manleystanley opened this issue on Oct 27, 2020 ยท 19 posts
Dartanbeck posted Sat, 05 December 2020 at 5:25 AM
But back to the point of that old Daz thread, I know you don't care for Daz Studio at all, but that is the software that Auto-Fit/Auto-Follow was developed in and for, so that is the tool that contains a plethora of fixes for the situation.
When you see products, like the one mentioned in that thread by Sickleyield, those are most often products made for people as an easy parameter dial fix built directly onto the figure. Sickleyield devotes a lot of time on that stuff, and if we buy her fixes they also come with a lot of extra information on going further - but she also offers a lot of free advice on the subjects a s well. Anyway....
So here is a page I've made with a bunch of the resources I use to figure out how to correct certain situations. I don't put all of this stuff to practice all the time, so I need to keep it somewhere so I can go back and look when needed.
Scroll down to the Josh Darling videos and you'll start to see fixes for many things. But there's a lot more. We can even add custom behavior to the clothing according to specific angles of a particular joint. This isn't stuff that we ca expect the content artists to do because it would introduce too many nightmares - everyone has a different opinion of what should happen when....
That's actually part of the magic with some of those shaping products that we can buy. For example: Poke-Away 2 for Genesis Male and/or Female (sold separately) allow us to tweak the collision distance for many parts of each joint of the figure. Negative values push the clothing out without changing the shape of the figure, and positive values do the opposite - shrink the specific part of the figure leaving the clothing item intact.
This can make for a pretty dynamic method of working with clothing across a whole animation sequence because sometimes negative works best, other time the other way is the key - even within the same animation of one figure.
VWD is an interesting way to deal with it, but not all clothing work out-of-the-box.
Remember my Carrara 8.5 Pro cheerleading during the beta phase? I was all-in with Genesis. I had a bunch of Generation 3 and 4 clothing and accessories so I bought the Generation clones for Genesis right away. Now that I'm actually using Genesis 1 again for Rosie, I'm discovering that Aiko 3 stuff autfits pretty darned well to my stylized figure. I can do the auto-fit and then run VWD if I want, but auto-fit always distorts the mesh in funky ways - easily (but sometimes time-consuming) fix as a conformed object on the figure, using Carrara modeling tools. But for VWD cloth simulations, I prefer to not use auto-fit, remove the mesh from the conforming rigging (before conforming it), just scale and position it to somewhat fit, and run VWD.
If It's not working for a specific clothing, we can go into the model room and fix the issue of it's something we really want to use. For example, the V5 Shirt by HongYu isn't welded at the seems so the whole shirt falls apart in a simulation, but works great as a tight-fitting conformed object. Well, if we really wanted it to drape/simulate instead, we could always just go in and weld all te seams. It takes a while but I used that product as an example because it's one of those that might be truly worth the extra effort.
Also, by removing the rigging, we're no longer confined to topology. We can add or delete buttons, snaps and zippers, for example. Delete anything we don't want - completely make it into something unique to ourselves.
The workflow video above begins to hint at these possibilities. The first simulation is the J-Suit, which I've already converted to a static object. But then when I bring in M4's Steam Cowboy jacket, I go through the whole process. Just keep in mind that, before simulating either of them, I can go into the model room and add or delete vertices all I want!