Quick Dynamic Clothing Tut

A quick and simple way to do clothing dynamic simulations in Poser 6 and 7
By Ayane Matrix

Recently, it has come to my attention that several people avoid using Posers cloth room to do dynamic clothing simulations for free or retail products. For me, allowing a clothing prop to drape across a figure is easier to work with and produce more realistic results than I could ever get by trying to use conforming clothes. Sadly, not everyone thinks this way. So, what I intend to do is provide interested parties with some basic information in the hopes that it helps them to gain a better understanding of the clothing room.


Step 1: Preparing the basic figure
For the most part, this one of the more crucial steps in using dynamic clothing. You must start by setting up your figure with a zero pose state as many dynamic clothing outfits are fitted to the figure in this pose. This can differ from figure to figure, but many are at least setup in a similar fashion.

Step 2: Using a suitable pose
This step is also crucial as many Poser users, including myself, have often setup poses that work with the first frame of the animation time line. You must set the pose that you want to use at least 15 to 30 frames into the time line so that clothing you're trying to fit to the figure has a chance to move into place and calculate some of it's movement.
Also, sometimes, if the pose you have selected is either complex or many parts of the figure poke through one another as you play the animation to the pose, you must setup an intermediary pose and lock it as a key frame to the animation. This is so that Poser does not get confused during the calculation process and force the cloth into odd shapes that do not follow the body of the figure. It'll also make the process run a little smoother.

Step 3: Adding the clothing
Not a hard step really, just import or add the prop to your scene at the first frame in the time line. In most cases, you will not need to do any adjustments; but, if you used something like morphs or enhancements to the underlying figure, you may want to scale those down or zero them to ensure that there is no poke through before beginning the clothing simulation.
In the worse case scenario, you'll have to scale the outfit or figure to fit one another, but that only happens when you are working with a clothing prop that was not originally made for that figure.

Step 4: The Clothing Room
This is where things tend to get a little tricky. First, make sure that the clothing prop is selected and not the underlying figure, then click "Start a New Simulation." A window will then pop up and you'll need to be sure that the outfit is still selected and how many frames of animation will it need to go through. Personally, I let it go from 1 to 30 frames and then add 5 to 15 more to allow for the clothing to drape and relax at the final pose. But that's entirely up to you.
Other settings are "Allow collisions against vertex" "against polygon" "self collision" and drape frames. For this tutorial, make sure to at 2 to 5 frames for draping against the figure so it fits; leave the rest clear unless you want to experiment. A note though, choosing the self collision setting does make the calculations take a much longer time to process per frame and, in most cases, it's not needed unless you're trying to emulate certain clothing movements such as blankets, curtains, and etc. Dresses come to mind as well, but they don't always work out well.

Step 4: Prep work
Click the "Collide Against" button to open the "Cloth Collision Objects" window. From there, were can specify what objects the clothing will collide against and what it should ignore. For this tutorial, select the figure you posed only, then choose to ignore head, hands, and feet they are not necessary for the simulation; yet, if you're pose has any of those areas making contact at any time, be sure to include those in the simulation or the clothing will pass through the figure at those locations.
You can also play with some of the settings in this window, though the only ones that tend to help are "Collision Offset" and "Collision Depth" since they can help with accidental poke through at the cost of additional calculation time and resources. More info on this can be found in the Poser manuals under the heading "Collision Offset & Depth," on page 233 of Poser 7's reference manual.

Step 5: Extra settings
Now, in most cases, the extra settings in the clothing room do not need to be adjusted; but, I'll touch a bit on them so you'll know what to look for. More info can be seen on this topic on page 234 of the Poser 7 reference manual or the heading "Clothing Groups."
You should see a couple of buttons pertaining to Clothing Groups which are:

1. Dynamic - Areas of the clothing that will undergo simulation calculations and generally has the name of _default_ for the group name.
2. Choreographed - Areas of the clothing that will follow the key framed movement or be excluded from simulation calculations. Adding polygons from any other group to this area will remove them from others.
3. Decorations - Generally used to keep certain areas in the clothing from moving too broadly during the calculation process, just as they would in real life. They are broken into two areas:
   
   • Soft - Objects that need to move and flex as the clothing is moved like pockets, belts, parts of a bra; they do not distort heavily when moved.
   • Rigid - Objects that should not move, but follows the clothing like tie knots, buttons, gems.

As I mentioned in the Choreographed grouping section, adding any polygons from the clothing mesh itself to a particular group will remove it from another. Keep that in mind when you decide to experiment. Also, for Decorations, if they polygons you want to add to those particular groups are part of the same clothing mesh, they will heavily distort the clothing itself as different calculations are being done for the same set of vertices. I learned that mistake from another outfit I was experimenting on.

The Dynamics controls pretty much affect how the outfit will move and fit to the underlying figure and are covered in more detail on pages 237 and 238 of the Poser 7 Reference manual, or under the heading "Cloth Dynamics Controls" in your versions manual.

Step 6: Running the clothing sim
This area is pretty simple after setting up everything. Just clock the "Calculate Simulation" button to get Poser working.
As a suggestion, I do not recommend that you try to multitask while the simulation is running, unless you have some sort of computing monster with a ton of memory. Often times, when Poser appears to have locked up, it's not the case as it's still calculating the sim for a given frame and it can take several seconds to several minutes/hours as it depends heavily on the complexity and polygon density of the clothing you're working with and your computer's processing ability. At this time, I'd recommend taking a break while you wait for the process to finish.
After it's done, check through the animation time line to see if everything went well and observe the last frame to see if everything went well. You can also run a test render to see if there are problems with smoothing as well.

Step 7: (Optional) Saving your finished sim
Normally, after you're satisfied with the clothing sim, you can just save the file and reopen it later. Though, by doing this, if you accidentally make a mistake and redo the simulation, you end up loosing all of your previous progress. This can be avoided by re-saving it with a different name prior to redoing the clothing sim, or by adding it to your library palette, or runtime, as a smart prop. The Poser 7 Reference manual, page 46, describes this step in further detail, but fails to mention that sometimes the simulation itself doesn't always save properly, which is why I mention saving multiple copies if you ever want to come back to it later.

So, that pretty much covers Dynamic Clothing and the cloth room in Poser. Remember to keep your manual handy as different versions of Poser tend to have slightly different menus and added features that I may not have covered. Also, don't be afraid of the clothing room! It's not a scary place and experimenting with it tends to yield nice, or sometimes funky, results. I hope this tutorial helps with anyone's further understandings in this area!

Till next time!