Has anyone ever actually been able to make capes work?

AliPop

I've seen alot of capes on the store. And I've bought most of them, because they look great and I have so many applications for them, but I have never been able to make them work, even with dForce simulation. There's always some kind of problem like, if the hands are inside the cape, the simulation will always clip through any nails or wrist accessories. And for some reason they are always glued to the bottom parts of the breasts on females, so no matter how I simulate it, it's like it's taped to the chest. This also seems to create a situation where I can't really "open" a cape unless it's designed from the start to be open. There are so many cases where I wish I could literally see the billions of vertices and just manually grab and move them into place. Or at least unglue the pieces that are stuck in place.

 

I should also note I've purchased one of the dForce tutorials here on the site to try and learn how to use it, but the presentation was so all over the place, I couldn't really absorb anything useful. Yet surely this isn't the case for everyone. There has to be something to it that just hasn't clicked yet. At one point while going through my wardrobe, randomly applying items to try and create a cohesive outfit, I came across the skirt from https://www.daz3d.com/school-girl-costume-set-for-genesis-8-females and while skirts tend to have a bit of issue with fitting for me, I noticed this one has a particular morph called "dForce Ready" which literally just opens the skirt all the way out, as if the person was standing on top of a big fan. And what this did, is whenever you did the simulation, because of this pose, it basically became 100% perfect no matter what shape or pose was in play. Because there's enough space for the skirt to properly fall over whatever surfaces are in the path of simulation. Yet with bigger and more complex things like capes, they always seem to be too snug or too restrictive to do this sort of sim preperation. And at that rate it seems like it would be more effective to go nuclear and just pull everything into blender and manually put it together correctly. But that's not something I am able to do yet. So surely there is some trick or something to making these capes work.

scorpio

Have you tried using an animation timeline to do the dforce draping?

AliPop

I have tried using the timeline to give the simulation more "time" to work, however this doesn't do much for the result. As I mentioned, I watched the tutorial I bought to try and pick up some tips, but the presentation meant alot got lost in translation, at least for me. 

 

So from frame 0 I have the "default" pose, then from 10 is the actual pose I want, and then I give it until frame 30 to settle. Is there anything to this technique I am missing? From the anecdote I gave on the skirt I used, it seems like if I could just grab the whole cape and pull it out and up, and then let it collapse into place, that would give a good result, but many of these items don't seem to have a "dForce Ready" pose/morph like that.

Richard Haseltine

AliPop said:

I have tried using the timeline to give the simulation more "time" to work, however this doesn't do much for the result. As I mentioned, I watched the tutorial I bought to try and pick up some tips, but the presentation meant alot got lost in translation, at least for me. 

 

So from frame 0 I have the "default" pose, then from 10 is the actual pose I want, and then I give it until frame 30 to settle. Is there anything to this technique I am missing? From the anecdote I gave on the skirt I used, it seems like if I could just grab the whole cape and pull it out and up, and then let it collapse into place, that would give a good result, but many of these items don't seem to have a "dForce Ready" pose/morph like that.

The advantage of using the Timeline is that you ca set staging poins, rather than have every bone move from staring position to final pose without regard to what elese is going on (which can lead to awkward snagging, or even self-intersection causing the clothing to explode). Don't forget to try the better options for collision detection, and you may also want to increase he number of subframe s or iterations per sub-frame to give the simulation more time to adjust as things change.

felis

I agree that using the timeline is much better for controle of what is going on.

But maybe try to post an image of the pose you're trying to get the cape to work with.