I've finally got my PC back from repair, and it seems to work reasonably well. I had been following the discussions by LaurieA and Grappo and others who tout the merits of the cloth room. There is no question in my mind that the appearance of even ordinary dynamic cloth after it has gone through the simulation/draping thingie IS infinitely more natural-looking than the very best conforming cloth.

So, why isn't everyone doing it? Why does it appear to be black magic to all but the initiated? Now, I've tried a few simulations recently myself with an item or two, but my results don't look anywhere near as nice as those of Those-That-Know. And of course, the Manual is poo.

Or is it?

Like with the Material Room, is there just a design issue that is preventing the average Jane Doe who has just unwrapped her shiny new copy of Poser X from slipping a dynamic cloth prop (why is it a prop? it's CLOTHING!) on to her favourite figure and clicking on the [Drape] button? Perhaps because there is no [Drape] button, just like there's no [Make Art] button either.

Okay... let's be fair. What's involved in making a conforming cloth fit a figure? You go into your Figures library (it's not a figure, either, it's CLOTHING!) and you pick an item... double-click, and it's in the scene. If you haven't posed your figure yet (he or she's still zeroed) then the item pops magically right into place right on the figure, fitting pretty well if it's the default figure in zero morphed state. Then it's:

Menu -> Figure -> Conform To...

and you pick who to conform to from a picklist. You're done.

Well, how many people use a completely un-morphed figure? And then, once you start posing this figure, issues develop. Poke-through etc-etc-etc. So no, it's not the perfect solution, but to get that initial clothing on, very-very simple to do.

BTW, there is a school of thought that entertains the notion that it's best to actually pose your figure before conforming clothing to it.

Okay, so let's get lost real quick. I've got this item in my props library called L75 A-V 4 BabyDoll. Double clicked on it and it's sort-of on V4. In the parameter-dials window, I notice there's a L75_V4 Fit dial. Set that to 1, and we're laughin'... looks perfect.

Now what?

Ice-boy said "ohhhh and dynamic clothing rocks. it takes 1 month to learn the basics." Why? It took 1 minute to learn the basics of conforming cloth. To those that are reasonably familiar with dynamic cloth: do you find it acceptable that one approach should take so much longer to learn than the other? What makes it so difficult to learn?

I find almost everything has an effect to the cloth.  The geometry itself , what bits you make hard or soft , or choreographed, or sticky (i forget the term) , the cloth settings for weight, shear, etc all change how it drapes, then determine the pose, do you tilt it to get better drape, or fake a wind ? do you use a wind ? how many frames , how many steps per frame, offsets and collision types .. theres a lot of settings.  Then if the figure is sitting how best to get it to sit and get the cloth properly draped. Are you shrink fitting anything ?  One simulation or two or three?  it can get really complicated

Philc had some free settings for the cloth room that are useful. Dont know if they work in all Poser versions.

What I found took so long to learn was what the different settings do. Even now, I'm not entirely certain about all of them ;o).

As far as dynamic vs. conforming, I see comparing them a little like comparing apples and oranges - completely different technologies. Let's say you have a sofa. You throw grandma's afghan over it. It fits, but it doesn't look spectacular in places and it drapes oddly in others. That's conforming. Then you get the fitted slip covers made just for the sofa...that's dynamic. Fits a lot nicer everywhere ;o). Takes longer to put them on, but in the end, it's a much nicer look. See where I'm going? Maybe a stupid analogy, but I'm not very good with analogies...lol.

There are pros and cons to both dynamic and conforming, but the biggest pro I see with conforming is that a morphed figure is much easier to manage with dynamic clothing. If the morph isn't too severe, the cloth should drape right over the morphs as if the clothing was made for them. With conforming, you either need extra scripts or a bit of massaging with the morph brush to get rid of poke thru. The biggest con so far is that it's just not as easy to manage cloth that has lots of details and that's where conforming shines.

It all boils down to what you want for the image and the amount of time you're willing to spend on it ;o).

Laurie

The basic idea with dynamic clothing is difficult ONLY because it has so many steps as compared with conforming clothing. Once I had used a tutorial to step me through it once or twice, it made perfect sense and I was off to the races.

One of the problems is quality of the conforming items. A great deal of what is out there is freebees, and a fair percentage of them are VERY poorly done. Let's face it... a dynamic piece should not fall apart when you run the simulation, nor should it fall off of the character. That is not to say they are all sub-par. LaurieA's in particular are Gold, as are Trekkiegirrls.

The main reason that I have failures with properly grouped pieces is forgetting to have them collide with everything that they are supposed to collide with. Yes, it's a pain to set. Yes, there needs to be an easier way to do it. What we need is a person with the coding skills/intuitive uderstanding of a Bagginsbill, except with THIS area of expertise to bring some order to the cloth room like BB did the Material room.

in the meantime...

The real problem is getting all of those groups selected and working together. I'm getting better at correcting the designers' errors, but they are still often there. If someone is going to start in the cloth room, it is imperative that they get quality clothing... get one of Grappo's sets, for instance, so that you know that any problems you have are you, and not the person who designed the garment. No way should they begin by trying the nightmare that is converting a conforming piece to dynamic. Yes, it can be done, once you understand what you are doing, but it's no way to try to learn.

I've had great luck with dynamic clothing, and I'm one of the sub-par idiots for whom Gamma Correction is a total waste of time and trouble. That ought to tell you something about how hard it's not.

What I'm picking up from you Laurie and from Mark is that the challenge is the room itself. Lots of settings, the purposes of which are not really clear. Whilst throwing a conforming item on a figure and conforming it is a no-brainer (two steps, done), dynamic is by its sheer wealth of options a megalo-cephalic.

A bit like Wordpad and Word. More options, more to learn.

I do want to learn this. I like how it looks when it is done. I've read a few cloth room tutorials, but they seem to not mesh in terms of workflow. One author I read indicated that it was really designed for animators. I just want stuff to drape naturally. Seems to me that should be a relatively simple thing to do. Pose your figure, then drape your cloth on it, sort-of like in Blender. But that's not it, is it? That's not how it's done? You have to start with your figure in zeroed pose? Now, if my figure is sitting in a quasi-"The_Thinker" position, how long do you think it would take for the average human to attain that position from the Michelangelo T pose? Two seconds? Three seconds? I'm talking comfortably. And this frames thing: Movies used to go at 16 frames per second. Now, there are currently three main frame rate standards in the TV and movie-making business: 24p, 25p, and 30p. So, which is Poser using when it says frames?

