Calculating soft body physics on a character
I glanced over a topic displaying samples of different Carrara user's attempts of applying dynamic clothes to their models with about 80% success rate.
Here's my issue:
I'm trying to simulate physics of a single object shaped shirt onto a character I created several years ago. After about 15 frames of simulation, nothing changed on the shirt's form or position.
I even discovered that the Shirt object being simulated onto this character can not be a child in the tree of the character it's trying to simulate flowing cloth onto, otherwise it won't simulate anywhere near or on it. I have to keep the shirt object separate from the character on the menu and not in the physical tree it's self, but use the "soft body attachment" edit menu's available tree option, if I wanted the object to follow the character around while animated.
The other issue is why is it taking so long just to simulate this shirt shape single object onto this character when Poser would be able to simulate well enough and do the job in half the time?
Any help, suggestions and feedback would be appreciated
Comments
Not sure where to start, cuz your question covers a lot of stuff. But here are some key factors to consider:
1. Carrara's Bullet cloth sim is still in beta (or whatever the unfinished status is), and a lot of stuff doesn't work.
2. They disabled the ability of cloth to collide with moving characters.
3. There are some key settings you need to understand and configure correctly to get a decent cloth sim. I'd suggest searching the archives for the info floating around on it. I did a thread on the basic settings a year or two ago, and 3DAge has some stuff on some of the basics.
Other than that, maybe if you can post some specific examples of the troubles you're having it will be easier to assist.
Here's a link to the info I posted a while ago about Bullet settings. It was directed to rigid body sims, but also most of it applies also to cloth sims.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/23632/
These two known facts tells me enough to abandon what I'm trying to accomplish with my moving animated character and just go back to using Poser software for cloth simulation until Daz can start making some progress with their soft body cloth simulation that was introduced a couple years ago, maybe more if I'm not mistaking. I wonder what Carrara 9 pro has in store if it will ever debut.
Thanks for your help and feedback. I'll take a look at that link you provided.
Yeah, sounds like you've got the right plan. Honestly, DAZ's implementation of Bullet cloth in Carrara is, and has been for a long time, just horrendous. Poser's cloth was light years ahead DECADES ago. And Carrara is falling behind even more. After all these years they couldn't even implement a fully functional public domain software solution, which has been working wonderfully in apps like Blender and LW and others.
Yeah, there are painful workarounds I suppose if you're really really determined to do it in Carrara (for whatever reason), but if you can do it in Poser or elsewhere then I think that's a far better plan.
Last time I used Poser was version 6 back in 2008-09. I used it then to create cloth and hair simulation only to import the poser animation, cloth and hair simulation into Carrara 6 pro back then. Worked fine. I'm glad Smith Micro is offering an upgrade to Poser 10 from Poser 6 now for just under $50. Great deal for an upgrade price. I would have purchased Poser Pro 2014 but trying to save money for a Summer trip and Poser Pro is a little more than what I need at this point. Thanks again.
There is a thread on how to set up working softbody cloth on a moving figure, but it does take some time and trouble to set it up (essentially there needs to be an invisible 'undersuit' of soft body cloth on the figure for the visible cloth to collide with). The simulations are relatively fast, but first setting it up and creating that invisible undersuit can take some time and be a pain. Stringtheory came up with the ingenius method, and it does work, here's the thread if you're interested: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/49954/
I think in most instances I can agree with the sentiment that if you have another way of doing dynamic cloth it's probably more efficient to do it there instead. There's a new thread on Rendo poser forums about a 3rd party plugin coming in (estimated) Sept that looks really great for dynamic cloth sim in Poser (I realize Poser already has a cloth sim, but this new plugin looks miles better), and Iclone 6 has what looks like a very good way to make conforming clothes at least partially dynamic, I've been eyeing both solutions (at last report, Iclone's 3dxchange exporter isn't exporting the dynamic cloth movement right, which is the one thing holding me back from grabbing Iclone6 and using that to set up my animation figure and cloth movement and then exporting to Carrara to put into the scene and render).
That's the exact topic I glanced over just looking at some of the images and gif animations showing about 80% success rate on simulating the cloth without going past any of the arms or legs etc. This invisible cloth formed to the body underneath the soft body cloth is nothing new; people were doing similar stuff with Poser 5 even professional Maya developers before "EOVIA's" Carrara teamed up with "Curious Labs's" Poser for Poser animation imports utilizing a integration software called transposer. It's a great solution nonetheless.