I agree with most of the points, but: how to make sitting poses without timeline or real-time simulation? (And it's not Poser only thing, DS engine now requires the timeline too if I'm not mistaken. )
Assuming a basic sitting pose (not a lot of stuff to interact with, only worrying about stuff behind and beneath the figure), the same way you would any pose that's fairly standard. I'm not suggesting that animation be impossible. I'm suggesting that you shouldn't have to think about it unless you're doing something non-standard. Sitting poses mostly work all the same, as do most standing poses. You start from T pose, then you go to the pose.
So right now, this is the basic workflow for unless someone either decides to use dynamic clothes exclusively, or deliberately decides, "I want to use dynamic clothes."
- Load figure, hair, some conforming clothes.
- Try to pose the figure
- Think, oh, this might look good with a dynamic skirt instead of a conforming one. Or have some dress in mind in their Runtime.
- Load the dynamic clothes. Find they don't fit the pose.
- Either start again from scratch _or_ figure out how to make the first frame into future frame.
- Try to figure out what a good frame is for the last frame. 30 seems really high, so probably pick around 10 or less.
- Set up dynamics according to instructions and what you need it to collide with.
- Run sim. Maybe have it work OK if the figure ends in the center of the scene. If the figure moves, the sim probably messes up due to low quality and too few frames.
- Give up.
And that's assuming there's no problem with setting up the start and end frames. All of those stumbling blocks could be avoided by simply not having the user mess with them, because for most cases they're the same. You should mostly take at least a second (30 frames) to get into the pose, and probably a half a second to settle (up to 45 frames). Everyone makes their clothes to start in T pose. Almost everyone has their figure basically in the same spot in the final state, usually moving only a little bit up, twisting a little, etc. in waythat would be better handled by relative terms instead of absolute. Have part of the sim say turn y rotate 30 degrees, x translate 0.5 m, z translate 1 m, etc., rather than trying to figure out where to put the figure in the first frame to make the clothes move the way you want before reaching the place you want in the last frame. Because anyone making a still is focused on the last frame, and has to work backwards using animation. Since most people making stills don't think in terms of animation (time, movement, etc.), adding a layer of difficulty is almost cruel.
Really, the only reasons you'd need the timeline rather than a less error prone single interface focusing on a single frame is if you needed a keyframe in between start and finish, if you had complex collisions with different environmental props, or if the start pose wasn't the T pose. All of which can happen and can be useful, but aren't the majority of uses.
Interesting thoughts. I think your first paragraph relates to the last. I don't avoid layered clothing but I recognize the added complexity and perhaps some users are scared off.
Based on my sales, I think it's deeper than that. I think people don't care about dynamics unless there's obvious draping and folds. Those are antithetical to structure in clothing. You can combine both in an outfit, but people really like classic unstructured drapes for dynamics more than they like detail and thickness. Or at least, that's how they spend their money.
A revamp of the interface would be helpful. Some suggestions are:
Presets: even though each clothing item reacts differently, we could at least save usable settings for particular items so we don't have to start from scratch each time.
Simplified and advanced interfaces: dials like Thicker/Thinner, Stretchy/Not Stretchy, Slippery/Rough, etc. A minimal palette for quick adjustment or those new to dynamics with access to the more advanced dials for experts if fine tuning is necessary.
Plain language: As you mentioned. I've never used the "steps per frame" option. Thanks for mentioning it. A UI update would go a long way.
On presets.... I'd say this is actually where the community needs education. Beginners keep thinking they should or even need to change the cloth settings themselves right out the gate. IMHO, this is like thinking you should re-rig conforming clothes before you know anything about using them. I spent a lot of time testing my clothes and changing the settings so that they worked with the topology and mesh density. My clothing loads with settings I've tried in various poses, on various characters. In my experience, dynamic settings are _enormously_ dependent on what clothing I'm working with.
My concern about presets that load independently of clothes is that they would totally mislead people about how those settings work (dependent on the clothes) _and_ how they should use dynamic content (mostly without touching those settings). One mesh's denim is another's silk. Especially since density makes weight polygon number dependent.