For me to go from the T-position to sitting in an armchair with my hands folded in my lap and one knee crossed demurely over the other takes at least 3 seconds. That's moving quickly, not leisurely. So, to drape a skirt is going to take an animation of somewhere between 72 and 90 frames.

Sheesh!

Wonder if they are looking at perhaps allowing draping of figures without the T-pose at frame 0 requirement. Has the cloth room changed much since Pose 5 at all, per those who use it much? Wonder exactly where development is on Cloth Room for Poser 9.

(bookmarked)

@BasicWiz: gamma-correction and all that made no sense to me either, until I looked at it from a maths perspective. Then, it made complete sense.

It is not a perfect solution. How Poser computes colours - appears to me - to involve a LOT of maths: light maths and colour maths and surface-normals maths (probably better called vector maths) ... lots of data. Some of the data is straight-forward, some of it isn't. I understand it to be a matter of giving the one that computes all that correct information to work with. Simple as that.

Now, it seems I've entered into another realm where lots of calculations are at play. You go into this room and first-off, you go: "Whoa! Scary!"

Where do I start? How about... "New Simulation"? So, I click on new simulation and get this range: start frame to end frame. Well, given the fact that I need to sit down and cross my knees and I'll have to assume 30 frames per second because at the bottom of this room is a bar with a slider that goes to 30 frames, I'll type in 90 for end frames. But, why is there a place to enter a number for start frame? And what's this Steps per frame? Can I slow things down by saying 3 steps in each frame, thus all I would need is 30 frames. "You can either set the simulator to run through your entire animation (I'm not making an animation: I'm doing a still!) or pick a set of frames during which the simulator is active by entering your desired frame numbers in the ..." Don't you sometimes wish the manual came with a manual? To explain the manual? Or am I just a bit thick?

That's the simple bit. Object vertex against cloth polygon. I think this is where conformists run screaming back into the safety of Conform To. Which Object? The figure object? There is an expanatory statement in parentheses that indicates that the default is cloth vertex against object polygon. This is not an option in the tick boxes. Does ticking one or more of these deactivate this?

Cloth draping... drape frames. OH! So I can drape my skirt without wasting a lot of time with a sim! I'll just put a number in here and pose my figure and the cloth will drape. Why am I wasting my time with a sim when all I want to do is drape a cloth?

Suddenly, programming Python and writing matmatic scripts seems like child's play. This is the most bewildering interface ever.

"Increasing the number of frames that a simulator is active requires greater amounts of system resources."

"Eat foods that are high in calories and don't exercise to gain the most weight in the shortest amount of time."

Neither of these statements are particularly informative. Does that first statement mean that if I set my number of frames at 90, I risk a system crash? As per usual, the manual states the obvious without saying anything useful.

Asking SM for help at this juncture is NOT going to be helpful... when consistent crashing was reported, this was the response from SM: "The terms used are pretty standard for describing cloth and its properties with regards to Dynamic Simulations. The values do have a relation to the term. This is a training issue and not so much a technical support issue. Unfortunately, training is not something that Smith Micro provides by email or phone. We do, however, offer many training guides and videos so that you can become a Pro with our Graphics software. Please use the link below to find these materials. To get you started, you can check out our tutorials on this and many other issues in the tutorial section of this same link."

About as helpful as the manual.

Back to my enlightening reading...

"1. Fold Resistance-

This parameter goes from zero to 100; it determines how 'stiff' the cloth is- as you'd expect from its title, the higher the fold resistance, the less the cloth can bend when it contacts an object. In conjunction with the other parameters this can help define how thick the cloth appears to be."

So, 100 is cardboard? and 1 is silk? Where is cotton? Denim? Polyester-nylon? I'm looking at the Smith Micro tutorial. That's all you got for Fold Resistance. I guess it is a "training issue" and I'm difficult to train. "2. Shear Resistance-

Shear resistance has a range of 1 to 1000; it defines how much the cloth tends to retain its shape as it folds. This differs from fold resistance; the shear resistance of a fabric determines how much or little it deforms when actually folding."

So, Fold Resistance has a range of 1 to 100 and Shear Resistance has a range of 1 to 1000. Wonder why the difference in ranges? And then, the difference between the two is baffling me no end: in the first instance, the cloth's ability to bend, in the second, the cloth's ability to deform while bending. Oooookay? I guess I'm thick and need an illustration.

Stretch Resistance range is 1 to 500 and stretch damping range is 0 to 1. Which bright mind came up with this concept? There is no way to consistently associate a characteristic with a material, is there? 1-100, 1-1000, 1-500, 0-1. Perhaps I'm being difficult, but wouldn't it have been easier for the neophyte dynamic wannabe to make these ranges consistent? I guess this was designed by physicists for physicists...

Quote - The main reason that I have failures with properly grouped pieces is forgetting to have them collide with everything that they are supposed to collide with. Yes, it's a pain to set. Yes, there needs to be an easier way to do it.

This, from Smith Micro:

"The issue with the Steps is covered in the Manual, along with details on all the settings and features. The values are explained. The Animation Palette is available in all rooms for showing details of each frame on the Timeline.

The Cloth Room is very reliable and perdictable. It is also very powerful. Normally a Crash in the Cloth Room indicates that you had a Collision at the start. We have very few unresolved bugs, most dealing with very specific aspects, or aspects that should not cause an issue for the user, but where it does not respond as designed."

IOW, the Cloth Room is considered by SM pretty much at a stage of perfection. Odd, then, that such a perfect product sees so little use by Poser users. I can't imagine it's the manual or the interface: all very self-explanatory. :blink:

So, the onus is on us, Dummies users, to get the head around all this. And if something goes wrong, we simply accept that we made the mistake, because it simply can't be the software. And that the subject is complex enough that if we really want to learn how to use this, we should make the effort to decipher the arcane titles by referring to the manual to enlighten us.

Why can't "choreographed groups" be simply called "pinned"? Makes more sense to me. Is this programme deliberately trying to be obtuse in order to weed out riffraff like me?

