Hya, Carrara user here who is enjoying Blender's (2.73?) cloth sim. Much faster than Poser 2014 cloth room.

I'm interested in bringing clothing into Blender to drape it then taking it back to Carrara to render (it;s what I know).

But I havent figured out how to pin existing buttons etc to the clothing object mesh without changing the mesh.

I have tried making the buttons into vertex groups and pinning them but it pins them in place rather than allowing them to follow the clothing mesh as it drapes. 

I didn't want to alter the original mesh so I can use it (possibly) as a morph target back in Carrara. 

My work flow is:

in Carrara:

pose  m4 in t pose, export as object, (m4 is a ready made daz dolly Michael 4)

then pose m4 in required pose and export as obj file.

Export ready made clothing obj in t pose. 

In Blender: 

Import t posed m4, use the second m4 as a morph target at the end of 100 frames.

Do the cloth Sim then export result cloth obj back to Carrara. 

Second Question: when I export this object I also get m4 mesh in t pose, m4 posed mesh, as well as the clothing mesh.

Anything I am doing wrong? ( I have the clothing obj selected, not the rest)

thanks for any help :)  

Hello headwax 

I personally have not done much with cloth sims except for some basic ones and this tutorial I had saved might help with the steps it is not exact to your current workflow but I think it might help with what step you might be missing and hopefully some else will chime in who has done cloth sim with Poser to Blender that will be more informative I think NanetteTredoux who is a member of our forum here has done this often and hopefully she might see the post and chimes in

Good Luck

Thanks Lobo3433 for the quick reply :)  I coulcnt see the link to the tut you reffered too, sorry.  :( Must be hidden ! 

I will pm Nanette if she doesnt chime in :) thanks again!

So sorry it seems they did not post correctly my apologizes 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX3eadVX-eM

thanks again :) will watch !

thanks, good video, I understand the verticies being pinned to the bone, very clear.

:)

best to explain in detail about what I need,

The clothing is a coat. the coat has buttons at the cuff. They are seperate parts of the same mesh. When I run the cloth sim they slide off :)

If I pin them, then they stay hanging in space in the t pose when I run the sim, while the cuff goes wondering off attached the forearm mesh by the cloth sim. 

Unfortuneatly!

 I think If I made a bone,, attached it to the mesh of the forearm, then pinned the cuff buttons to it, it would work, but then my morph wouldnt work

for that part of the mesh?  (The arms move via morph rather than rigging - it's the only way I could figure to get the animation out of Carrara - just doing stills, that's all)  

thanks again! 

long time since I used Carrara ;-) was fun at the time but blender is sooooo much better lol , thought Daz was adding a cloth sim to it ??

poser is the best app for what you want to do, it allows for "pinning" buttons on or other soft or hard decorated  groups. With blender you'd add them as part of mesh [adjust setting {stiffness etc} by vertex groups or you can run sim then add buttons after with a particle system or dupliverts, so many ways to do stuff in blender

running the pose as a morph the way you are I think will lead to problems , arms etc wont move the same way an arm moves but I'm not sure on that 'cos I never tried it , I have some success exporting as collada (some tweaks needed) then posing in blender  for sims  [just use the rotation widget lol ] scaling can be an issue! a poser doll is tiny and blender sims are sorta RL size

While I do think what your trying is possible!! I think it would be a lot easier to run sim in poser save sim'd item as prop in a runtime then load from runtime in Carrara 

thanks for that haddheld :)

to be honest I played with Poser 2014 for a few days in the cloth room (not 24 hours a day ;;) ) and didnt get the result I wanted/.

that was using a rigged figure.

I found Blender with the same meshes much faster - which meant I could make my mistakes even faster !

I know what you mean about Morphs as the verticies travel in straight lines rather than follow the curve of the bones, but apart from shrinking hands it hasnt caused much mesh poke through trouble that couldnt be sorted out in Carrara 

these robes are what I have so far (The two robes that have the 'fancy' textures - not the back cape. Havent had a chance to  post work it yet.

The Robes were cloth simmed in Blender using the m4 morph work flow. They were originally made for M3 so there's an issue with the ends of the draped cuffs but it's not too bad - better than I got from poser.

Yes Carrara has a cloth sim, it's like eating a steak with no teeth or riding a pushbike with no wheels and the handlbar put on backwards and connected to nothing but a small piece of string that leads back to your grandmother's last house that she hasnt lived in since she died in 1986....

Thanks for suggesting Poser :) cheers!

thanks, good video, I understand the verticies being pinned to the bone, very clear.

:)

 

best to explain in detail about what I need,

 

The clothing is a coat. the coat has buttons at the cuff. They are seperate parts of the same mesh. When I run the cloth sim they slide off :)

 

If I pin them, then they stay hanging in space in the t pose when I run the sim, while the cuff goes wondering off attached the forearm mesh by the cloth sim. 

Unfortuneatly!

