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Pulling back the Drapes: The Cloth Room

VortigensBane

Busy Bee
I thought it would be fun (and informative) to start a thread solely about Poser's Cloth Room. I have had a lot of fun (and headaches) using it, and while I wouldn't consider myself an expert, there are a few things that I have learned along the way.

I thought this could be a good place to show off cloth simulations you're particularly proud of, to ask questions about the Cloth Room, and in general, just to have fun...

To lead off with a little bit of bragging:

Leatherface Woos His Bride

Leatherface Woos His Bride.jpg


The background for this image starts as any fairy tale should: "Once upon a time..." Actually, it grew from a story I made up once to tell some little kids I was babysitting. I had them tell me who the story should be about, and then went on from there. I got the usual fairy tale characters: a prince, a princess, an unicorn, and a dragon, not to mention an army of goblins. Oh, and the prince has to be ugly... Kids!

There was a young prince who was stricken with a terrible disease when he was a boy. Both of his parents succumbed to the disease and died, but he survived. The disease, however, left him so scarred and ugly to look at that he began to wear a leather mask over his face so that his subjects would not have to look at him. From this mask he received his name, which people would whisper as if it were a horrible secret: "Leatherface." Despite his terrifying appearance, he was a truly good and gentle prince, and always tried to do what was the best for his subjects. Nevertheless, the people were afraid of him, and he became the subject of tales of horror. His only friends were three great wolfhounds, who did not care what he looked like.

In the kingdom across the river to the South, the king was mean and stingy, but also jealous of the prosperity in Leatherface's country. This king's jealousy almost led to war between the two kingdoms, but something else happened which caused them to join as allies instead.

A messenger arrived from the North to say that the goblins were invading with an enormous horde, and the king of that nation was in dire need of help, or all three kingdoms would be overrun.

Leatherface received the message first, and generous prince that he was, sent on the messenger to his neighbor with his own plea that the two kingdoms would unite their forces to march against the common enemy.

The neighboring king, selfish as he was, was afraid that the whole thing was just a scheme to lure him away from his lands, so that Leatherface could send in an army in secret and take it from him. Nothing could convince him of Leatherface's good will unless Leatherface agreed to marry one of his daughters, for in that time, no prince would dream of attacking a kingdom belonging to a member of his own family. The king, selfish as always, decided that Leatherface should not have his oldest daughter, or even his second oldest daughter, because he hoped to marry them off to more important and even richer kings in other kingdoms. Instead, he decreed that Leatherface should marry his third daughter, and right then and there at that, before his army would march one step to the help of any other kingdom.

Leatherface did not wish to force any girl to marry him, because he knew full well just how ugly he truly was. He agreed to the match, however, to try to save the three kingdoms, as long as the girl would accept him.

As for the poor girl, what could she do? In those days, a princess had to marry whomever her father chose for her, whether she liked it or not. This particular princess was very timid and shy, and spent most of her time in the crypt of her father's castle, caring for her youngest sister, a little blind girl who could not tolerate the bright sun in the upper parts of the castle. For her, just as for most people outside of his own immediate household, "Leatherface" was a monster who stalked through all the children's tales. Now she was forced to marry him before even meeting him, and on the very next day, too!

This image is from a more "grown-up" version of the story, when the poor frightened bride is left alone with her terrifying husband for the first time. The first thing that he tells her is that, as his wife, she may say whatever she wishes to him when they are alone together. He knows he is hideous, and does not wish to make her life any more difficult than it must be. If he disgusts her, she should tell him. When she tells him that his hounds frighten her as well, he commands them not to come within twenty paces of her (they are really well trained, as you would understand if I had enough time to scratch down the whole story, which took several hours to tell...). She says that she worries for her little sister, who now has no one to care for her. He suggests that the little girl come to live with her sister in his castle. By the time the last candle is flickering out, the timid little princess has come to realize that Leatherface is truly not as horrifying as all the stories say.

