Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Yes, it can help. See this example:
In this case, the thickeness was rather large because I used it in the promo video and wanted to emphasize the thickening effect of the plugin. But lower values of thickness may also fix the poke through.
Are there any known issues with installing? It shows up in DIM and appears to install properly, but it doesn't show up anywhere in smart content or the content directory and the files don't actually seem to have gotten downloaded/installed. Installing manually from the order page doesn't work either. I'm using the latest Daz build and haven't had issues with anything else recently.
Scratch that, apparently it was waiting for me to say something about it. :D Maybe it was my internet.
You need to go to Help/About Installed Plugins and put in the serial number, then restart DS. There will then be a pane for the plugin.
Hello @Alberto , thank you for making this cool product and I have another question: goes the thicken procedure with the normals only or can we choose to thicken to the other side?
How to dForce simulate dynamic thickened object.
When I try dForce simulation, Daz Studio says, there is no dForce modifier on it.
it's probably better to dforce the original mesh and let the dynamic thickened object follow it.
you might want to turn off the thickened mesh for the simulation though and turn it on again when you're done if you're using the timeline otherwise it'll be slower.
if you really want to dforce the thickened object you'll probably have to use a static rather than dynamic
Thanks. Will try with static.
How to make the dynamic thickened object to follow it.
I parented dynamic to the original object, but it has not followed it.
dynamic with mesher turned on should automatically follow whatever base mesh its made from without needing any special options.
you may need to set the dynamic object to not visible in simulation as well otherwise it might interfere with the base object
Hello, Enchanted April.
You can use positive values inThickness to follow the normals, and negative values to thicken to the other side.
You don't have to parent the dynamic to the original object, only need to point its Geometric node property to the original object. And, after that, enable the Dynamic object.
If you changed positions, morphs or so in the original object, enable and disable the Dynamic object to synchronize it.
If you create an animation, set to 0 % the Completion property of the Dynamic object at the first frame of the timeline and 100% at the last frame.
Okay, so the Serial Number showed up yesterday early afternoon, and I immediately got started playing with it--and it works GREAT!.
Unfortunately, I had to shut down when some thunderstorms came in for the later part of the day. But so far, the Thickening function is fantastic! It's easy to use, and very intuitive. There are two options to get from it--one is to create a static thickened object that has no joints or motions available (which is the one I'm focused on right now), and the other option creates a dynamic object (which I haven't played with yet, but also seems to be something I'll need to look at the instructions to figure out how to use ATM).
The Millennium Dragonfolk, the Dakotaraptors, and many other figures were easily upgraded to their new effects. Copying the textures was the most important element to work on once the new Thickened object was created. Since all my original duplicated figures had the IRAY settings I wanted, all I had to do was copy those surfaces over to the new Thickened object, delete the old duplicated figures, and I'm done!
Still a few problems I still had to work around, but these are understandable and easily worked around....
1) If you notice the pose of the DAZ3 Dragon's wings in the picture from my original post above, I found the Thickening tool still left the underside of the Right Wing Membrane uncovered--but that was an easy fix: I just needed to make another thickened figure and slightly shift it down and to the side just enough to envelop the membrane's lower side. Crude but effective, however it does highlight that extreme poses may give less than ideal results.
2) another issue I had involves a figure that has elements Parented and FittedTo it. For example: Drago for G8Male--when I selected the G8Male figure, the thickener also grabbed the Tail and Wings that were both Parented and FitToo the G8Male. Why is this a problem? The Thickening process creates a static object in the same shape as the entire combined figure, but there were no Surface channels for the attached Tail or Wings--only the Surface channels for the Root figure was created. The solution for that was, I had to Unparent AND Unfit the attached figures--THAT now involves repositioning, and a bit of tweaking to manually put them back into position in relation to the G8Male figure. But once done, applying the Thickening process and copying their Surface channels over works great just like it did for all the other figures.
3) and I did see one other problem--the scene that I had built is a pretty extensive job as it is intended to be a location used pretty heavily in my project (much like the Enterprise Bridge set). The architecture is the Commander Bridge set, and I prepopulated the stations with various dragons, draconics, dinoraptors, etc.
With the original work I did, I had to duplicate all the characters to each have their own Life Support Field effect (which involved making 2 Duplicates of each character because of limitations in full body coverage that I simply couldn't get with a single modified Duplicated figure), so the total file size was between 7-8 Mb. The new work, however, after Thickening each character, copying over the textures from the LSF figures, and deleting the original LSF Duplicates, didn't save me any memory. In fact, the file is now 78 Mb! I'm not really sure why it's almost 10x as big. When the current test render is completed, I'll give another try with a fresh clean scene to see if this is normal.
