Greetings Today we are going to talk about dForce - it is an exclusive technology from Daz Studio software It is used to accurately simulate the physical collision and interactions of soft materials Mostly it is used to simulate such things as clothes and hair So instead of manually placing things in a natural-looking way - we can leave this process to the computer And in the end, just use the result as I did with this ball that is enveloped by a fabric Using dForce is surprisingly simple All you need is an object - a Cube in my case Now select this object and go to the Edit>Object>Geometry>Add dForce Modifier: Dynamic Surface This will make my cube a dForce object, which means that it follows the laws of physics Also in the Create menu, you can find some other dForce utilities that we will use later Most importantly, to work with the dForce we will need a specialized window You can open any window if you follow a Window>Panes path We need a Simulation Settings pane It is the main window that you are going to use while working with the dForce Here you can find all of the needed settings to simulate your scene Most importantly - the "Simulate" button, that will activate the simulation So when I press it - it activates all the physics And my Cube simply falls down There it is There was nothing to catch it or stop, so that was expected to happen Now I will delete this Cube and create another scene I propose to recreate the scene that you saw at the beginning of this video There we had a Plane, so I will add a plane object to my scene 1 meter is quite a small object, so I have changed it to 3 meters Now if I try to simulate this scene - I would be greeted with an error It says that there are no objects to simulate and it is right because we never specified that this plane is a dForce object To fix that, again we go to Edit>Object>Geometry>Add dForce Modifier: Dynamic Surface If I simulate the scene now - my plane will just fall, as did the cube previously Instead, I will add another object that the plane would interact with - a sphere Right now this sphere is not a dForce object, so we will fix that in a similar way But the Dynamic Surface option makes object obey gravity and fall Not something that we need for this sphere, we want for it to stay That is why we will use a dForce Modifier: Static Surface So it is a static object that does not fall, but other dForce objects such as our plane - will interact with it Now change the placement of a Plane, so it would be above the sphere And we are ready to press Simulate It seems as if something went wrong The plane did indeed fall onto the sphere And even changed the shape around it But it is not detailed at all and has only a one single fold This happened because this plane is not able to fold more than that It simply does not have geometry for this By default planes are made of 4 vertices, meaning that they are not detailed at all I will delete this plane and create another one instead But this time we need to change the Divisions value More divisions mean more geometry and more detailed the result would be But be careful not to go overboard, because more geometry is taxing on the computer power Oops Seems that I have made a mistake and forgot to make this plane a dForce object Not something to worry about, of course, as it is easily fixed Finally, it works as expected The plane falls upon the sphere and envelops it like a piece of cloth Let’s look closer at what the Simulation Settings tab has for us to use There are a bunch of settings here The first one is Gravity It is pretty self-explanatory - it changes how much gravity influences your scene A higher number increases the strength of gravity, so everything falls faster and feels heavier On the other hand, lowering the number decreases the pulling and my plane falls much slower It only started touching the sphere If you have a similar problem, where simulation ends earlier than you would want it to - there is an easy fix In the Simulation section, we have an Initialization Time option Increasing this value adds “initialization” before the render frame, so you will have a longer simulation With the Initialization Time set at 1, it already falls lower than it did before Resetting changed settings and we will look at other Air Resistance is interesting Our world is filled with air and everything is always in contact with it So when something moves and especially falls - there is an air resistance If you set this setting to 0, there would be no resistance to your object My cloth falls very quickly and does not stop to move at all, because nothing resists it Increasing air resistance changes how the object behaves, it now falls slower and in a different manner It is similar to what Gravity setting did Next, we have a Start Bones from Memorized Pose setting It is for when you work with objects that have bones, such as figures Frames to Simulate is a very important setting that controls how and which frames are simulated I have it set to Animated, which means that the whole simulation is animated and I can found it in the Timeline I can view each keyframe and even play an animation, which is very useful An alternative is a Current Frame option This setting only creates a single frame Meaning that there is not animation in a timeline It may sound that this method is inferior, but the main pro here is that it simulates much faster Because there is no need to simulate each frame, it skips them and only simulates the main parts When you are simulating Current Frame only it is important to set a right initialization time Settings below are more advanced and I don’t think that there is a need to dwell into them right now Another thing that you can do with the dForce is control how much and which parts of the objects are affected by it To show you this I will only use a plane, delete a sphere and clear the simulation Select an object and go to the Create>New dForce Modifier Weight Node You should see it connected to your main object Don’t forget that you need a dForce object for this, so add an according modifier Next, we will need a special tool for this - a Node Weight Map Brush With it active, we can select an object’s geometry in the form of polygons But before proceeding, we need to create a Weight Map This can be done in the Tool Settings window Don’t forget to select a Weight Node for this The whole object turned