C'mon, seriously, you've got an application component the fewest use because the interface is obscure. The common herd don't "get it". There are some bright minds on here that have been able to get around those obstacles. They "get it". What would those bright minds - that I conspicuously do NOT factor among - suggest in terms of interface improvement? in order to help the menially-intelligent like myself (or even people of normal intelligence) to make the cloth room an exciting area to explore?

'K, back to my diggings...

I can sumpathize with your problems and issues exactly, RobynsVeil. Every few weeks, I get the urge to use the Cloth Room and approach it with enthusiasm and a "This time! This time I'll make it do what I want it to do!" attitude. And then, four hours later, I'm feeling despondent, depressed, and vowing never to go near the hopeless thing ever again. (Until a few weeks have passed and the madness hits me again...) And I don't think that it's because I'm too stupid to use software. The Material Room is my bestest friend, it can hold nothing that I find myself scared of. The Cloth Room, on the other hand... oh dear.

I can get simple things to drap over other things. E.g., a square to drape over a table to create a tablecloth, but the biggest problem I have is when it comes to clothing more complex than a poncho or cloak.

First problem: Guessing the values to put in to create the fabric I would like to simulate. Yes, there is the PhilC collection of ClothRoomPresets, but it would be nice to know that if I tweak parameter X then effect-that-I-can-see-happening-to-my-garment Y is increased/decreased. The scales, as you point out, are all different and non-intuitive to remember.

Second problem: This is probably just me not being familiar with animation, but I so struggle with getting the initial frame at zero, the final frame in the pose I want, and making sure the things stay that way. I've lost count of the times I've started a simulation from zero-pose and noticed by about frame 10 that, actually, the figure isn't moving into his/her pose and yet I can clearly remember spending a decent about of time getting him/her into that pose. I go to frame 30 (or whatever) and... WHAT?!? It's the zero pose! Where has my pose gone to??? Yes, as I said, this is more about my unfamiliarity of the animation tools but it's still part of the experience of the Cloth Room and it's something extra that needs to be learned if all a user is used to is dealing with stills.

Third problem: When I've got an item draped and simulated, I'd say a large number of times it looks horrible. It just looks nothing more than what it is: A cloth room simulation. There's something very typical to the way these failures look---crushed and smushed polygons, unrealistic folds, corners jutting out at unnatural angles---I can't quite describe it precisely in words, but I can tell immediately that it's one of my usual attempts in the Cloth Room. Which, after struggling with all the technical bits and thinking I've finally conquered them, makes me feel totally disheartened to see something that is hideously inferior and of a quality that's not even approaching acceptable.

So, on the whole, a very miserable experience. (At least until I decide the Hair Room is due for another visit.)

Quote - ...Third problem: When I've got an item draped and simulated, I'd say a large number of times it looks horrible. It just looks nothing more than what it is: A cloth room simulation. There's something very typical to the way these failures look---crushed and smushed polygons, unrealistic folds, corners jutting out at unnatural angles---I can't quite describe it precisely in words, but I can tell immediately that it's one of my usual attempts in the Cloth Room. Which, after struggling with all the technical bits and thinking I've finally conquered them, makes me feel totally disheartened to see something that is hideously inferior and of a quality that's not even approaching acceptable. So, on the whole, a very miserable experience. (At least until I decide the Hair Room is due for another visit.)

Yup! I'm staring at eXACTly that right at this very moment in my cloth room, John. Basically, it is poo. 7 on the Richter-scale. I followed the SM tutorial settings for silk. Maybe the mesh isn't right for it. But, it looks like absolute rubbish.

My issue is: I hate just following a recipe without understanding what sodium chloride does, and why no garlic is called for when it's clearly an italian dish and can zucchini really be used as a bread substitute.... and why. I'm weird that way. So, I've looked at "hey, don't worry about all those settings, just do THIS" tutorials and they just don't work for me.

Bagginsbill gave me WHYS in the mat room.

So now, like you, I have no fears there. No, I'm not going to pretend I know what BB knows... not even a fraction. BUT I know basic principles. Here in the cloth room, basic principles need to be dealt with in a non-jargoned, lay-person language, making things crystal-clear so that this whole technology is demystified. Meaning: make the labels clear, standardise the ranges, offer a manual that actually explains stuff instead of saying things like what I cited above.

Until then, you will enter the cloth room with hope, John, and leave with dispair. And mate, it's not you... it's the freakin' interface.

Wake up, SM. It's not perfect, this room. Lots still to do!!!

Just watching PhilC's brilliant tutorial on dynamics. Interesting point was that he initially wondered why an animation was necessary when all he was creating was a still image. He subsequently 'realised' that in order for the cloth to follow the body, it had to go through the animation.

Whilst this served as sufficient reason for Phil, being not as bright as he is, I still don't get it. You can drape cloth in Blender without going through an entire animation process with the figure at zero pose. Why can't Poser do that?

Having a really hard time getting excited with this:

...when I'm also playing with this:

Oh yes... those black lines in the first image. I hate those, and I can't get rid of them no matter what I try. In preview, they look like the fabric has snapped or crushed in on itself, and in render they just show up black and ugly.

I've got a skirt simulation going at the moment where the figure is simply sitting down on a chair and at the place where the thighs bend at the hip, those sharp creases are appearing. I try changing the fold resistance and other values, but this just serves to make the rest of the garment mess up (e.g., where before it was draping over her legs nicely, it's now floating several inches above and refusing to drop any closer, and other---stranger---effects such as going right through her thighs even though it started off by colliding correctly with them). And then, when I bring the chair into the picture and make the skirt collide with it, then things start to get really weird.

I can already feel that familiar sense of frustration setting in...

The "Why an animation for a still?" thing isn't that difficult to work out, I would say.

The object is modelled in one particular way (to fit the figure's zero-pose, usually). The picture you want has the figure in some other way. You need the in-between frames to allow the object/garment to change from one state to another. It can't be done instantly because the effects of gravity, etc, take place not only in three dimensions but also in time. The longer something is hanging, for example, the more it will want to drape straight to the ground. This has to take place over time, and time is what the animation timeline is all about.

It's not really an animation as such, it's just getting the object to move from its modelled state into the state you wish it to be. (In theory.)

The hem of the skirt refuses to lie down, no matter what reasonable changes I make to the cloth parameters. Fold resistance reduced to 0 gives lots of crumples; fold resistance maxed out produces so many collisions, the calculation took almost for ever. This is 35.