Despite those issues, I REALLY like how the render is coming out, although I definitely had to dial down the emission value for the LSF effect applied to the Thickened geometries—it was a little too intense at the same settings that I used for the Duplicated figures. You'll see what I mean and be able to compare the results against one of the figures that didn't get changed: there is a 2nd Drago character in the upper right of the render that I have not changed yet because of it will need to have the wings and tail Unparented, UnFitted, and repositioned again before Thickening them. His emission settings is still original, and is 10x that of that for the Thickened objects. I'm not sure why the difference between this result and the Surface channels for my original efforts, but I'm certainly not complaining. This is fantastic!
I'll post the result here when the current test render is done in a few hours.
Thanks - will try something simple first.
Does it means, that it only works with animated timeline dForce simulations?
No. It also works with morphs, modifiers, scaling, translations, rotations, etc.
Moreover, it also works wiht static scenes. You can update the original object, and after sychronizing, the dynamic object will follow the original one. Or you can change the dynamic object parameters,as the thickness, and you'll see immediately the updates.
Glad you like it!
Okay, I had to interrupt the render because I was getting something VERY weird developing that shouldn't have anything to do with Alvin's Thickening product
I had to load up from my gallery because trying to attach files here suddenly started giving me more issues.
Everybody, (except the Drago for G8M at the right of the picture) has the Thickened copy of their figures, with Transparency and Emission set, and everything looks great.
The strangeness is related to the figures circled in RED -- they have some odd transparancies showing up, but I hadn't touched the textures of those figures when I applied the Thickening tool to them. I only copied the textures from my original work at creating the LSF effect and applied them solely to the newly created results of the Thickening tool. I didn't touch the textures for the Source Figures at all! All the proper body-parts are set to show, and their Source Figure textures are set to full opacity. So, why those two glitches? Weird.
Oh, just one more thing to keep in mind: I had originally assigned some of those Millennium Dragons to have some body-parts (horns and/or wings) initially hidden to imply different races on the ship. When I used the Thickener tool on them, those hidden body-parts were copied over, and I had to go through and use their Surface texture settings to hide them again. This isn't a problem or failinig of the Thickening tool, but it is something that could easily be overlooked, as I almost missed it myself.
Anyhow, hopefully, this shows some of the versatilty of Alvin's product. I think it's defenitely worth getting!
Thank you @Alberto , that's good to know!
Not that awesome considering the gap all around them between said sock and skin
... Fix one issue, always highlights others.
but Thickener is certainly awesome
My god this is super easy to use!
Haven't had the time to really dig in with it, but did several tests with it last night, and WOW! What an awesome plug-in! And it's so simple! Thanks so much!
easily fixed by using a negative value for the thickness. That will cause the thickener to thicken TOWARD the leg instead of away from it and probably preserve those folds better too. The only problem there is that it leaves a small "lip: around the edge of the mesh. Won't notice from a distance but will if close up. In cases like socks where you might want the fabric to look snug with the figure, you might want to add a smoothing modifier and add a LOT of negative thickness to the thickener so that the mesh actually goes into the figure's mesh. Here, the thickness is -1.50 and is intersecting with the figure's mesh.
Here are the socks from the Hospital Gown for G3F on G8F (I did not have the socks the other person was using). The first is not thickened, the second is using thickness at .25 and the third is using thickness at -.25.
Thank you for sharing these experiments and observations. I'm looking at buying it, but hoping someone can answer this question.
From what I've seen in this thread, it looks like the thickener is adding another obj of the "thickened" part to the original item to make it "thicker" (I may be off here, if some please elaborate).
How do you save out what you made? A scene subset? A wearable present with both objects selected?
It definitely makes a mesh. I know this because I tried to do a simulation with the thickened object turned on on a dynamic object. The dynamic mesh exploded because it hit the thickened object. LOL. Now, I either wait until I'm completely done doing sims and posing to create the thickened object, or I turn it off in Parameters before I do a sim and then turn it on again after the sim is complete.
This is a really nice plugin, but I did just run into a problem with it. In the Iray preview, after a while of rendering, the thickener mesh just kind of explodes.
This is a great plugin. However, I have one serious problem. When I move the frame count in the pane of the timeline, my mouse is always dragging. I can't create an animation as it is. This is clearly a bug in this plugin. I hope this issue will be fixed soon.
I've seen this too on dynamic objects. The frame marker gets attached to the mouse movement when you click on a frame number. A temporary fix is to click again which unleashes the connection and you can move the mouse without moving the marker. Alternatively, double-click to select a frame and the marker won't follow the mouse.
Thank you! I was able to resolve this issue by double-clicking on the frame number. But I still hope this issue will be fixed.
The thickener option of Stretch UV Map doesn't work as I expect for negative offsets. I get white artifacts in the border. Subdivision in border and Triangulate non planar facets didn't help when I tried those options.
This problem seems to be fixed with the 8/26/2021 update version 1.0.1.0. Thank you, Alberto!
Yep, I'm getting it too - only if I use negative values. Nothing I tried would fix it.
Another strange thing happend. The added border on the skirt bottom was separated from the garment and floating in mid air, when I didn't stretch the UV. This was with a positive offset. The garment is from dForce Chiffon Crop Top Dress.