Help with dforce
elhectro
Posts: 58
Hi. Can somebody recommend me a good and real tutorial for using dforce made for dummies? Not the "official" one from daz3d where they put a "wonderful" product but never say how terribly complex, slow, disappointing and unreliable, and extremely difficult to use it is. I can't understand why it begins with a "zero" pose that takes several minutes instead of working directly with the only frame I selected (or did they make it this inefficient?) I can't understand why it takes 15 min to get a single frame and finally only "destroying" it. I can't understand what's the purpose of selecting the simulation preset that came with the item, if in the end, the simulation will work on ALL CHARS and ALL ITEMS (even I selected visible in simulation OFF for all figures and clothes).
I was very happy working with my old Genesis gen1 & 2 items, but now that I moved to gen 8, I'm starting to regret it, because now I can't do anything manually....
Thanks a lot
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Comments
1-Turn the "Start Bones From Memorized Pose" Off
2-Freeze Simulation for the items you don't want to simulate
Your problem has nothing to do with G8
Please keep in mind two things :
1/ Daz is free. But all bundles, except the Daz Originals ones are made by anyone, you, me, my grandma, your neighbor. If some artists are really good and take good care of all little technical details before selling something, others don't always go deep enough and sell an "imperfect" bundle. I've seen for example countless so called dForce bundles that had only the default dForce Surfaces settings applied. Which proves that they didn't know much about dForce at all, or didn't want to bother doing that. Sometimes bundles sellers add dForce without knowing much about it, or without configuring weights and surfaces properly, only because it sells better this way.
2/ 3D can be fun, but fun doesn't mean easy. If you don't know anything about dForce, please don't shoot it in the face saying it's terrible. First read and take notes from the "manual" about dForce. And define properly dForce Surfaces for a garment to see if it fixes issues.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/203081/dforce-start-here
I've seen too many threads about "dForce doesn't work" when it actually works pretty fine when one understands all the options that define a garment's physics, and how the scene and the Genesis participate to its proper simulation.
When you buy a dForce item, the only thing you can usually be sure about is that the object has been 3D modeled properly and that everything is welded to prevent the cloth from falling appart.
If it doesn't work great out of the box, then it's the user's job to change a few parameters so that the simulation works better. It's only frustrating to do so when you don't know what the physics engine is. But when you're used to "drive" and control dForce rather than click simulate blindly then hope and pray for it to work, then things get better.
Your question is too vague and I have the feeling that you just want to click on 1 button without much thinking. Sadly (ironic as it's actually what's exciting about it), 3D is complex and necessitates a minimum of research on the user part. With a bit of practice, dForce is very useful and works fine. One just needs to get his hands dirty a bit with the tools at hand.
P.S : I often advice people who don't know... or don't want to know how dForce works and what physical parameters are, to use dForce Master - Cloth Simulation Presets as it's very useful to test in one click different Surface presets until you find one that works fine for the garment you bought. Default thumbnails for this useful bundle are really terrible and don't reflect in any way what the thumbnails do... but FenixPhoenix has been kind enough to test (what you should do) dForce presets and create renders of them that represent a much better way how each icon will influence the cloth behavior : dforce Master - Cloth Simulation Presets Unofficial Visual Guide
dForce Companion 2.0 is, even for someone who understands what each Surface slider means, also quiet useful to configure how geometry will behave once simulated.
Physics simulation is wireframe battling against wireframe : what's above, what's under, how gravity and other forces affect the Surfaces, etc.
Your issues have nothing to do with Genesis 8 or Genesis 79 (Back to the Future). Compatibility has nothing to do there.
Becaus a pose may have the fitted clothing intersecting with the body, which will cause the simulation to fail. This is especially likely with loose or trailing clothes, the kind that are most likely to beenfit from simulation.
Mesh density may be a factor, both by increasing the number of springs (edges in tbe mesh) that need to be simulated on each run as the process tries to even out the energy of gravity and movement and, quite possible if the simulation is failing catastophically, because a significant number of edges may be shorter than the offset value resulting in the two processes (relaxing the spring as close to its rest state as possible while keeping it at the minimum distance from the other vertices) to fight and keep pumping more energy into the simulation: check for a long run of edge length warningsat the beginning of the simulation, if you get that then you may need to adjust the minimum offset through the Surfaces pane.
Some items may need more iterations than others, the defaults are not the only sensible values but just values that work for a typical model.
Hi,
Let me give you two "safety features" to implement when using a dForce item:
1) Set your "Stretch Stiffness" on every single surface -- all of them -- to the minimum possible value. Think of this as a seat belt.
2) Set your "Collision Offset" on every single surface to some very small value like .050 or even smaller, and make sure that Self Collide is ON. Think of this as an airbag.
If you do these two things and also make sure that you don't have other objects in the scene ripping a hole in the item during a simulation, you will rarely if ever get any explosions. I do this with every dForce surface I create. Most of my products are explosion-proof because of it. Well... you can explode them, but you have to actually set out to do it. :) You have to try - hard.
While you didn't ask about these things specifically, I think you'll find that if you do them, then everything else becomes much easier to figure out. That was my experience anyway.
PS: I see that someone in this thread brought up the old 1/10th truth that Daz is "free". Yeah. Like a set of tires is free. The actual car is extra, dontcha know. Sorry to whoever wrote that, but we all know that without buying further assets, Daz is right next to useless. So the program is free. That is true in a sense that is so constrained and narrow as to be almost untruthful. And that last sentence reflects directly on anyone who utters this "fact". You should probably bear that in mind. :D