Dynamic Clothing Pane Missing Some Options
blue_055c15ca15
Posts: 17
I'm giving Dynamic Clothing a try and have immediately run into a problem. After loading a dynamic cloth and opeming the Dynamic Clothing pane I am able to select the cloth and configure the Collision source and the cloth does it's thing when I hit "Drape". But where there shouold be controls for dialing Weight, Thickness or Friction in the Panel's Tab there are no sliders or controls. Moreover, there is no avaiable Physics, Garment or Preference Tabs to click on so I feel like I am missing out on something. I've tried a couple of different pieces of dynamic cloth but same result. Any ideas? Thanks!
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Those options are part of the 'advanced' DCC system and only show when you have the separately purchaseable item installed. As DCC seems to be working for you I assume you are only running with the basic system 'built-in' ot Daz Studio.
Ah ok - thanks. I've looked in the DAZ Shop but don't seem to be able to find the more advanced comntrol - is it still available?
http://www.daz3d.com/dynamic-clothing-control If you can't see it you may already have it, but installing DS after the control plug-in will replace it with the basic version (and that tends to happen if you select DS and all its plug-ins in one go). If it is showing as installed but not working uninstall and reinstall; in future it would be a good diea to install the DS Application first, then the plug-ins.
On page 4 of the Optitex freebie site there is a set of fabric presets...
http://www.optitex-dynamiccloth.com/FreebieDownload04.php
These will provide some of the things like weight, friction, etc for the included plugin. They are not configurable, but the settings are recognized by the free plugin and used.
I found the control - but wonder if it's been updated for Mac since having issues with Mac OS 10.7. Mac is up to OS 10.11 now. Sure would be nice to have a trial version of a product like this, there's so little information given on the product page. I don't glean much from reading through the forums either.
Thanks for the tip mjc1016.
It would be nice if DAZ3d changed their dynamic cloth physics engine to be able to convert any 3d object into a cloth. It seems at the moment that the dynamic cloth engine is limited to using Optitex compliant clothing, which apparently does not include general primitive objects like a plane or a ball or simple clothing (Someone please correct this if it is wrong.).
Other 3d programs like Poser, Blender etc allow for simple objects to be turned into cloth which then follow normal physical interactions; gravity, friction, wind, elasticity etc. So why can't the DAZ system do the same without having to buy items from Optitex?
Please don't misunderstand; I'm sure Optitex is a fine company producing fine products, but I like many others would like to be able to "clothify" normal objects.
If anyone can comment further on the technical or commercial reasons for the differences in dynamic clothing systems please enlighten us.
Hi Isac, I know optitex had been developing their system for a couple of years and put a lot of reserach into achiving as realistic as possible simulations while considering different properties of different fabrics. Their main business is developing pattern making software in which you can see how your finished textile will look like. You can see if the sleeves are to short or to long etc. The whole optitex package cost somwhere around the $20.000 where about $10.000 are solely for the 3D feature. They are still marked leader in terms of realism ( i would think anyway). They licensed this draping engine to DAZ some time ago for whatever reason. Optitex lacks most other 3D features DAZ has and got a very limited selection of avatars and pretty much no proper lightning set-up which makes it realy hard to use to create near real images of your garments usable for a catalouge or website. If you want you can have a look on kapinua dot com to see what images are possible. Instead of going closser together with DAZ and using the stuff DAZ is good at they decided to go down the path end develope their own "DAZ" which will probably take years and realy distracts from their core business of pattern making. Maybe the patternmaking market has stalled and they need to look for new features for new version. I know a few patternmakers who have not upgraded for a while as the version they have is doing the job. I have been working with optitex nearly 3years now and only started with DAZ in october last year. One of the interesting reasons for that was that DAZ apparently suported clt file formats which are the 3D files created from optitex. However, that was not the case out of the box. It took nearly half a year of winging and hassling of both optitex and DAZ to get the required plug-in to import clt files. Since about 3 weeks i am now in the lucky situation where I can create my very own dynamic garments from scratch using real world patterns. So far I only spend a couple of hours playing with it just to se what can and can not be done. One of the sad things is that textures are not being included in the file. In optitex i can apply Zips and buttons and different types of stitches, all those still come over but the textures are missing and I am not experienced enough yet to replace them in DAZ. Maybe somebody else her would be able to chip in some advice. I can provide some duf files to play with. In regards to your simple items i might be able to help you there. No promisse. what are you after.