While I could see presets being useful to content creators and experts, I'm more concerned about the number of people who load a dynamic item for the first time or so, immediately change the dynamic settings based all the talk about "satin" or "leather" presets and all the tutorials that list setting the dynamic controls as part of the process, have the clothing not work at all the way it's designed to, then give up on dynamics as too difficult. Or, even more frustrating, have their sim not quite work and instead of, say, giving their sim more time to settle, changing collision settings, or any other of the generally more helpful changes, change the clothes' dynamics, make them unusable, then decide that dynamics are too hard.
We really need to get away from those dials as a part of _using_ dynamic clothes. They're key to making dynamic clothes, but in a reliable dynamic system, we should basically be able to ignore them the way we do rigging and JCMs once they're in the clothes. And any published dynamic clothes should (ideally) have settings that work (given a reliable system- which Poser's mostly is, but somewhat isn't).
Yeah, if the all the dials except density were normalized to the same scale (o to 1 or 0 to 10) and given real world labels, that would go a long way to making the settings usable. I definitely and wholeheartedly endorse those changes. That said, again, that's about cloth _creation_, not use. I think the big problem in the Poser community is that we conflate content creation and use, and they're just not at all the same. I think users should be actively discouraged from messing with those settings (and others, like hair settings) unless they want to become an expert. IMHO, at least half of what makes dynamics complex to users getting needlessly overwhelmed by those settings instead of just leaving them to the creator. It not only adds complexity, but takes away time from what they actually should be mastering. 9 times out of 10, I've found that what I needed to make a sim work was changes to frames and timing, quality, and the collision settings. Default quality is ridiculously low and default collision settings are ridiculously high. But people tend to ignore those and go right to the cloth stuff that should mostly work out of the box.
I'd love to see the work of the vendor you referred to. Do you consider Lully's work structured or not?
I can't seem to find him at Rendo any more. Yep, he's gone. I've lost almost everyone in my favorites there. It's really too bad. He had some really great stuff. So did the others. I miss so many artists I admired.
No, compared to what I'm talking about, I wouldn't exactly say Lully's work is structured, but I could totally see why one would call it that. Lots of her pieces have tight, fitted areas, combined with draping and/or gathered ones. That said, she's kept her designs elegantly simple, her textures flood fill and interchangeable through out her line, and her work (as far as I can tell) single layer. She doesn't seem to use constrained or decorated groups much if at all.
Since I can't find any of cocco's work, here's a _very_ old example of mine from Poser 6 or 7. That jacket doesn't look like much, but it's got modeled thickness, with creases modeled into the collar and cuffs. That's kind of the extreme end of structured. The ruffles and gathers Lully adds are the kind of really cool stuff that MD makes easier to model, but they're not new to dynamics. They were rarer mainly because of pre-MD modeling difficulty, and not because they're hard to sim or make work in dynamics. It's a whole lot easier to deal with than, for instance, the belt loops and belt on cocco's pants (he constrained the lot) and or proper overlapping fabric jean pockets on
kobamax's jeans.
That said, you can add structure mainly in materials, too. I found that modeled thickness tended to conflict with my displacement, so I started avoid it. My items with more structured _maps_ sold worse than my more flowing, simpler creations, even though my best selling dynamic item has more layers. So it's not just about complexity and difficulty.
Everything in this set is dynamic, including the boots. The top is essentially a leotard. It wasn't even popular enough to keep selling. My poncho and jacket for V4, however, that's still going.
Point being, with well-mapped, quality clothes like Lully's you can add structure with maps, though she hasn't really done that. Which I think is completely fair and a good idea. It takes a minimum of a day for me to make one of those texture and material sets for one piece. That means it's about about two weeks to make 3 material/texture sets for a whole outfit and do a few final test renders. Even with today's tools, I can't see it taking half that time. I mean, sure for paint and metal and such. That's actually pretty straight forward. But start mixing velvet and satin, add lame to your satin, get all the layered stitched elements in place, and there's really only so fast detailed materials can go. In my experience, really detailed clothing texturing just takes lots of time.
And it doesn't seem to do a whole lot in terms of sales.