This has gone on long enough, though, for one blog post, so suffice it to say that the combined armies of the three kingdoms defeat the goblins, and Leatherface and his bride live happily ever after. ;-)


So, I guess I have just been having too much fun... This image more-or-less composed itself; all I started with was the general "story," which I've had for quite a while now, and a dynamic shirt that I am testing. I ended up doing a lot more cloth room testing than I planned on; there are eight -- or maybe nine, I can't remember -- cloth simulations all layered on top of and colliding with each other, which turned into quite a bit of time blankly staring at the screen waiting for the sim to complete, and then adding various (hidden) collision objects to the scene and re-draping. I think there are over twelve non-rendering collision objects altogether.

In case anyone is remotely interested as to how it all went together (which you probably aren't), the girl's dress was the first sim; I added a collision object on both sides to keep the sleeves from touching the skirt of the dress, because I wanted the blanket to fall there later... The blanket was the next sim. I had one choreographed vertex which I used to pull back the blanket so it would drape nicely over her knees. Next I ran a sim for her hair, which I did as a dynamic cloth sim as well, instead of a hair sim, because I still haven't figured out that part of Poser (the Hair Room, that is). The next sim to run was his shirt (the whole reason for the scene at the beginning...). Each of the bed curtains was its own sim as well, and there are six of those. The whole animation was 75 frames.

The lighting is the result of LOTS of trial and error; I have re-rendered I don't know how many times trying to get it right. The main light source is an "infinite" light with a slight blueish tint. There is a low-powered point light for the candle flame, and another low-powered IBL light with a really blueish tint for the ambient lighting. All three lights are using various degrees of Ambient Occlusion.
 

VortigensBane

Busy Bee
So, enough bragging for a while. Now for some more-or-less helpful information...

Starting at the beginning:

Perhaps the biggest hurdle for those learning to use the Cloth Room is to get used to the idea of animating the base figure's pose from its default DaVinci stance to whatever pose you want it to be in when you render. Normally I pose my figure on frame 15 in Poser's timeline, unless I'm doing a sim that is really complicated. Once I have posed the figure (on frame 15), I next ALWAYS run the animation in preview mode, to check how the figure moves during the animation. More often than not, you will discover that the person's body parts collide during the transition from frame 1 to frame 15. Not paying attention to this will cause you untold headaches when you go to calculate your sim, because it will always either explode or fail outright... If my person has colliding body parts (arms and hands are really good at messing up sims) during the transitional frames, I will add more keyframes to the figure's pose. Normally, I only use keyframes in increments of 5, so frame 01, frame 05, frame 10, frame 15, etc.. It just makes it easier for me to remember in case I have to come back and fix something later. Once and a while, I will have to add more keyframes, but that is pretty rare.

The first part of running any cloth simulation, of course, is to load a prop (to become a cloth object) into the Poser scene. I have found that ALMOST any clothing figure can be converted into a prop (or number of props) that can be then run as dynamic cloth simulations (more on that later). Normally, though, it is a lot easier to just load some available dynamic cloth prop from your Props library. Usually when loading a dynamic prop, you should have the figure who is supposed to wear it selected, because most available dynamic props are "smart-parented" to the person wearing them.

That being said, though, some dynamic props are NOT smart-parented. Personally, I find those a pain if they are clothing for a figure. The benefit of smart-propped clothing props is that if you have moved your figure around in the scene (on frame 1) so that the person won't collide with various items, a smart-propped cloth object will load in its proper place on your person, while a "dumb" prop will always load in exactly the same place in your scene. If my cloth sim is for clothing, the first thing I always do is parent the prop to the person who is supposed to wear it. DO NOT parent the clothes to the "Body" node of the figure, because when you move your person around in the scene (on frame 01) to prepare them for the start of the sim, their clothes will not come along with them, and your sim will be a flop. If the clothing IS parented to the person's body, change the cloth parent at least to the "Hip" node of the figure, so you will be able to move the person around in the scene. Something like a cape might be better parented to the person's chest or neck node, it just really depends on the primary point of contact with the underlying figure. As a general rule, the cloth should be parented to whatever body part it will be most in contact with: hats to heads, cloaks to necks/shoulders, shirts to chests or hips, skirts to hips, dresses to hips, etc. I have also been successful running sims where the clothes are not parented to the underlying figure. This only works, of course, if you don't change the pose of the figure on frame 01 before running the sim.
 