Shear resistance at 0 gave me the opposite of 0 fold resistance; that is, lots of collisions that made me think I'd crashed the simulation. It was taking so long I aborted that one. Shear resistance at 500 (half the maximum?) gave me very unrealistic folding. This is shear resistance at 200.

Cloth density at 0.2 gave some pointing-directly-at-the-ground effects on the bits of the skirt overhanding the chair, and c.d. at 0.01 made the hem float around as if it didn't want anything to do with gravity. Here, I've got cloth density at 0.1.

For the bits that worked, it looks okay. I like the folding at the hip-thigh bend and the way the skirt has moved out in response to the underlying hip being widened (I used a "sit down" 3rd-party morph as base V4 bends poorly without help).

However! The hem refuses to fall onto her lap, and the back has gone straight through the chair. In all the simulations I've done with this today, I noticed that the chair-skirtback collision was okay up to a certain point (around about frame 24 of 30) and then it seems to reach a certain point and think to itself "What the hell, let's just ignore the chair and forget that I have to collide with it." And the result is as the picture shows. I tried those cryptic "polygon against vertex" options in all four combinations and either produced no change or, when the second box was ticked, a crash occurred at frame 5 of the simulation.

I was hoping to use dynamics for some scenes in a story I'm illustrating where conformers just won't work, and the woman-sitting-with-crossed-legs pose at this point is looking even further away than I had feared.

Yea, experimenting around with all the dynamic settings is confusing and tedious .. and often enough just a plain mystery LOL

But once you got them right, I think it really looks great.

johnpf, may I ask you, what "collision depth" and collision offset" values you used in this simulation? And will lowering the 2 values bring the skirt closer to lie down over the thighs?

The cloth room uses the animation timeline to allow easier draping to a final pose. Technically it seems easier to calculate cloth path and collisions that way.  Longer cloth sims take more memory but reduce the amount of distance the cloth has to travel in each step.

I prefer 5- 10 frames  at the end of the sim where the cloth remaons motionless. If the cloth is still moving at the final frame I add frames and recalculate. 

The various collision types can help if your polygons are a bit large or you are trying to drape cloth over something pointy. Using them increases the simulation time , a lot.

The skirt front edge in the last post to me looks like a collision offset issue.

with the pic of the woman sitting with knees up and arms behind her . I would start with her hip raised so her thighs and body are horizontal and the coth sim runs for say 20 frames, then slower her hip to final position over maybe another 40 frames. Cloth self-collision should be used in this case to get the bunching of the skirt.

hi all,

I'm glad to help you out on this. It doesn't take a month, trust me. But perhaps each one of you, or just Robynsveil, is able to wrap up the debate into some questions for me to address.

BTW I'writing a tutorial on this aimed at non-tech users like artists and photographers, but I won't let you wait till it's finished. I'm happy to share right now.

Perhaps I can kick off with the following.

Like all 3D, Poser is about 3D meshes. It cannot create them, but it has (limited) tools for deforming them. The root of all is a bones-driven deform, you can Pose all meshes (tables, houses, figures, clothes, hair, ...) by altering the relative posing of "bone"pseudo-objects which in turn drive the deform of the surrounding 3D mesh. You can create and alter (and just view) bone structures in the Setup Room. Here you can turn table-legs of a straight prop into legs, and make it walk. When object A conforms to B, it means they will share the same bone structure so with the same bone (say Left forearm) you drive the deformation of Vicky as well as the sleeve of her jacket, etc.

Any mesh also can get deformed by magnets and morphs. The magnet will push and pull to the vertexes (points) of the 3D mesh, and morphs are just (partial) alternative meshes. When you have a "0" and a "1" alternative, for each relevant vertex of a mesh, you can take middle positions as well with a simple dial. This way, you can make expressions to faces.

To some extent, the various ways can be combined: the morph amount is driven by the bone position. This way, one can make muscles buldge while arms are bending.

A third way is simulation. used for hair and cloth, but not necesserily for clothing or other body portions. the hair-sim is also fun for grass, streaks and strings, while the cloth-sim is great for curtains, flags, drapery, and covers over statues and cars in exhibitions. The sims not only react to reposing and morphing an underlying figure, but they also respond to gravity and wind, or natural forces alike (think: long hair of a mermaid swimming against the stream). Grass and flags in the wind, that simple.

Sims are designed to make complex deforms simple for you. Just put an oldtimer car in your scene, hold the hires square primitive as a sheet some feet above it, and just drop (drape) the sheet in the cloth sim. It takes a complex form, and in the case you use poser to generate the examples for your oil painting (the origin of Poser!), it tells you the way the cloth textures have to look like, folds included. Then image Vicky comes along, and put one foot on a corner of the sheet. Then the car slowly drives away, underneath it, while Vicky manages to keep standing up. Can you tell me how the cloth will deform over time? Poser does. And it does different for silk and thick plastic.

Now imagine Vicky to do a ballet piece, but not in tutu but in a long evening gown. In real life, the gown will have so much weight and such an air resistance that it will resist too strong movements, too strong pose-changes in too few animation frames.  Ever tried those strong moves in your just washed jeans? Some clothes will make some poses impossible. The sim will teach you all that. The parameters help you to tell latex form jeans from lace from studded leather. It makes a difference.

Hence, we're talking cloth room. not clothes room. Mind the difference. And please do mind that we're talking about a great feature in a $200 piece of software. We're not into $4000 SoftImage or alike. That's a completely different world, in a different solar system. Cloth sim in Poser is quite good actually, but limited and not perfect. Like the rest of it as well.

So, questions please. Fire at will. Or ignore me, whatever suits you best.

Quote - johnpf, may I ask you, what "collision depth" and collision offset" values you used in this simulation? And will lowering the 2 values bring the skirt closer to lie down over the thighs?

0.3 for both.

I tried other values, without much change in the upper values but getting lower the skirt began to sink into the thighs, around the hip-thigh area, in little 'puddles' (difficult to explain, but sort of like random areas of the skirt would sink through and then, once through, it would drag some of the surrounding mesh down with it).

Quote - So, questions please. Fire at will. Or ignore me, whatever suits you best.