red, don’t worry, it was supposed to be like that Color represents the weight of the region Now we need to select the correct parts of the geometry You can see that it is not easy to do by default We can change how we select geometry For this, right-click anywhere, make sure that the Brush Mode is set to Geometry Selection And then change the Selection Mode to Marquee Selection This allows us to click and drag to draw rectangles All geometry inside the rectangle would be selected A convenient way to select geometry When you selected the part that you want to change - right-click anywhere and go to Weight Editing, Fill Selected Here choose the weight value that you want to use A higher value means that it will be more affected by physics This represented with the red color, so right now the whole object is filled with a 100% weight value Instead, I will change this part to 0% Now it is grey, as it was before adding any weight This means that it will not be influenced by gravity at all Let’s test this by returning to the Perspective View and Simulating the scene As expected - the whole object fell, but the part that we changed - stayed totally still This object kind of reminds me of the flag, so let’s make it a proper flag For this, we obviously need to rotate it Now it simulates more like a flag that is just hanging from the pole Usually, weights don’t behave exactly like that So I will change a bit more in the Weight Node Exactly what I mean is that objects don’t just jump from not moving to 100% gravity This transition is gradual So I will add regions in-between 100% and 0% to simulate this gradual transition Three segments for around 25, 50, and 75 percent should do just fine Another Simulation and now it behaves differently, more natural It is time to talk about the next main thing I have already mentioned that in the Create menu, there is also a dForce Wind Node Let’s add it to the scene And move it, so it would point at the flag At the beginning of the simulation, we could see a bit of wind force, but it is not noticeable in the final result I will change the Frames to Simulate to Animated, to show this better Here at the beginning of the animation, we can see that the wind node interacts with the flag, but very briefly In the Parameters tab, we can open settings for the Wind Node Here we can control diameter, for example, to make the wind node influence bigger And change falloff, so it would blow to a longer distance without falloff Finally, we can change Strength to make it stronger I will also change the location and rotation for a better effect It is still no good, so I will change it again And increase the strength value to the max You can see that the location of Wind Node and Strength value both change throughout simulation It is better, but still not good This time it is because of the mistake I made This happened because I made all those changes, not on a frame 0 of an animation, so instead of changing the values, it animated them I fixed that by deleting the extra keyframes and replacing other ones with the right values Now it works much better, but still not ideal I think that it is because the flag is too big, it is bigger than the wind node So I have made it smaller And not it looks a lot more like a flag on the wind We even have it fully animated Daz Studio is mainly about working with characters instead of other objects What can you do with the character using dForce you might ask then? Well you can try to apply a Dynamic Surface dForce modifier to a character itself, but I don’t recommend doing it The result would be atrocious and I don’t think that it even could be useful Instead, we can apply dForce to other parts of the character Such things as hair and clothing I have made this scene with a free Bardot outfit that is perfect for dForce Applying Modifiers to the clothes And simulating the scene that we made It looks similar to what we already had before To demonstrate the difference better, I recreated the character before simulation Now we can see how unnaturally clothes looked Some parts were floating in the air basically After simulation, these problems were gone and now it looks a lot more realistic and overall better To further improve your dForce renders, I recommend sticking with the items that were created with it in mind You can find such things easily on the daz3d.com/shop Such as this Winter Splendor Outfit It is very loose and airy A perfect fit for the winter scene Another example - this Tropical Breeze Outfit This one is for the scenes with warm weather And it looks awesome when combined with the dForce Wind Node as it is so lightweight The Master - Cloth Simulation Presets is not a clothing product, but something a bit different Instead, this product allows you to control the way how clothes fold and wrinkle One of the greatest thing about this Cloth Simulation that it can work with clothes that were not designed for dForce at all Even with older clothes that were made before dForce was even a thing Another main part of the scene that dForce can be used on is hair Just like with clothes - there are a lot of hair products that were designed to be used with dForce Such as Classic Long Curly Hair There are a lot of uses for this hair and it will work flawlessly with dForce Besides, there are presets that you can use too Also, you can find short hair examples, like this Maureen Hair It also works with dForce, even though it is quite short Usually, longer hair is used for this anyway Just like unusual DarlingX Hair A very long hair that is at the same time fairly unique One more dForce product that we just can’t miss in this article is dForce Magnet This product allows you to create magnets on the objects, so they would stick to one another This can create a very interesting scene, like someone holding something It is a similar effect to what we did with the Weight Node and can be even recreated with it But this one is much easier and faster to use That is it for the basics of dForce Don’t forget to visit our website - RenderGuide.com to learn more about 3D Design overall and Daz Studio in particular There you can find such articles as the one that this video was based on - Daz dForce: Basics, Tutorials & More This article has even more information about dForce and introduces more ways in which it can be used in Don't forget to subscribe to our channel to get more inspiration