VortigensBane

Busy Bee
Now that you have a figure who animates nicely into its final resting pose, and something dynamic for them to wear, it is finally time to switch to the Cloth Room tab.
The Cloth Room is conveniently arranged with numbered headings, in case you aren't smart enough to figure out which step to do first...

Number 1. Cloth Simulations
Before you click the magic "New Simulation" button that starts of the cloth-making process, you have to really think about how your scene is going to be set up. Just like regular clothing, it has to be put on in the proper order. You don't put on your coat before you put on your undershirt. I personally think it is extremely important to have all of your simulations in the proper order. The reason is, if you have 5 or 10 simulations in a scene, and after setting them up and running them all you decide to tweak the person's pose at the end, you can either recalculate all the sims automatically in their proper order (if you have them in the right order in the first place) with just one button in the "Animation" menu, which is "Re-calculate all Cloth", or, if you have your sims set up out of order, you have to wait for each one to re-calculate before starting the next one. My computer is a little slow, so I always do intense calculations like that over-night.

The "Simulation Settings..." button is VERY useful.
The first option is to change the name of the simulation. I usually name the New Simulations something other than "Sim_1", because that way, if you have several sims in one scene, and you come back to it after a week or so, you know which sim is the shirt and which shirt is the cape.

Next you have the Simulation range. Your start frame will almost always be 1, but there are occasional exceptions. The End frame is usually the last frame in your scene. If you set the end frame at more than 30, Poser automatically adds the extra frames to your scene when it goes to run the simulation (at least on my computer). I usually don't change the "Steps per frame" setting; what increasing it does achieves the same amount of drape that you would get from a longer simulation over the space of a shorter simulation. E.g., running a simulation for 60 frames with 2 "steps per frame" will get you comparable results to running a sim of 30 frames with 4 "steps per frame." I just run the sim with more frames if I need it... I always check all of the additional cloth collsion options (Object vertex against cloth polygon, Object polygon against cloth polygon, Cloth self-collision) unless I am running a hair simulation in the Cloth Room, which I will try to discuss eventually as well. The Cloth Draping option I sometimes use, other times not. It really depends on how much movement your figure has between the start pose and the final pose, and how pre-draped your cloth item is.

Now for the usefulness of the simulation range settings. Let's say you want to run a sim where your lady is wearing a slip or under-dress under her gown. Well, the slip was made by one vendor, and the gown by someone else. At frame 01, the two meshes collide. If you run the simulation like that, it will fail right off the bat. You can either play with the original mesh in your modelling software (which most people probably would rather NOT do), or do it in the Cloth Room. With Simulation Settings, there is a work-around. It involves adding an extra keyframe for your person at frame 02. Once you have that second keyframe, copy your figure's pose at frame 01 and paste it to your figure in frame 02. Now, since you were smart and "put on" the slip first by making it the first sim (which I'll call Sim_01 for this section), set the start frame of that sim at frame 1, but the start frame for the gown (Sim_2) at frame 2. If you go back to Sim_1, set the number of drape frames to be pretty high (I've used up to 30). The practical effect of this is that when you calculate the drape for Sim_1, by the time Sim_2 starts on frame 2, the meshes no longer collide, and your simulation doesn't crash...