Do you have any pictures (preview or full render, I don't mind) of successfully posed and simulated clothes? Something that isn't just a figure standing up, I mean. That's fairly easy, once you get the idea of what the Cloth Room does. It's the other poses, such as my sitting-on-a-chair pose, that I imagine dynamics would help with and where conformers don't even begin to work.

I'm asking because I know the theory behind the Cloth Room. There's no mystery there (for me, anyway). It's putting the theory into practice that, ever since I got Poser 6 and tried my first cloth simulation, results in me giving up as I encounter the usual things (already mentioned in this thread so far) that no amount of knowing the theory will actually put right.

johnpf: How many frames did you use in the simulation? it may be a combination of very low density and not enough frames, I'd sugest to you to start with the default setings and some more frames after that experiment with the setings.

Dynamics are great, no complications with morphs or rig, you just model a simple cloth give it a nice texture and it look great in any character.

I use dynamics since P5 and if for some of you some setings are criptics consider I'm not english speaker, it was basic martian lenguage LOL, anyway after some hours of experimentation I was able to handle it, even coreographed and constrained to add movements, and believe me, I'm far from being a genius :-) just forget to compare it with conforming, it make no sence and distract you.

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What I am addressing here, Ima70, is the question: why is the cloth room so daunting? What makes most Poser users give it a miss, even after they've had a bit of a go? And then consider those like John and myself, who have tackled more complex aspects of Poser like the Material Room who find the cloth room of extremely limited use, and fraught with frustration.

My contention is: it needs a conceptual facelift.

Look, you talk to people about modelling in Blender: the standard reply is that it is unneccessarily weird and arcane. They try it and find it unacceptably complicated. Nothing makes sense. Sure, it's free, but who wants to learn it? So, they turn to Hex and Wings and Anim8tor instead.

So, it's okay to fault Blender for having a difficult, inconsistent interface but ... whoa, you're not talking about Poser, are you, mate? Poser's perfect! Just ask Smith Micro: they'll tell you.

Poser's cloth room has issues. The labelling makes no sense to people like me. It does cause crashes for no apparent reason. The learning curve is too steep for something that is meant to be an alternative to conforming cloth.

No, I agree that conforming and dynamic aren't / can't be discussed in the same breath. However, what people see is this: Conforming...?? or Dynamic??? Which affords more consistent behaviour? You will have to agree that in order for dynamic to become more popular, more utilised and more stuff made for it, it needs a bit of demystification.

I'm not talking more tutes. I'm talking better interface.

I agree with RobynsVeil that Cloth Room (and other portions of the app too) could do with a makeover. The way they are is like turning simple cardriving into rocket science, it's too high tech and low-user oriented.

Jargon out, perhaps a Wizard in, essentials upfront, splitting advanced portions into tabs and a more user-problem oriented help (when this happens then do that for such reason). More?

On top of that, most manuals and so on are quite app oriented, they tell you what the menus, scripts, options and parameters are for. Mostly in tech-buzz. And most tuts address quite singular issues. So we don't need more of that, we need different ones, written from a user perspective. How to accomplish ... (sitting woman in gown, adding dynamics to comforming clothes, ...) and for what reason did one take this approach and what are reasonable alternatives. At various levels of expertise.

I take the example of lighting. No one has to tell a photographer about lighting his/her models, and there are sample of books available. But can anyone tell him/her how to emulate lightstrips, softboxes and ringflashes in Poser? And how to match the lighting between the Poser foreground and the Vue background scene? And how to emulate the outdoor lighting in a polar scene?

Well, that's my view. They can make some steps at SM. In the meantime, I can try to contribute a bit myself, in order to stay in the positive energy mode. Answering questions, help others, bundling knowledge in a tut to avoid having to tell the same story over and over again. 

Happy Posing.

Brilliant suggestions and ideas... most of which I could never have come up with. Pity that SM 1) don't realise that the cloth room could do with a bit of work and 2) more people don't write SM with these sorts of excellent ideas. They're under the impression all is perfect in Cloth Room World:

"Overall the feedback that you described from others is not something we have had provided to us. If these users truly want to see changes, they need to contact Support with examples of issues they encounter or changes they would like to see. The Cloth Room and its settings have a higher Learning Curve than the base program, but once mastered and understood the results are excellent."

:blink:

It would be nice if the the cloth room could recognize conforming clothing, and simply wnhance it further, rather than insist on be a whole separate technology.  that it could simply read the different body parts of the clothing, and drap them around the body parts of the figure in a natural way.

dph

hi RobynsVeil,

I like the quote.
It sounds like Ford presenting their T-model a hundred years ago. We don't have customers asking for other colors, you do want black (although you may not be aware yourself). And of course no customer ever asked for any improvements on the 100-gauges dashboard, its not our fault you don't have an MSc. Just get one.
Or: it has a higher learning curve than a bike, but once mastered and understood the results are excellent.  

I'm going to like the last part of this more and more. It applies to my Christmas meals as well (once mastered...), I'll put it on the menu cards. I'll put it in my tutorials as wel (no, it's not my bad writing, it's your brain!). Oh dear, this has no end.

You made my day, thanks a lot.

Quote - It would be nice if the the cloth room could recognize conforming clothing, and simply wnhance it further, rather than insist on be a whole separate technology.  that it could simply read the different body parts of the clothing, and drap them around the body parts of the figure in a natural way.

dph

That Would be great!! dph, that's something similar to Daz Studio dynamics,you load a dynamic cloth, conform to the character, it move with the pose, then you drape it, but unfortunatelly that would make the proces of creation of a cloth not easy for most people, I think you shuold lear to rig, but it would make the proces of using dynamics way better for most people I think

Quote - hi RobynsVeil,

I like the quote.
It sounds like Ford presenting their T-model a hundred years ago. We don't have customers asking for other colors, you do want black (although you may not be aware yourself). And of course no customer ever asked for any improvements on the 100-gauges dashboard, its not our fault you don't have an MSc. Just get one.
Or: it has a higher learning curve than a bike, but once mastered and understood the results are excellent.  

I'm going to like the last part of this more and more. It applies to my Christmas meals as well (once mastered...), I'll put it on the menu cards. I'll put it in my tutorials as wel (no, it's not my bad writing, it's your brain!). Oh dear, this has no end.