Hi Ingo, Thanks for your input on Optitex and the background. I know that specialist software made for industry can have a price tag in the 10s of thousands of dollars as the customer base is so small. I guess your own copy is for professional use. In view of the price tag I can well understand why so few people made dynamic clothing items for DAZ Studio. This is way outside the "enthusiastic amateur" bracket and probably outside most of DAZ's Product Artists budgets. I wonder how many copies of a clothing item you would need to sell to recoup the cost of the software required to make it. Ouch!
I have been told by DAZ3d that the type of cloth simulation system common in other 3d rendering/modelling programs is "on the wish list" but that they are "not actively working on it". I suppose that means there is no chance in the next couple of years. That's a real pity. Perhaps there is not enough interest in dynamic clothing? However that seems strange as there is a growing interest in animation and the two go hand in glove together.
Thanks for your offer of help. What I most want to do is to take some of the dynamic clothing made for V4 (in Poser) and apply it to Genesis 3 female (in DS4.9). I recently looked for dynamic dresses for G3f in the DAZ shop and couldn't find a single one. There are a couple of PAs selling dresses with Dynamic morphs. Which I assume means they have made the dynamic pose in Poser then exported it as a morph for use in DS. perhaps I can find a good tutorial for this process. With a multi-10k $ price tag for the software which could make the dress properly dynamic in DS, I can't say I blame any of the PAs for just skipping dynamic clothing. ..... Sigh!
There is a not to be talked about script available elsewhere; and at the same place there is Virtual Dynamics for Poser, that is also being developed for Carrara and Daz.
Hi Isaac, we make actual garments for real people and optitex is helping us to cut down on physical samples saving time and material. To produce garmenst for DAZ is realy just a neath side effect. That, however means, I can not convert something into dynamic like this "other" plug-in, but it does mean I can create a dynamic 3D boddy from 2D draft. For example to create a singlet I just need the fron and back, virtualy stitch them up and optitex is doing the rest. From there I can create different sizes to. All I would need is a simple draft of what you want and potentialy an OBJ file of the figure you want to use it with (if I dont have the figure allready) or you applied funny morphs. Happy to give it a shot for you.
An OBJ file of the figure is just not going to happen. That is strctly not allowed, as per the DAZ 3D EULA.
Hi Ingo,
As Chohole said, transfering an obj file of a DAZ figure would be against the EULA. However, I guess you already have access to Genesis 3 female.
Regarding making a draft of a clothing item, I'm afraid my drawing skills stopped developing around age 11, which is why I love 3d graphics :)
However, if you would be willing to knock something up for me I can point to some dynamic dresses made for V4 in Poser which I would love to be able to use (as dynamic dresses) on G3f in DAZ Studio.
Check out this link: https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/?search=Tipol
For example: Easy Summer Dress, PetiteFilleModele, Ruffle Dress, Little Summer dress and my favourite; White Wedding.
These items are by Tipol. Even better; how about you and he/she getting together and making DAZ Studio versions of these dresses for G3f. Tipol clearly has the designing/artistic skills and you have the technical know-how. There could be a bit of cash in this for both of you. I'm sure DAZ3d would love someone to make some dynamic clothing items for G3f as there are none available at the moment.
Ok, understood. I guess you would need to let me know which figure it is about. Is there any other way of transfering settings like poses and morphs which would only work if I got the same conten installed on my system? Any form of duf file which only exports/saves settings but not content? This is basicaly just about letting me know how GF# needs to look like so I can make sure the initial drape is going to work on the final figure. I di purchas most of the figures anyway.
Here is an extract from an official DAz e-mail I had previously about that.
"It would not be permissible for users to send you OBJ files - it would, however, be permissible for them to send you a .duf scene file from which you could then export an OBJ (File>Export) as that would require you to have the assets used installed on your local machine (if they used their own custom morphs, made by directly sculpting the mesh, then they would also need to send you the morph asset file they created - but assuming they used stock morphs all you would need is the .duf file and your own copy of the products used)."