 

 I think If I made a bone,, attached it to the mesh of the forearm, then pinned the cuff buttons to it, it would work, but then my morph wouldnt work

 

for that part of the mesh?  (The arms move via morph rather than rigging - it's the only way I could figure to get the animation out of Carrara - just doing stills, that's all)  

 

thanks again! 

 

 

Hey, Andrew! I'm stalking you.

Why not weld the buttons to the jacket by some vertices or edges? Then it would be a physical part of the mesh and shouldn't fall off when you run a sim. I don't know about Blender, but in Poser you could assign the newly attached buttons as a soft decorated or rigid decorated group before you run the sim.

gah don't you hate it when your post vanishes . David, ha ha ! I typed something really witty and it went puff, oh well. Here's the succinct version sorry

In the future I wanted to use the resulting mesh as a morph target  (maybe) but of course (?) Id have to do that in the t-pose - not sure about that.

Must have something to do with global rather than local cords? not sure either.

I asked the question because there must be hundreds of older meshes that are made with hanging vertex groups and I thought there was an easy way around it apart dfrom attaching the verticies , I googled blenderartists.org yesterday and came up with quite a few threads on the problem, but didn't find the answer. The answers so far suggest that if I want to use Blender the best thing to do is hide the offending polys and paint them in the texture ?  

Blender's cloth sim has been much quicker than posers. I wonder if that;s because I am using morph targets to move the collision mesh rather than armatures /bones? 

posers cloth room isn't that bad once your used to it ~ tips to make it work better

1:- step through the pose one frame at a time, poser don't care if a hand passes though the body getting to where its going but the sim WILL fail, at same time keep body parts a little way apart ~ armpits are worst culprit when the upper arm is too close to body the sim will slow down or fail

2:- make sure theres NO intersections  between body and cloth at start

3:- try dif cloth settings  I think there should be a huge range of presets but alas  don't think its easy to even save a preset for yourself lol

ps nice pic  ..... makes me think of St Pat chasing the snakes out of Ireland !!!!! lol

gah don't you hate it when your post vanishes . David, ha ha ! I typed something really witty and it went puff, oh well. Here's the succinct version sorry

In the future I wanted to use the resulting mesh as a morph target  (maybe) but of course (?) Id have to do that in the t-pose - not sure about that.

Must have something to do with global rather than local cords? not sure either.

I asked the question because there must be hundreds of older meshes that are made with hanging vertex groups and I thought there was an easy way around it apart dfrom attaching the verticies , I googled blenderartists.org yesterday and came up with quite a few threads on the problem, but didn't find the answer. The answers so far suggest that if I want to use Blender the best thing to do is hide the offending polys and paint them in the texture ?  

 

Blender's cloth sim has been much quicker than posers. I wonder if that;s because I am using morph targets to move the collision mesh rather than armatures /bones? 

Ah, OK. May have to look into Blender's cloth sim. I've been looking a bit more in Blender's direction since the last version came out. It's starting to look like something I can understand. :)

posers cloth room isn't that bad once your used to it ~ tips to make it work better

1:- step through the pose one frame at a time, poser don't care if a hand passes though the body getting to where its going but the sim WILL fail, at same time keep body parts a little way apart ~ armpits are worst culprit when the upper arm is too close to body the sim will slow down or fail

2:- make sure theres NO intersections  between body and cloth at start

3:- try dif cloth settings  I think there should be a huge range of presets but alas  don't think its easy to even save a preset for yourself lol

ps nice pic  ..... makes me think of St Pat chasing the snakes out of Ireland !!!!! lol

 thanks hedheld, I did find some cloth settings which were very helpful but it just got too slow (impatient lad that I am) :)

thanks for those tips though. I will keep them in mind when I revisit poser.

Last night I tried to get a FBM to work, or just to load a new morph target in so I could do the sloth sim in Poser with a morph targeted obj, rather than a rigged figure.

I couldn't get the morph target to work as there kept being a difference in vertices number, even when I exported the mesh straight from poser, did nothing, and bought it in again.

obviously I am ticking the wrong buttons!

 

 

 

 

 

 

* *

 

 

 

pS thanks, yes it is Saint Pat, but apparently he was a Welshman :)

Greetings BooksbyDavid,

Yes, I have tried Blender off and for a while and found that it's main problem was every tutorial I did was for a different version so I would get stuck mid tutorial looking for a button that was no longer there! This version seems much more approachable.

I'll post a step by step later when I get a chance as I'd like to see more Carrara users using Blender as a 'plug in' (small joke there).