Number 2. Cloth Objects
In order to actually make your clothing become dynamic, you have to "Clothify" it. That sort of makes sense, maybe? If you "clothify" the wrong thing, you can always "unclothify" it. Again, sort of makes sense... Probably the most important thing, after putting your clothes on in the proper order, is selecting the proper collision objects. This is done by hitting the "Collide Against..." button. You'll get a pop-up menu. By default, your new cloth item doesn't collide with anything. To fix that, click the "Add/Remove Collision Objects" button. You will get another pop-up that lists everything in your scene. Usually, clothes collide with the ground, but there are occasional exceptions... One thing I have learned is that when your figure is dressed in layers of dynamic clothing, the bottom layer should not collide with the layer above it, but the higher layers should collide with what is underneath. Usually, at least, because there are, of course, exceptions... The other option, depending on how form-fitting the clothing is, is to make the bottom layer offset from the person just a little bit (like .100), and each consecutive layer to be offset from the person more (increase by around 1.00 for each layer). Once you have selected what your cloth should collide with, close the pop-up window. Usually the only collision "option" that I change is the "Offset" from the thing it will collide with. I usually set the offset as low as possible, but if the figure has strong displacement maps, you sometimes have to increase the offset so that Hercules' bulging veins aren't sticking out through his sleeves...
 

Pendraia

Sage
Contributing Artist
Thanks for this. My brain is fried from work but I'll have a good look on the weekend.
 

Gilraen777

Inspired
Thanks for this. I own Poser pro 2014, but have yet to use it (I bought it not long after it came out; shame considering how much I paid for it), as it is more difficult to figure out, and I am so used to Daz. Also, I don't know how to save and import my morphed figures into it, and I don't know that I could re-create them again, one important one in particular. But the cloth room is one of the reasons I bought the program and this will be a big help once I finally do get down to using it.
Oh, and you are a great story teller, I was just getting really interested in your story when you stopped! LOL
 

Rokket

Dances with Bees
You stated that Poser automatically adds frames if your end frame is more than 30. I take it you are using a Pro version? Poser 8, 9 and 10, which I have used don't do that. You have to manually change the end frame in all of those. Sorry, don't mean to derail a very useful thread. Just thought I'd mention that to the uninitiated.
 

Pendraia

Sage
Contributing Artist
Thanks for this. I own Poser pro 2014, but have yet to use it (I bought it not long after it came out; shame considering how much I paid for it), as it is more difficult to figure out, and I am so used to Daz. Also, I don't know how to save and import my morphed figures into it, and I don't know that I could re-create them again, one important one in particular. But the cloth room is one of the reasons I bought the program and this will be a big help once I finally do get down to using it.
Oh, and you are a great story teller, I was just getting really interested in your story when you stopped! LOL
welcome Gilraen777, I'm mainly a ds user and have always found it difficult to use poser but with this version I've actually made some progress with the help of some of the people in this forum...I hope you havesimilar luck.
 

VortigensBane

Busy Bee
You stated that Poser automatically adds frames if your end frame is more than 30. I take it you are using a Pro version? Poser 8, 9 and 10, which I have used don't do that. You have to manually change the end frame in all of those. Sorry, don't mean to derail a very useful thread. Just thought I'd mention that to the uninitiated.
I am currently running PoserPro 2014, but even when I used Poser 9, I'm pretty sure it still worked. You don't see the extra frames until after you run the simulation, though. They don't get added to your timeline automatically, they just get thrown in after the simulation runs. I discovered it by accident one day...
 

VortigensBane

Busy Bee
For a little more hopefully useful information...

Cloth Room Setup step 3:

3. Cloth Groups
When I first started using the Cloth Room, I ignored this box all together. Usually you can without any problems if you are using dynamic clothing items that you got online. Sometimes, though, you want to tweak things a little bit...

