It’s been requested a few times that I show how, exactly, I run dForce sims to get the billowy fabric like I do and I keep putting it off (for reasons I don’t even have, honestly).
While I was at it, though, I figured I’d run through the character dial trick because it’s useful for quite a lot of dForce items – Mine especially – but it seems to be a slightly lesser known one unless you’ve been playing with dForce a bit.
Neither of these tricks are new. We’re certainly not reinventing the wheel and there have been plenty of other people who’ve shown how it’s done, I’m sure. They’re not particularly advanced, so even if you’re not used to messing with dForce, you should be able to get it working rather easily. This is mainly for those who want to use dForce and barely know where to start without going into Advanced Youtube Tutorials, but still give something play with aside from the basic drape steps.
First things First:Turn off absolutely everything in your scene that you don’t need.
If it isn’t colliding with the fabric, then you don’t need it. Alternatively, you can go under Parameters and set the ‘Visible in Simulation’ toggle to Off. Either way, banish it all.
˗ˏˋ Fabric Billows´ˎ˗
Once you have your figure posed and your dForce item loaded, open your timeline up – For the pretty billows of fabric, we’re not fighting with the wind nodes.
Your starting pose should be done on frame 0 – If you haven’t used the timeline in the scene yet, it should be there already, so you don’t have to worry about it.
If you want to get super fancy or you need to account for things intersecting with other figures or objects, you can adjust your pose on other keyframes like you normally would. If you’re doing that, though, then you probably already know what I’m showing here anyway and can bypass the rest of this journal.
1. Make sure you have ‘Start from Memorized Pose’ ticked to ‘On’ – For most dForce items, I find you’re going to get your best results doing that anyway, regardless of timeline use. I know it’s annoying sometimes, but it really is worth it.
Next, set “Frames to Simulate” to “Animated (Use Timeline Play Range)”
You can leave the timeline at the default settings of 31 frames or you can play around with the length of the sim. We’re keeping it at 31 for this.
2. Slide your trackbar to frame 5 or 10
Now move your whole figure in the opposite direction that you want your cloth to billow and drape.
Here I’ve moved it over to the right of the scene. You don’t need to move it very far for this to have dramatic results. In fact, if you move it too far in such a short number of keyframes, you’re risking a lot of clipping and probably an explosion.
Hit simulate and watch it like a hawk.
Ta Da. You have a nice, dramatic skirt billow! You can let the sim continue past the keyframe of movement to soften it more or pull it back to just before, depending on the results you’re aiming for.
Because we have everything turned off, the sims run fairly quick – This one took all of 1:04 from memorized pose to frame 31 and that’s with a multi-layer dress. That’ll vary a lot depending on what your simulating and how much you needed to leave in your scene, obviously, but I promise the timeline sims aren’t as scary as they seem.