How to : Using DAZ Studio dForce in Animation

hello everyone my name is kevin and i wanted to do a tutorial today on the use of d-force specifically applying d-force to a certain situation i ran into in the creation of my visual novel this here is a scene of one of the last scenes of that novel but i wanted to go through um the use of dforce in a particular situation and hopefully you'll find the information and helpful and useful and here is the lovely amazing captain tanya sadaya here to help demonstrate the use of dforce she's the captain overall leader of the multiverse response unit who you will see in my upcoming mru chronicles visual novel hey tanya let's get started okay so here we are in the scene this is one of the last uh scenes in the uh the first episode of the visual novel as you can see the lovely captain tanya sedaya there she's holding a t-shirt that we're going to apply d-force to and um we're going to basically going to have it draping from her hand and fall onto the staircase hitting the stairs and hopefully if i got it positioned right it's going to drape over the step there so what we need to do is basically apply deforest we don't have it set up here so let's do that right now if you come over here and you select uh file actually it's edit let me zoom in there for you you select edit and then go to object and then we select geometry and there's three options you can choose from okay as you can see here if i move over you can see there basically you have three options you have you have static surface dynamic surface and dynamic surface add-on and the one we want to use is dynamic surface static surface is for applying a modifier to the object that your deforest item is colliding with in this case that would be the staircase or the floor of this scene or set and you use it to determine the amount of friction on the surface in this case the step so we can make it more like glass or metal where the cloth would slide slide easily on it or we could make it i guess like more rubbery and increase the friction so the shirt doesn't slide around we're not going to do that in this case i think it's going to work fine based on other simulations i've run uh dynamic surface one we're going to be using it applies d force and we're going to simulate the the t-shirt here falling to the ground uh dynamic surface add-on is more for from what i understand it's like applying strings as springs and other three-dimensional applications it you can use it let's say you've got a t-shirt that has it's basically opened up or a some kind of shirt and you want to connect it so the front of it where it's open you want to like zip it up or button it up you can apply a deforest add-on modifier and what that does is it keeps the front of the shirt connected despite what the character's doing or if the shirt or or a jacket falls to the ground or clothing item then it will keep those surfaces connected you're basically gluing the vertices between both fronts of the the jacket or the shirt of the clothing it allows the polygons to move fine but it keeps those vertices connected in relation to one another along a polygon line i can get into that more later i haven't tried it i i have a good idea of how you would apply it but the one we want to use this and that was just a brief description give you an idea of what it's about hope you can see that it might be kind of blocked there but the one we want to use is dynamic surface right here um there and there's another way you can get to that you can actually come over to here you can go to this hamburger icon i guess they call it you can come down edit and then go to geometry and then excuse me sorry edit geometry and then you have your three deforest add-ons right here so like i said we're doing dynamic surface and how you can tell that the deforest is applied is through the parameters tab here you can see there's an there there's a simulation uh parameter here this isn't here you won't see this here before dforce is applied and you can also change and select the type of deforest modifier you're applying there just like you did from the menu and just in case you're interested in following along or want to to try this yourself you can go to smart content and you can come down this t-shirt is just part of the genesis 8 starter essentials i think it's made for a male character but i have applied a autofit to the female character done some d forms done some geometry editing so it tucks nicely within her shirt there's some work i had to do for that but uh we won't worry about that here i can do a tutorial on that if you're interested in how to use the deformer geometry editing deleting and to make that work but i've also applied a shader to the t-shirt so this is not that it's a the default color is black but we'll go back and the second way you can tell if there if the d-force is applied is go to surfaces here if you go under surface of the t-shirt you will see as you scroll down these peach colored i guess peach colored um parameters here all of these were added when deforest was applied and they're all deforest controls okay that you can use to affect how the simulation works so we know through these two um through this that we have d4 supplied so what we're gonna do is the first thing is just simulate the clothing hanging from her hand in a natural position that looks physically correct because the shirt's not going to look in this shape if she's not wearing it or there's no one in it so we have to simulate the through deforest the clothing or shirt hanging from her hand that's what we're going to do first so if we come over here uh go to the first frame i might happen to be on frame 30 i could be on frame 0. the reason i'm on frame 30 is because i did some other simulations that i don't want to reset here and you'll notice on the staircase there's some clothing items here one of them this is the atlas pants that you can get from the daz 3d store that already has d4 supplied okay and one of the things we have to do is if we only want to apply a simulation to this t-shirt we have to make every other item in the scene that has d4 supplied we have to freeze its simulation and how you can do that is in this case if i click on this item here the pants you'll see if we go over here pants right there if we go over to simulation we have under the simulation in the parameters tab we have free simulation you can normally that's turned off you can turn it on so what that does is it tells the deforest algorithm not to affect that it's already set in its current position don't re-simulate that because it if it has to simulate two items is going to take even longer so we'll just leave it like that and the only thing the only other item in the scene is the t-shirt so we are going to run the d4 simulation on the t-shirt so let's do that if you come over here to the simul simulation settings tab now if you don't have this tab up one of the things you can do is you can right click in this area i don't have any free space to really right click and bring up another pane so you can also come over here to window panes tabs and all of the