How to properly Sim dForce hair with no "starter morph"?

mikethe3dguy

I have Lady Littlefox's dForce Lexi hair, and I can simulate it just fine with standard characters and thin clothing. But for a figure wearing a particular dress, the clothing on one of the shoulders is already inside the dress mesh. So of course when I render that's where it remains. I am used to dForce hair with "starter" poses (Linday) that lift the hair up, or up and to the left side, up to the right, etc, so you can just simulate and it drops into place. There are morphs for this hair but when I use them to lift the hair up and then simulate, the hair doesn't fall into place - it seems held in place or something by the morphs. Anyone know how to get past this?

On a related sidenote, it frustrates me to no end that 90% of the products in the Daz store have no user instructions or tutorial, and there seems no established way to contact the vendor with questions, or at least it's optional for the vendor (commercial products forum). I waste ridiculous amounts of time trying to "figure out" new products when a simple one page tutorial pdf would answer 90% of user problems. This is a huge problem with Daz IMO. Create a product support path!

felis

Is the intersecting just with the dress loaded or is the character also posed?

Maybe a picture how it looks before simulation?

AgitatedRiot

I'm kind of weird so my method has a madness to it. I flip the actor upside simulate for a bit. Flip back upright put clothes on Pose and simulate until the hair comes to rest on the clothing. (Note: you could end up with funky hairstyles once in the while.)

mikethe3dguy

felis said:

Is the intersecting just with the dress loaded or is the character also posed?

Maybe a picture how it looks before simulation?

Your question and comment helped me to solve this, thank you! I realized that I hadn't tried turning "Start from Memorized Pose" on, which might fix my problem. As it turns out, it did, but it also led me to discover a quirk or issue with the hair that's also been slowing me down:

I had changed dForce Collision Mode from "Better" to "Best" which is a normal thing you do when making sure the dForce item has precision in avoiding slight collisions with objects. I discovered that Lexi Hair REALLY hates that setting. When you change that setting to Best, the hair seems to over-correct, and almost push itself away from the collision object, such that it ends up going from a very straight hair hanging down vertically, to basically a puffed-out bouffant! That issue is what made me think the hair was hanging up on the morphs I applied before simulation.

Which all comes back around to my sidenote comment about there rarely being a tutorial or instruction PDF included with products that need it. I have now wasted probably an hour and a half to two hours dealing ith this issue that could have been avoided by spending 3-5 minutes reading a tutorial PDF. Sometimes I wonder if Daz doesn't require vendors to provide instructions with every product because it makes it more attractive to vendors, who might look at writing instructions as a chore.

mikethe3dguy

AgitatedRiot said:

I'm kind of weird so my method has a madness to it. I flip the actor upside simulate for a bit. Flip back upright put clothes on Pose and simulate until the hair comes to rest on the clothing. (Note: you could end up with funky hairstyles once in the while.)

Yeah I've done stuff like that too. There's a limit to how many hoops I'm willing to jump through though since I do many renders with the same figures in all sorts of different poses. Imagine setting that kind of sim animation up for a character twenty times for twenty separate poses!