a dForce skirt wouldn't get pushed properly out of the way by a leg. I find the best way to think of dForce weights is as a spring that tries to pull the vertex back to its unsimulated position; a 100% weight means an infinitely floppy spring that doesn't pull at all, a 0% weight means an infinitely stiff spring that doesn't give at all, and everything in the middle is different levels of yielding... but at this point I'm probably rambling too much.

Reference: I spend far too much time mucking around with dForce.

TL;DR: Rig it as conforming first, then dForce can go on top of/override that. (Although for things like long skirts/dresses, you can probably stop after getting the basic rigging mostly sorted, as dForce does override it and it's not that useful getting it perfect if you're almost always going to sim it anyway).

Faeryl Womyn

That's a lot of information and not something you normal see in youtube video's lol Thanks for all the explanations and will consider all of it as I practice while finishing these pants.