panes you can add are here and you see simulation settings uh let's see if we can zoom in on that one that may be a little bit further away i'm sorry menu it doesn't really show but you'll see over here simulation settings so you select that and it will add the tab wherever you've it will add the tab in there so we have simulation settings in here uh that might have taken it away actually hold on a second sorry so let's go back now simulation settings are in there so if we go to look at everything um one of the things that i've always heard uh watching tutorials and reading information in the forums and online was to turn star bones from memorize posed off what that really is is if you memorize a character's pose by going to edit object or edit uh figure you can memorize a figure's current pose and then you can apply that pose that's memorized to the character there's some issues related to that i've seen others have i'm not going to be using this right now because i'm just going to start from the pose she's in so we won't have to worry about that also we're just going to simulate from the current frame because it's not going to be falling or anything we just want to get the the shirt in a position to where it looks like it's hanging from her hand so let's go ahead and do that everything's set up fine the other thing i want to mention there's two things is that by default i believe the there's a multiplier for frames per second multiplier so if you have your multiply or if you have your frame set uh i have the current can't see it but i have the current frame per second set to 30 in my timeline this basically multiplies the frames for the simulation by whatever's in the timeline so it's going to be a 60-second 60 frame per second uh clothing simulation i'm fine with that it looks good but you can increase or lower or raise that however you want and i think everything's fine we're gonna start that's off we're gonna do it from the current frame okay so we have everything set up we should be ready now because the shirt is hanging and intersecting the the mesh of the shirt is hanging and intersecting from the characters the mesh of the character's hand then d force automatically assumes it's to be connected to that object so it's actually going to drape from her hand rather than falling to the ground which is what we want to have happen so we're just going to run this simulation which should run pretty quickly here and then after that's done we will go and do the second part of the simulation which is the shirt dropping to the floor and basically colliding with the floor so you'll see it's working here so we'll be back when this is done the next step is to export this shirt as an obj so we need to make sure over here that we have our shirt selected so let's come over here scroll to the basic wear t-shirt and then we are going to go over to our file menu and select export and we want to make sure that we have wavefront object or obj selected here from the drop-down so you select that and give it a file name in this case we'll call it t-shirt okay save that now we've i've saved it previously but i'm going to go through the steps to show you how this is done so we save that yes and what you want to do is you want to make sure that you have this filter object selected and you choose from the drop down here selected roots what that does is it over here if you look in the scene tab it selects or it only exports the ob only exports the objects you have selected in the scene tab as obj so the only object we have selected is the t-shirt therefore it's the only item that's going to be exported as an obj from the scene so select accept and it just takes a few seconds if it's a if you just one obj or object or one item in the scene so then what we have to do is we have to re-import it and it's going to be what that does is it turns the item in for it's it's a rigged item and it turns it into a prop which is not rigged but it's going to be in the shape of the shirt you see here deformed based on what deforest has applied to the shirt through the simulation we ran so if we come over here we go we select import here and we choose the obj file we save the t-shirt and we're going to bring that back in we open it and i'm going to say select dash studio because that's what we exported it from and everything else can remain default select accept and we're going to see that if you look over here in the scene tab we're going to see the t-shirt has been brought back in as a a prop an unrigged prop this was what it was before which is a rigged prop now it is just a prop without any rigging that's okay because we don't need it to be rigged because we're not going to apply it to any character it's just dropping to the floor as part of the animation so if we hide this we'll see the t-shirt is there and the good thing is it's in exactly the same position in the scene as the original rigged shirt was or is so what i can do is i can just go ahead and delete that because i'm not going to need that right now so delete the rig t-shirt that we used to create this prop when we exported it and now we're going to apply dforce to this prop we created there's a number of ways to apply deforest i'm going to do it this way this time and go over here select this hamburger icon in the scene tab or this part of the window select that and choose edit geometry and we're going to go add a deforest modifier dynamic surface okay so we're doing the same thing we did before for the rigged t-shirt but now we're applying it to the prop that we exported and then imported back in so if you come down here and look go to general we can see simulation is there the right add-on type or the right modifier type is selected for d and everything looks good we come over here to surfaces and we can see t-shirt come down here and all the peach colored uh parameters are have been added and everything there and everything is good now one of the things i do want to mention if you look over here okay you see this self collide is turned on one of the things i've noticed with applying dforce to items that aren't originally created with deforest because there's some items from the daz studio store or the das 3d store that have d4 that already made with dforce if you apply it later what i've noticed is if you have this self collide turned on it can create issues during the simulation i noticed that when i was simulating for the character here captain sedea i was simulating it and i didn't have her fingers touching the mesh of the shirt and when it dropped down and when the shirt finally touched her fingers then the mesh of the shirt exploded i also see that happen if i run the simulation when the shirt drops to the floor as soon as it touches the floor the mesh explodes the mesh just goes crazy and it doesn't look like a shirt anymore the polygons shoot off in all kinds of directions and it just isn't right so one thing i do is i turn off self collide now there is also a collision offset here that determines the distance that polygons in the mesh have to be from what uh from one another for the d force algorithm to calculate