So that could ba way of doing it, if your figure is actualy specialy morphed.
I also made contact with Tipol, lets see what is coming out of it.
Half the dresses are easy enough but for noe I can only produce the actual dynamic mesh without texture and shader. need to look into how to apply those. Had already some help offered in this respect. I am just a bit thin on time.
Sound good Ingo. The character that Tipol has made lots of dynamic dresses for (I listed a few above) is Victoria 4 for use in the Poser Cloth room. I would like to be able to use the dynamic clothes on Genesis 3 female (G3f) in DAZ Studio 4.9. DAZ Studio does not use the same system for dynamic clothing as Poser, so the dynamic clothes need to be made especially for DS4.9, which is where you do your magic. If you and Tipol want to be able to sell these products to a wide customer base then you should design them for use on the base G3f figure. I understand that even dynamic clothes need to fit the figure reasonably well otherwise they will look like they are made the wrong size for the figure. However, I think the most universally applicable method for getting a good initial fit would be to have a bunch of adjustment morphs which could be applied before draping. Actually I suppose the autofit facility of DS should be able to help there. Again, I'm not sure of how that works technically; as far as I understand DS copies morphs on the figure to the clothing, but I could be wrong. Even a few basic scale morphs would be useful as a start.
A threeway collaboration between a clothes designer, a clothes mesh/rig maker and a texture designer, sounds like there could be some really exciting stuff being produced.
The .duf file format already does that. It's never contained the textures or mesh data making up a prop, figure or scene, only the pointers to the texture and mesh files, and the dial settings for the parameters (including morph parameters and pose parameters). The only gotcha here is that as well as having the same content installed on both computers, for something like a Genesis figure you must have the same morph sets on both computers, otherwise your figure will look a bit off when you compare the two.
Note that, for this to work, the same content must be installed properly into both computers. It doesn't have to be installed into exactly the same content location, you only need to make sure your content can load without interruptions from "can't find file" errors due to misplaced installations.
have not heard from Tipol yet, but there is another question dawning on me. If I understand all the above right, I am not actualy safing my dynamic garment in a DUF file? So how can I hand over a dynamic garment to somebody else? Where is the actual mesh being saved once I imported it from optitex? Can I save just the garment as an asset somewhere seperatly for "distribution"?
a off looking figure would not be a problem, To do the initial drape in optitex I only need a static mesh without any texture. Or does "off" refere to poses as well?
I strongly recommend using the base Genesis 3 female figure as your model, with no additional morphs. This will enable your final clothing figure to be as universally applicable as possible. A few scaling/ stretching morphs can be added to the clothing figure for increase applicability to non-standard g3f body shapes, or you can just let the end user apply magnets to do the same job. It comes down to how much time/effort you want to put into each clothing project. Just remember that the easier a product is to use out of the box, the better it will sell.
Regarding the point about how the actual clothing figure will be distributed, that is a good question. I imagine that a clothing.obj file can be used to save the geometry. There are various options in DS for SaveAs (see Save As: Support Assets:Dynamic Cloth). I suppose that DAZ3d has some guidlines somewhere for the best file structure for saving items for distribution (or look at an existing clothing figure package to work out where things should go). Like me you probably normally use the Download manager to install new packages, however you can also download an item manually and get a zip file which will have the correct folder structure which you can easily see.
Hm, will see what I can find out. I tried the various safe as options but that looks like it does not include the actual mesh. So will need to figure out where all the stuff is going.
There shouldn't be pose problems, it's just about the shape — if the figure is morphed using morph sets that are installed on the first computer but not the second, then of course those missing morphs won't contribute to the final figure shape once it's copied to the second computer. How much of a problem this is for draping dynamic cloth depends on how significant the morphs are. E.g. a missing "broad shoulders" morph might affect the way a shirt hangs on the figure.
Ingo, you're right, the Save As function in DS is rather misleading. The submenu of SaveAs which is called Support Asset gives a range of options for saving different assets. I would imagine that these options would actually save the assets; that would seem logical given the notion of Save Support Asset. I would imagine that figures and props would be saved as .obj files or some similar file format but apparently this is not the case. The assets that are saved appear to be .duf files which point at the actual assets. It would seem clearer if the menu said Save Asset Location. The duf files are not readable in a text editor so it is not easy to find out where exactly the duf file is pointing to.