A Dynamic Group is just what it says it is. It is a group of vertices selected to be dynamic cloth in your simulation. So far, I have not been able to find a maximum number of dynamic cloth groups that any one cloth item can have. I have done at least 6 on one dynamic prop. See below... Normally, I think of dynamic groups as different types of cloth on the same garment. For instance, if you have a dress with a stiff bodice, but a "foldy" type of skirt, and chiffon sleeves, I would create three dynamic groups: bodice, skirt, and sleeves. In the next step, you can make each dynamic group function differently in the simulation.
Arabian blanket 011.png

For this blanket, there are LOTS of dynamic groups. The reason for that is that for the blanket to still look remotely realistic after the sim, the different areas need to have different characteristics. For instance, the tassels are all dynamic. If they were on the default settings in the Cloth Room, they would stretch all over the place, and normally, tassels in reality don't do that. The workaround: Each tassel is composed of two dynamic groups, the "suspension" (what attaches the tassels to the blanket), and the actual "tassels" themselves. Before anyone thinks I went crazy and added 200 dynamic groups to my horseblanket, though, I should rephrase... When I said "each" tassel, I should have said "all" the tassels. Dynamic groups are pretty much the same as material zones. They don't have to be connected, but they all share the same properties. My "suspension" dynamic group was set to be very anti-stretchy, and the "tassel" group was set to be very light-weight and easy folding. The neck collar had to be pretty stiff to support the "weight" of all the tassels without deforming all over, so that was another group, and then the blanket itself was supposed to be light-weight so that when I add wind to the sim, it blows around nicely.

You add dynamic groups by clicking the "New Dynamic Group" button. You remove them, surprise, surprise, by clicking the "Delete Dynamic Group" button. All objects, once "clothified," automatically have one Dynamic group assigned, which is made up of all the vertices in your object. This group is called "[default]". Theoretically, you can rename this group, but I usually don't. When you add a new dynamic group, it doesn't have any vertices assigned to it until you do that with the "Edit Dynamic Group". Clicking this button brings up the "Group Editor" pop-up, which in itself is a whole kettle of fish to work with. Personally, this is usually my least favorite part (other than waiting for the sims to complete). If you are lucky, the vendor who put together the prop you have clothified used lots and lots of material zones when putting their prop together. The advantage of this is that you can add a whole material zone to a dynamic group with one click. Otherwise, you have to select vertices more-or-less one at a time using the little paintbrush. Just a caveat, though, for Poser 9 users... For some reason, whenever I selected vertices (say on the front of a dress), Poser would select any vertex that corresponded to the same space on the back of the dress, so I would always have to be really careful to make sure that I didn't select any unwanted vertices. I haven't had any trouble with that in PoserPro 2014, though.

Now for the buttons that really make cloth objects come "alive"... the "choreographed" group, the "constrained" group, and the "hard" and "soft" decorated groups.

The "Choreographed" group took me FOREVER to figure out how to use. What is it for? Example. Your fair lady is for some reason running in a long dress, or walking up a flight of stairs. In real life, normally she would reach down and hold up her skirt so she doesn't trip over it. In Poser-life, that is what the choreographed group is for. My workflow is as follows. On frame 01 of the simulation, before running it, I select one vertex (using the group editor by clicking on the "edit choreographed group" button) on the skirt that is in the area that she would grab in real life. WHILE I AM STILL IN THE CLOTH ROOM, AND WITH THE GROUP EDITOR STILL OPEN, I move the timeline slider to the final posing frame. Because I am still in the group editor, I can tell which vertex I have selected. Now for the scary part, which I couldn't wrap my mind on for the longest time. At that final frame, you use the parameter dials (which I have always added to my Cloth Room tab for this very purpose) to move the entire dynamic prop. The goal is that your single choreographed vertex should end up where you want it to be in 3D space. Where the rest of your outfit ends up doesn't actually matter. Since you are still in the group editor, you can see which vertex you are moving. If you exit the group editor, there is no way to tell. Next, you have to "scrub" through the entire simulation (still in the group editor), to make sure that your choreographed vertex does not collide with your mesh in any of the frames. If it does, just add keyframes... Just like with body parts, a choreographed vertex that crashes through moving body parts will always crash the sim.