colliding polygons that is set i just leave it at the default and i turn self-collide off and it runs fine if you know how to fix this um without having to turn self-collide off then please let me know in the comment section like i said i'm not an expert but these are the things i know how to do to make the ma to make this stuff work so what we're going to do now is we're going to run a d4 simulation let me back out here we're going to run a d4 simulation and we're going to do it over the frames we have set in the timeline usually one second for a shirt dropping the floor is plenty of time or 30 frames in this case because i am the animation is set for 30 frames per second so we're going to run from 30 over here as you can see right here 30 to 60 frames and we're going to change the simulation from using current frame to use the animated or use the frames we have set up in the timeline which is 30 frames 30 to 60 frames 30 frame 30 to frame 60. so we're going to use that and we're going to leave everything the same the thing we have to do is we have to hide captain sedaya in this because the mesh of basically her mesh her fingers are intersecting with the t-shirt and as long as that's the case if you run a simulation the shirt is going to continue to hang there it's not going to simulate where it falls to the ground but if you turn off the character here which we're going to do right here we're going to turn off captain sedea and if she's off then the it's like she's not there so the deforest isn't going to include her and include basically her mesh in the algorithm so it's going to allow the shirt to drop to the floor so we're going to do that and we still have for this right here we still have free simulation so it should just be the shirt hitting the staircase so let's do it simulate okay this will take a little bit longer to run it's going to go through frames in the timeline and it's going to drop to the floor so there's more simulation that has to occur i'm going to let this run and be back as soon as it's done okay so the simulation completed successfully i brought captain sedea back into the scene here and all i did was just unhide her so one thing i do want to mention this is kind of a cool tip that i learned from uh someone else another content creator if you select a item and you you click control before clicking the eye icon it actually unhides not only that item but everything parented to that item as well and that was a huge time saver for me because i was having to go in before i realized that and hide and unhide things individually in addition to unhiding the character so that saved a huge amount of time but if we run this now you can see that she drops the shirt and it falls to the staircase now it doesn't quite drape over the staircase one of the things i noticed when i was running the d4 simulation i have to figure this out but the shirt when it was draped over like most of us draped over the like the edge of a step and it would actually wind up falling off it's like the simulation couldn't handle it so in this case it's falling directly on the step in the case of the other t-shirt i did earlier which was another character that's part of the squad her name is ming xiaohuai she's not in this scene because she's actually went and into the hot tub at this point to enjoy her time off from her duties so her t-shirt here does actually drape over just a little bit but i think i was having a problem because the way i positioned this shirt most of it was going to be off the staircase so the simulation would the physics would naturally have it falling off and it was just i don't know the um dforce didn't seem to be able to handle it maybe some additional settings would have corrected that and once i figure that out i'll i'll definitely make a tutorial tutorial discussing it in this case it looked like it was fine it fell directly on the step and we can zoom in and i can show you what that looks like there's a few other things i want to discuss related to this as well if you come over here to perspective view you see the shirt is right there and the simulation it falls and hits the floor which is really cool you know and the cool thing is it's starting the simulation from a position where the shirt is already deformed and this is with the obj that's the way i can figure out how to do it like i said if you guys know of a way uh to do this without having to export as an obj that certainly would save time one of the things i do want to mention related to deforest is let's say you run the simulation from a single frame to get the sh get the shirt in the shape it's in now and you want to reset it well you don't have any way to go back to any other keyframes because you just simulated on that keyframe what you can do is come over here first select the item in your scene here your scene tab select the item here which in this case is the shirt prop right click on the simulation tab and go to dforce and then you come down here to clear objects so if you want to just clear the simulation from the object you have selected in the scene tab over there then you can clear selected objects and what that will do is it will clear the simulation entirely from the selected object and put it back into its default position so like i said if you're simulating from a single frame the current frame you don't have any other frames to go back to so you can clear the simulation off the object this way the the version i guess i should have mentioned this when i first started the video but the version of daz studio i'm using is 4.15.0.30 it is the absolute latest at the time this video was created can't think of anything else that i was going to say related to this but thank you captain tanya sadea for becoming or agreeing to demonstrate d4 simulation here i'm going to do regular videos like this i plan to create the videos over the weekend and upload them every monday so i'll have regular tutorial uploads it takes a bit of work because i'm getting used to doing these tutorials which i haven't really done before i've mostly been working on my visual novel but i do enjoy it i hope you find this information helpful also please if you in if you like this and you want to see more tutorials please click the subscribe button turn on the or click the bell notification icon so you get notified when these videos are available also you'll get notified when my the first episode of the visual novel the mru chronicles will be released soon if you have an idea for something you'd like to see and i'd be happy to do a tutorial on it if it's something i don't know i'll be happy to learn it and figure it out and show it here on the channel so everyone thank you so much for taking the time to check out this video it does mean a lot to me have a great rest of your week and i hope to see you in the next tutorial take care

Channel: MRU Studios

Views: 4,539

Keywords: #daz3d, #dazstudio, #dforce, #dforceanimation, #animation, #daz3danimation, #dazstudioanimation, #dazanimation, #howtodforce, #howto

Id: 2jgfKIKDjts

Length: 23min 40sec (1420 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021