I was lucky as I found a few tuts that taught me little bits of what I needed to know, I'll post them as well. And discovered buttons that let you change the mesh hotpoint because those buttons were staring me in the face thank fully :)

@hedheld here are the Poser fabric settings  that I worked with

Poser Dynamic Settings 

when you import a model from poser (for a morph etc) IN BLENDER on bottom left of import window is some options

you must tick "keep vertex order" and use "poly groups"  then (so long as you don't add or remove a vert lol ) it should all work   

blender by its nature (FREE and maintained) evolves pretty fast and sometimes in strange ways ;-) , I'm lucky 'cos lots of the shortcuts "have stuck"  so theres not a lot of things I use that I need the menus for ......... have you looked at pie menus ?? lots seem to like them !!

is a few versions of cloth settings  knocking about ;-) there all based of real world cloth just proggys implement them in dif ways have dif "scales" lol

glad your enjoying blender .......... am sure this time next year you'll be saying Carrara who?? rofl ......... did love C back in the days before I got blended but don't want to go back

have fun  

 ha ha :) thanks heddheld, yes I discovered that magic button 'keep vertex order' else all my meshes were falling apart ! but I didn't know about the poly groups!

thanks for that , I am sure I will be back asking questions!

Greetings BooksbyDavid,

Yes, I have tried Blender off and for a while and found that it's main problem was every tutorial I did was for a different version so I would get stuck mid tutorial looking for a button that was no longer there! This version seems much more approachable.

I'll post a step by step later when I get a chance as I'd like to see more Carrara users using Blender as a 'plug in' (small joke there).

I was lucky as I found a few tuts that taught me little bits of what I needed to know, I'll post them as well. And discovered buttons that let you change the mesh hotpoint because those buttons were staring me in the face thank fully :)

 

@hedheld here are the Poser fabric settings  that I worked with

Poser Dynamic Settings 

I had the same issue when it came to learning Blender the use of so many different version but now I keep and run several different version on my Machine just so I can do some tutorials as I learn. I do not know if you knew you can run Blender right from a zip version? I keep on my machine Blender 2.49, 2.50 2.63, 2.68 and the current version these to me were sort of major releases where major changes happened and covers most of all the tutorials out there that you can find. Just a thought if you wish to do older tutorials just download a older zip version and run blender right from the zip it does not have to be installed. Good Luck

Greetings BooksbyDavid,

Yes, I have tried Blender off and for a while and found that it's main problem was every tutorial I did was for a different version so I would get stuck mid tutorial looking for a button that was no longer there! This version seems much more approachable.

I'll post a step by step later when I get a chance as I'd like to see more Carrara users using Blender as a 'plug in' (small joke there).

I was lucky as I found a few tuts that taught me little bits of what I needed to know, I'll post them as well. And discovered buttons that let you change the mesh hotpoint because those buttons were staring me in the face thank fully :)

 

@hedheld here are the Poser fabric settings  that I worked with

Poser Dynamic Settings 

:) Blender has got some great tools. If I could only figure out how to use all of them. I have used Blender's fluid sim. That was fun to play with. I exported a weightmapped figure from Poser into Blender, ran the sim, then exported the final frame of the sim into Carrara along with the exported Poser figure, set shaders and rendered. It turned out pretty nice.

I had the same issue when it came to learning Blender the use of so many different version but now I keep and run several different version on my Machine just so I can do some tutorials as I learn. I do not know if you knew you can run Blender right from a zip version? I keep on my machine Blender 2.49, 2.50 2.63, 2.68 and the current version these to me were sort of major releases where major changes happened and covers most of all the tutorials out there that you can find. Just a thought if you wish to do older tutorials just download a older zip version and run blender right from the zip it does not have to be installed.

Good Luck

Thanks for that Lobo3433

Great idea, and thanks for that tip about the zip files.  I hadn't thought about running separate installs.! 

BooksbyDavid, ah so you can bring a poser figure into Blender fully rigged? Didn't know that! Which format is the best? 

BooksbyDavid, ah so you can bring a poser figure into Blender fully rigged? Didn't know that! Which format is the best? 

Well, no. At least, that's not what I did. I just exported an obj of the posed and morphed figure and used that in the fluid sim. Sorry to get your hopes up. :)

Hey that's fine!! I was slightly excited . :)

Thanks for that Lobo3433

Great idea, and thanks for that tip about the zip files.  I hadn't thought about running separate installs.! 

It was the best way I was able to buckle down and really start learning Blender granted many features go from one to the other but sometimes from one version to another something is moved to another location or they make UI changes that change things just enough to make it a bit difficult to learn the over all software package

collada works to a point ..... have some tweaking to do if you have the game version I think FBX might work don't have that so cant test it

Thanks Lobo3433 and heddheld, i'll buckle down and check out collada and fbx ! ;) cheers , 

headwax 

Hi head wax :)

After much testing I found about the best method for bringing in a Daz dollie is to export from Studio as Collada, delete the messed up armature and make a very basic one, simplified especially for the cloth sim.  Bring in your T-posed cloth and scale the two to match.  Remember, every time you scale anything in Blender, you need to apply the scale (Ctl+A) and rotation if needed.

Animate the arms moving downward.  The beauty of Blender is that you can start the cloth sim before the start of the timeline to give it time to settle before the animation starts.

Thanks for that Roy ! I'll ave a go and see what up comes !