The "Constrained" group is a little easier to figure out. Any vertex in the "constrained" group is essentially glued to the underlying figure (which theoretically you parented the cloth to in the first place). It is also extremely useful, especially if your fabric settings (which will be set later) create a very stretchy cloth. Some rather common uses of the constrained group would include the waistline of a skirt, or the neckline of a dress. You can also constrain, say, part of a blanket, to a figure's hand, and then when the hand moves, the blanket follows. By using both the constrained and choreographed groups on a dynamic prop, I did some experiments with wrapping a shawl around a girl's shoulders (constrained vertex "held" in right hand, choreographed vertex "held" in left hand, animation mimicking actual motion). Overall, it was pretty successful, but I was having trouble with my underlying mesh. I wanted a dynamic dress underneath the dynamic shawl; so far, that part hasn't worked too well. Conforming clothing would be better in this case. A "limitation" of Poser that I wish they would fix is that you can only have one constrained group and one choreographed group per scene. Sometimes I could really use more than one...

The "Soft-Decorated" group is for making things (e.g., decorations...) that are a part of your dynamic prop, but at the same time are not really affected by the sim. In the Poser manual (which it is a good idea to reference on occasion), they suggest things like pockets and belt loops. In the horseblanket pictured above, the heads of the tassels are "soft-decorated." Because of the way my mesh is set up, if the tassel heads were truly dynamic, the tassels would just droop. By making the heads "soft-decorated," they maintain their shape during the simulation; well, for the most part, anyway. If you look closely, you can see some slight distortion on some of them.

The "Rigid-Decorated" group is for things that are, um, rigid. Again, the Poser manual suggests buttons. One thing I have found out, which I'm pretty sure is also mentioned in the manual, that the mesh for the "rigid-decorated" group should not actually be connected to the rest of the dynamic object mesh. If it is, problems occur. Normally, I don't use the rigid-decorated group very often.

Coming next... 4. Dynamics Controls
 

VortigensBane

Busy Bee
4. Dynamics Controls

The "Calculate Simulation" does just that. After you have survived steps 1-3, it is finally time to actually make the prop cloth object act like cloth. This is done by hitting the "Calculate Simulation" button. Depending on your computer, number of frames in the sim, and the complexity of the object you have "clothified," this calculations can take FOREVER. I have had over 30 minutes per frame, for a 45 frame animation, but that was on my laptop, which doesn't have much guts. Normally now I get about 2 minutes per frame when running a sim, less if it is a l0-res mesh.

I have to confess I don't have the SLIGHTEST idea what the "Play Simulation" button is for. If someone actually knows, they can teach me something...

"Collision Friction" is another one of those check-boxes that I haven't quite figured out yet, so I leave it in its default setting, a.k.a., unchecked. It has something to do with various settings that I ignore in the "Collide Against" pop-up, so I have never felt the need to experiment.

The rest of the settings are descriptions of how your cloth object will react to the Poser version of the laws of physics. A few years ago, and I have absolutely NO IDEA where, I came across a set of Cloth Room presets which you can apply to your dynamic prop to simulate real-world cloth types. It includes things like leather, silk, linen, wool, velvet, burlap, denim, cotton, gossamer, latex, etc. If anyone knows where to get it, links would be good... Also, if anyone knows how to replicate this feat of usefulness, I wouldn't mind learning that either. All I know is how to use it. You go to the MATERIAL ROOM; for some reason this step is important. You then click on the cloth preset you wish to load, and the pop-up box asks you which sim you would like to apply it too. You type in the name of your sim, e.g., "Sim_1", and then when you go back to the Cloth Room, the cloth parameters have changed. Now, here's another goody... If you have more than one dynamic group in your prop, the cloth parameters will be applied to whatever group you have currently selected.