You made my day, thanks a lot.

aRTBee, you provided me with my first real laugh today, for which I fervently thank YOU! I just LOVE it when people run with ideas... :biggrin:

Quote - It would be nice if the the cloth room could recognize conforming clothing, and simply wnhance it further, rather than insist on be a whole separate technology.  that it could simply read the different body parts of the clothing, and drap them around the body parts of the figure in a natural way.

dph

agaain :)  

if the mesh model from the cloth is good you can use it .

my conforming pants and shirt will always work in the cloth room. because 99% of the mesh is welded together.

a lot of models from DAZ have for example sleeves and body seperate. so when you calculate the dynamics it will not work on the body.again it has everythign  to do with the OBJ model. ;)

that said you can already use conforming cloth in the cloth room.he he he ;)

I really don't want to sound ungrateful but there's a danger I might... but... anyway.

What we need is for someone who does use the Cloth Room and who does get consistently usable results to contribute to this thread and share his/her experience and knowledge.

As well meaning and generous as the advice so far has been, it does seem to me (and here's the bit where I might annoy people) that everyone so far has simply been commenting from the sidelines without having used the Cloth Room for anything other than a square draped over a cube. That's why I asked if someone had actual pictures of their experience in the Cloth Room (which has gone unanswered). In the Materials For Dummies thread all that time ago, bagginsbill came in and posted results from which I'm sure many people (including myself) learned tons of stuff. As interesting as saying something like "Well, in the Material Room you can string together lots of nodes to create some realistic material effects. See, you can do math calculations and all kinds of really neat stuff!" might have been, it really only would have helped someone who had no idea what the Material Room was for. Instead, the pictures that bb posted showed that he had the experience and knowledge to understand what was really going on. Same with the Cloth Room. I think everyone who is even semi-proficient with Poser knows what the Cloth Room is for. It's the next dozen steps that are being sought here. Requests such as "This value here, can you show me what effect it will have on my draped cloak if I double its value?" being addressed are infinitely more useful to everyone than paraphrases from (what could easily be) a Poser advert's features list.

So... simple request: Has anyone here managed successfully to use dynamic clothing on a figure doing something like sitting on a chair? If so, can you post pictures and discuss the settings and technique you used?

That is pretty much what my intent was, John, when I started this thread. May the Bagginsbill of the Cloth Room please raise his or her hand!

Apparently, there are several Poser artists who have attained a significant level of profficiency in this area. I've read some of the tutorials they recommend, but fail to get the same "Aha!" ... possibly my brain (winks at aRTBee)...

My first question to them would be: most instances of going from T - pose to whatever pose would take a real human more than one second, which is what Poser gives us with 30 frames, right? 30 frames/second? So, for most poses, we should have it set up for at least 60 seconds or even 90... yes, 3 seconds is a long time, but sit down in an easy chair, fold your hands in your lap and cross one knee over the other... and do this in a silk dress. 3 seconds is rushing it, unless you're not worried about being inelegant.

Point being: how many seconds is too long? What is the longest frame session you've created? Why is it frames and not fractions of a second, anyway?

(Okay, so there was more than one question.... but they were related! :biggrin:)

this is how i learned to work in the cloth room.

first i tryed to understand all the settings. this was done with experimenting in the cloth room with the numbers.

then i spend months on google searching for ILM,WETA and pixar articles about cloth simulation.how they apporoach. they layer cloth. they first simulate the cloth under the jacket and pants. then they simulate the next cloth on top of it. that way they get good results.

the more frames you use the better the simulation will be.

My wish, too.

Quote - Apparently, there are several Poser artists who have attained a significant level of profficiency in this area.

I'm starting to doubt that anyone has actually used the Cloth Room to do anything more than simply posing a figure in a standing-up or, at most, lounging-on-the-ground pose. Okay, so this thread is not exactly weeks old, but so far the response has definitely not been "Look at this picture I did where my character is doing this everyday-but-still-complicated pose. And here's how I did it..." It's been theory, more theory, and "This is how it should work" from the sidelines.

Anyway... the attached picture. I swapped out the previous skirt for a longer one and used the exact settings as before. Look at the difference. I doubt anyone could have predicted that this skirt would do those things with the precise same settings as the first one.

Problem areas:

1. Skirt sinking through the thighs. It started out okay but then with just a few frames to go, it started to sink through her legs. Why? Why obey the collision and then decide, without any apparent cause, to act as if it weren't there?

2. Just as in yesterday's skirt, this one has also gone straight through the chair. It worked, up to a point, and then it just sailed right through. And before anyone asks... at no time does the character actually intersect the chair. I made sure that there was a gap of a few millimetres between her thighs and the chair so the skirt material could sit betwen flesh and wood comfortably.

3. Some strange breaking of the mesh around the waistband of the skirt (it's even worse on the other side).

Every simulation I've tried (yesterday and today) was at 30 frames and with 15 steps per frame.

I think I've just about reached that familiar old "Why am I even bothering with this useless thing?" point, unless someone can offer some info that actually does work and can explain why it works with their settings and not with the ones I've been trying.

And yes... I realize I'm probably coming over as being grumpy and miserable here. It's a justified grumpy and miserable! This should work. I know the theory, I know the thinking behind it, and I'm intelligent enough to make educated guesses at what's what. So why, after almost two solid days of working on this, is even the most basic thing (i.e., fabric not passing through something you've asked it to collide with) not working?

Frustration is not even close to describing it.

What are your collision settings? From the rim of your skirt it looks like the skirt's polygons are rather large. The default collision option (in "Simulation settings") is "cloth vertex against object polygon", but this is only good for a (relative) high-poly cloth against a low-poly figure. If you have a higher-poly collider, you have to use the "object vertex against cloth polygon", too. And if you have outstanding edges (like the 90deg-angles in your chair, or the rim of your skirt) in your collision, you should use the "polygon against polygon" option.

Also note, that when setting your character on the chair, there should be enough space between the chair and the thigh for two collision offsets (one in direction of the thigh and on for the chair), so that the cloth can levitate freely between. Otherwise the cloth-simulator does not know in which direction to move and the result is basically random.

Oh this is an IMPORTANT threat (sorry for shouting)

David and I are trying to get Posette to sit in a floor length dress with a full skirt. What a horror this is turning out to be. We have read all the tutorials, we are following the instructions to the letter (He in Israel, me in South Africa).