There must be a description of the process of saving actual assets somewhere and how that relates to the duf files, but I haven't found it yet. I know that you can export a figure in various formats; .cr2, .obj, .fbx, but how that would be related to the duf or dsf file formats I do not know.
Maybe someone in the community who is familliar with packaging items for use with DS could explain the whole process. Or is this more occult knowledge available only to the initiated? :)
When you save a Figure or Prop asset you create a preset (.duf file) for loading and the actual asset files, in the Data\Author\Product folder in the selected content directory. Other assets types, such as morphs or UVs, create files in the Data folder tree only. By default all the files are saved with compression - if you want to examine them as text turn that off, unpack them with the Batch Convert pane, or uncompress them with an archive utility.
Duf files are human readable...when uncompressed, as Richard said, they are compressed by default. To turn it off, there should be a little check box in the save dialog...usually along the bottom of the box on the left.
Also, once they are saved, yes they are pointing to a geometry file...but it is not an obj, 3ds or any other 'standard' file...it's a dsf file in the data folder Richard mentioned.
You need three things to 'make' a product...the /data/author/product info/folder, the preset to load it (duf file that shows up in the Content Library) and the textures...usually in /Runtime/Textures/author/product <<<create this folder and place the textures there...even if it loads with the textures on importing the obj, you should reload them from that location, so they will then be found, when the item is saved as an asset.
I knew you guys were out there somewhere :)
So how do you save a clothing figure, for example, as a dsf file? Or is the dsf file created automatically when saving assets in the form of a duf file?
Yes, when you use File>Save as>Support Assets>Figure prop Asset you create both the .dsf asset files, in the Data folder using folder names generated from the Author and Propuct fields in the option dialogue, and the .duf file, in the location you select in the fiel browser, for loading the asset. If you don't save as an asset but simply as a scene/sceen subset then DS will generate asset files of its own (in \Data\Autoadapted as I recall) but it's better to explicitly save anything you want to make repeat use of as an asset.
Thanks, that explains a lot. Hopefully Ingo can now save dynamic clothing items.
Yes, that helped a lot in deed. Well, I collected a whole bunch of stuff for all sorts of peopel who are interested in it here.
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B5UXdV2EfVojZVQyMTN2TUZpZkk&usp=sharing
I put some fbx and obj files in there which came straight out of optitex. For me the FBX seam to work best for a statik mesh as all the stitches are still there. It is coming in at 1000% of its original size. I also included the original clt file which I get from optitex and than import to daz to make the dynamic garment. Also a few shots out of optitex how the garment looks like there. And most importand the data files for the hopefully funktioning dynamik funktioning shirt.
cheers
have fun
There is always at least one awkward person... this time it's me :)
I can't seem to download from the link you gave. Do you perhaps have a "dropbox" account?
A couple of things...which one (figure) is the long sleeve tee for? And if you are going to leave it in the A-pose you'll need to provide a start pose for the figure the item is for.
Also there is no fabric type assigned to the shirt...that should be able to be assigned before it is saved as a dynamic clothing asset type and 'stick'...it should become part of the base settings that the duf loads.
And some more...
While the UV mapping is good (minimal stretch, etc) the layout/arrangement of the islands isn't very Studio 'friendly'. It's difficult to work with for Studio.
Notice the sleeves and main body of the shirt have the ribbing running in the same direction?
This means that tiling/procedural shaders could be used, but actual purpose made texture sets, especially ones with prints/logos would be very difficult. A little preplannng would counter some/all of that...or editing of the UV mapping later (but that's the much harder option).
Also, the hems and collar are the same material as the rest (sleeve, main body) of the shirt, so they aren't being accented/showing up.
Here is another one...this time with a tiling texture on it.
I also ran a sim to move the arms to the default t-pose and resaved the asset. It makes it a bit easier to start with.
If there was a 'shrink' factor on the original Optitex version, there isn't on this, because no cloth data was attached, so that could be why the sleeves are a little long. I only have the free plugin, so I have to adjust the cloth settings by scripting them and I don't have any cloth presets with shrinkage already in them. I'm about to create one and see if that helps...