Another option for getting cloth presets is to buy a dynamic cloth prop that comes with cloth room presets, such as the "Burgundian Robe" by Digital-Lion and SaintFox at Renderosity. Personally, I think the outfit would be worth it just for the Cloth Room presets included with it, but it is also one of my favorite outfits. It also has a great set of material shaders to go with it. That outfit also has examples of using the "rigid-decorated", "soft-decorated", and "constrained" groups. For adding choreographed groups you are on your own... The included tutorial is excellent as well. (And no, I am not self-advertising...)

The "Clear Simulation" button undoes any calculations that Poser made after you hit the "Calculate Simulation" button. You will occasionally need it if you discover a mesh collision during simulations, if your mesh somehow explodes during the sim, etc.

The "Reset" button returns all of the cloth parameters to their original default values.

Some practical tips...

The files that Poser makes to save dynamic simulations are pretty large, and the sim itself takes up a lot of memory (If someone knows whether RAM, graphics card, or processor is the main bottleneck for cloth sims I would be interested to know...). So, when I go to run a sim, THE FIRST THING that I always do is SAVE THE SCENE before clicking the "calculate simulation" button. I cannot count the number of times that Poser has frozen or crashed because there was an error in the sim (usually related to mesh collisions). If your scene isn't saved, you can lose a LOT of time. Also, and perhaps this is just a fantasy, it would seem that by saving the file, that relieves the load on your computer's memory, which results in a faster sim. If I'm doing a really big, long, or complicated sim, the other thing that I always do before running the sims is to clear the memory cache. Edit>General Preferances>Clear cache now. This does make the sims run faster; the downside is that you can no longer "undo" or "redo" any of your recent work. That has never caused me any problems, though.

Now that I've touched on all the basic settings, I guess next will have to be either dynamic hair (in the Cloth Room) or "hybrid" dynamic outfits (a.k.a., half conforming, half dynamic). Unless of course someone suggests something more useful in the meantime...
 

Rokket

Dances with Bees
I learned about the choreographed group today! Nice. I've been using the cloth room since Poser 8, and I have never bothered with all those groups other than constrained. Thanks VB!
 

Ken1171

Esteemed
Contributing Artist
This week I have watched a webinar from SMS where they have presented 3 professional cartoonists, where each explains how they use Poser in their pipeline. One of them uses dynamic cloth, and one of the most useful information was when he explained the MEANING of the numeric values in some of the parameters. Have you noticed they are just numbers, with no lower or upper limits, and no units? To most people, they are just meaningless until we blindly play with them. Numbers without units give no sense of meaning and scale.

For example, what parameters should I use to emulate cotton, leather or satin? In that webinar the guy mentioned exactly that kind of thing, and apparently, like most of us, he has learned it from trial and error. Poser uses the same cloth solver as used in older versions of 3DSMAX, so I used to have a PDF with a list of all values, but I seem to have lost it over time. Apparently, the "cloth mass" parameter is measured in a weird unit (Kg/cm2). I say "weird" because I don't know of any cloth that has a whole kilogram per square centimeter, unless it's made of thick lead. That's why the typical values are so tiny, like 0.005.

In other words, I just wish the parameters were a bit more meaningful and user friendly. Even now that I know that the cloth mass is measured in Kg/cm2, it is still difficult to figure out how many kilograms per square centimeters cotton (or anything) would have. So I just memorize values from previous experiences.
 

VortigensBane

Busy Bee
It would be nice for someone to explain all those numbers... I sort-of understand the effects of most of them, but it would be really nice to know what real-world units they are based on. At least I know now what the "Cloth Density" unit is...
 

Pendraia

Sage
Contributing Artist
That makes sense Ken as cotton drapes very differently to a heavy wool due to the weight of the cloth. I say heavy wool as light weight pure wool georgette would drape differently to the heavy wool also and would possibly have more similarity with light weight fabrics.
 

Rokket

Dances with Bees
I have a .jpg that I downloaded that lists all of the parameters for dynamic cloth. When I get on my laptop later I'll upload it here so everyone can have it. It does make a world of difference in the cloth simulation.
 
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