Drape frames (there are five drape frames) take forever. There is a readout with large numbers and obscure decimals. What is that about?

Cloth Collision options? What do those really do? I tried to run with just the default to save time, but the simulation fails at frame zero with no explanation.

Or (as it did for David) it runs all day and then fails at some random frame with no explanation.

It should not be this difficult to get a woman to sit in a skirt.

Robyn, your comments on the manual and the Smith Micro feedback are absolutely to the point. Thank you for opening this discussion.

Please note that I use a really bad dynamic dress for P5 Judy, I'm shure that with a better one with more polis it would have worked better.

Look how I set the scene in the first picture, the cube will be my chair

then move to frame 30 and set character pose the way I want in 2nd picture, and most importan I move and scale the cube to the right position and size

note in picture 3 how I use an small space between the char and the sit.

and the picture 4 is the result after 60 frames, with some more frames, it may have look better, the same adjusting the constrain group for the top area.

Hope somebody find it useful in same way. :-)

Quote - Oh this is an IMPORTANT threat (sorry for shouting)

threat?

everybody! get back! she's got a copy of poser!

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/full.php?image_id=2035024

Obviously it's possible to use the cloth room on a figure that's sitting down ;o).

ima70 has the right idea by keeping the figure slightly above the surface it's sitting on. If there's a tiny space there between the cloth and the chair, the cloth is less likely to sink into the chair.

As for the above image: I used two different settings for these dresses - one slightly stiffer for the black one and one heavier and more drapey for the other two since they are velvet. I didn't use any specific formula. I just kept playing with the settings until they looked right. No rocket science there ;o).

Laurie

That picture Laurie make notorious how nice dynamics can look :-) really beautiful,

Please note that in if you run the animation in the way I do it you will see the sit (cube in my case) moving and growing toward the characater until frame 30

My apologies for the Freudian slip!

I've given up on my own attempts at such a pose for now and gone back to a simpler pose.

The attached picture shows a dynamic skirt simulated with the following settings...

Frames: 60
Steps per frame: 15
Object vertex against cloth polygon: Off
Object polygon against cloth polygon: On
Cloth self-collision: On

Collision Offset: 0.3
Collision Depth: 0.3
Static Friction: 0.5
Dynamic Friction: 0.1

Collision Friction: No
Fold Resistance: 40
Shear Resistance: 150
Stretch Resistance: 100
Stretch Damping: 0.1
Cloth Density: 0.1
Cloth Self-friction: 0.5
Static Friction: 0.8
Dynamic Friction: 0.6
Air Damping: 0.02

Groups
Constrained: Waistband vertices
Default: Everything else

The skirt was set to collide with the figure's hip, abdomen, buttocks, and thighs, and also with the hip and abdomen of the vest.

A few small dots of poke-through and some strange wiggly effects on the waistband. From this angle, it looks like the skirt waistband might be sinking into the vest but it's not... the wiggly effect seems to be the vertices of the waistband jumping around a bit, several millimetres away from touching the vest.

Does anyone have any suggestions about how to change the settings and/or do something else to remove these problems? I mean, actual numbers and techniques to try, since "Try lowering value X" could mean I spend the next week trying every possible lower value for X! If anyone offers some decent-sounding suggestions, I'll give them a go and post the results.

Quote - Just watching PhilC's brilliant tutorial on dynamics. Interesting point was that he initially wondered why an animation was necessary when all he was creating was a still image. He subsequently 'realised' that in order for the cloth to follow the body, it had to go through the animation.

Whilst this served as sufficient reason for Phil, being not as bright as he is, I still don't get it. You can drape cloth in Blender without going through an entire animation process with the figure at zero pose. Why can't Poser do that?

Having a really hard time getting excited with this:

...when I'm also playing with this:

Oh, I've had those too, the black parts where it looks like the mesh just went away.. why does it do that?

Cloth room is very frustrating, imo, and I noticed the same thing you did on the dial parameters, why is one 0 to 1 and one 0 to 1000?

Delaney

Thanks, ice-boy, for sharing your approach to learning the Cloth Room's mysteries. Ice-boy does a pretty credible job with this feature of Poser. So, his approach has validity, to my view. His was perhaps not the easiest or most straight-forward way to learn something about a programme's feature, but effective... all credit to ice-boy for his persistence.

How about the other gurus? Was the manual all that clear to you? Or did you have to flesh out your understanding from other sources? Or was it the tried-and-true "let's try this and see what happens..." method?

I find it interesting how, when faced with a challenging problem that appears resistant to cracking, we first assume that our intelligence isn't up to the task. This is one case in point. Mind you, there are those who claim using dynamic cloth is easier than fiddling with conforming... be curious to know what exactly was meant by "easier".

Quote - I just kept playing with the settings until they looked right. No rocket science there

I'm going to assume that you mean these: Collision Offset: 0.3
Collision Depth: 0.3
Static Friction: 0.5
Dynamic Friction: 0.1

Collision Friction: No
Fold Resistance: 40
Shear Resistance: 150
Stretch Resistance: 100
Stretch Damping: 0.1
Cloth Density: 0.1
Cloth Self-friction: 0.5
Static Friction: 0.8
Dynamic Friction: 0.6
Air Damping: 0.02

settings.

We have that guide for cloth types from the SM site, which is what I used. The first graph looked like, er, rocket science, and the second section was what I used to create that render with the huge holes in the dress. I look at your images, Laurie - they are mouth-watering - and I guess the exact values and approach are going to be your little secret, but I'm actually not looking for a handout, I'm wondering how in the heck did you know which dials to fiddle with? This IS rocket science to the rest of us mere mortals, Laurie. Which is the point of this thread. Some people just get it, and other can muck around and muck around until the cows come home and eventually leave because it just never gels for them.

Like me, for one. I can program Python scripts to generate materials so I sort-of think I'm not exactly excessively challenged - Bagginsbill may have other thoughts on this :biggrin: - but this whole area appears more complex than it needs to be. Particularly when I've tried dynamics in other programmes and the concepts seems so much more straight-forward.

I'm going to be as persistent as ice-boy and probably infinitely more annoying in the process of learning. I do wish to bring to light the fact that SM think that 1) this is a finished, well-thought out feature in need of no further development and 2) any issues that users might have with it are training issues that with enough time and effort can be dealt with. Nothing wrong with the programme: it's us.

Sorry I didn't add a chair etc but this was a test of the dress. By the way that is a hybrid dress the top is conforming and the skit is the dynamic group. I used soft select on the "hem" of the skirt to keep it's shape, which works good about 80% of the time, sometimes it causes and odd effect but again I've been able to correct that with a touch of the morph brush or even a little post work.

I know everyone ones a "one button" answer but as in most art, don;t be afraid of using ALL of the available tools.

click on the picture for a larger view.

Quote - I know everyone ones a "one button" answer

I don't! For every proper render I do, I spend about 60-70% of my time in the Material Room tweaking and adding nodes and reconnecting and sorting out the mess that most vendors produce in terms of materials. And I don't mind spending that time, either, because I know that what I'm doing is (1) raising the picture to the standard I'm going to be happier with, and (2) adding my own 'signature' to the over-all look of the thing.

So... no. If I knew exactly what observable effect a parameter has on my simulation (just as, say, in the Material Room I know what each node can do, what it can't do, and any pecularities about it that I've discovered) then I'd willingly spend as much time as possible getting those parameters dialed in just right.

But so far, there still haven't been any actual numbers for me to try and then, I hope, go "Ah, yes! I see what this value is doing and why my guess was so wrong!" I imagine that RobynsVeil had the idea in her mind that this thread might produce something more than being content with random dial twiddling until things look right. If not, I certainly do.

See, if I want a particular material I have a very good idea how to get it. I might not get it first time, but I know the approach I need, what nodes to plug in where, all of that. At the moment, if I want a particular type of fabric simulation, I have no base from which to start except just randomly moving stuff about until things look right. That approach is not one anyone should be using, if they can help it.

By the way... I fixed the last skirt simulation. Yes, through random tweaking, but it worked and it was something that no one had even hinted at so far. I won't mention what it is for anyone who finds it an interesting challenge to guess.

Quote - > Quote - I just kept playing with the settings until they looked right. No rocket science there

I'm going to assume that you mean these: Collision Offset: 0.3
Collision Depth: 0.3
Static Friction: 0.5
Dynamic Friction: 0.1

Collision Friction: No
Fold Resistance: 40
Shear Resistance: 150
Stretch Resistance: 100
Stretch Damping: 0.1
Cloth Density: 0.1
Cloth Self-friction: 0.5
Static Friction: 0.8
Dynamic Friction: 0.6
Air Damping: 0.02

settings.

In no way was I implying that I am brilliant and everyone else is dense. It's just that I have a tendency, when faced with a particular challenge, to keep at it, sometimes ad nauseum. I stop when I get what I'm after. I, like a lot of you, don't really understand why certain things work and why certain things don't and I agree with Delaney that the settings are all over the place as far as decimal point. I'm just tenacious is all, but certainly not any smarter than anyone else...lol.

Laurie

Quote - But so far, there still haven't been any actual numbers for me to try and then, I hope, go "Ah, yes! I see what this value is doing and why my guess was so wrong!" I imagine that RobynsVeil had the idea in her mind that this thread might produce something more than being content with random dial twiddling until things look right. If not, I certainly do.

Precisely, John. The hit-and-miss aproach doesn't work in the material room: Bagginsbill proved that quite clearly. And in order to get reasonably good results in this cloth room, a comprehensive understanding of the parameters and variables one deals with is going to ensure a much quicker, more consistent success ratio than the trial-and-error approach.

You are lucky (and amazingly good!), Laurie. You have intuitively met with success with your experiments - your images are a standard to aspire to! I mean that in all sincerity. For the rest of us plodding phlegmatics, we need a more definable approach, one where the interface itself doesn't obscure the meanings of dials with arcane names and where we can go to the right dial knowing this is what we need to manipulate to achieve the desired effect. This is where SM needs to re-think things, if they want this feature to be more accessible.

Heh! Two days of nothing but cloth simulations, and I've finally worked something out. Well... I've worked a few things out (mainly how not to do things), but I've come to the conclusion that the most influential parameter (so far) is the Cloth Density value in section 4 "Dynamics Controls".

At first, I assumed (incorrectly, it turns out) that this would somehow affect how the cloth bends and folds. After all, something that's incredibly dense will fold less easily than something that's a lot less dense. How wrong I was! Instead, the reverse sometimes happens from what you'd expect with a 'dense' (using my incorrect definition) cloth.

What I noticed was that if the fabric has a very low c.d. (0.01 or thereabouts) it will float. Not actually floating in the air, but it will be only slightly affected by gravity and it won't bend much due only to gravity. A collision mesh pushing on 0.01 fabric will bend it, but left to its own devices and only having gravity exert any force on it, 0.01 fabric doesn't want to bend very much. Now, at first, this was strange. Something that's not dense at all should fold instantly! Imagine the density of tissue paper... it barely keeps its shape if you suspend it and let gravity drag it down. And the opposite was true, too... a high c.d. of 0.3 or higher made the fabric bend due to gravity almost instantly. Huh? It's dense! Cardboard and wood and cement, they're dense, and they don't bend from gravity much!

Of course, if you dissociate the idea that the cloth is actually 'dense' in the real world sense and, instead, imagine that density here refers to the mass of the fabric it all makes more sense. Even though gravity affects all mass in the same way (cf. hammers and feathers being dropped on the moon!), the density here refers to what I'm going to call the bendy-resistance strength of the material. Tissue paper (or a fabric at c.d. 0.01) will bend due to gravity much less than a plank of wood (of c.d. something huge), if wood could bend in the way that fabrics do. This is because tissue paper has a lower bendy-resistance stength. Gravity will make it want to bend less than the higher c.d. fabrics with their much higher bendy-resistance strength.

What does this mean for simulations? Well, if you have a floaty garment, try increasing the Cloth Density. It should start to drape in a way that makes it point much straighter to the ground.

Even more important is what I've discovered about high Cloth Density values. A high c.d. will actually over-ride your collision settings. That fabric really wants to be affected by the downward pull of gravity, and nothing's going to get in its way! Which explains my original picture with the skirt sinking through the figure's thighs. The c.d. was too high, and once the simulation had reached a certain point (I'm not sure why or what that point is... further testing is needed), it will start to plough its way through anything, even the things that prior to that tipping point it was happily colliding with.