Navigation or Camera Controls

[jim]

I believe that in less than four years, the primary way of interacting with Artful Tailor and tools like it will be through a VR or AR setup. However, today that is really only possible with a top-of-the-line GPU and additional expensive hardware that I think restricts the audience for this software too much. As a result, we need to be able to control the viewport using the good-old keyboard and mouse.

Orbit	Pan	Zoom/Dolly
Alt+Left-Mouse	Alt+Middle-Mouse	Alt+Right-Mouse
	Middle-Mouse	Scroll-Wheel
View-Mode+Alt+Left-Mouse	View-Mode+Left-Mouse	View-Mode+Ctrl+Left-Mouse

The selected Eye Icon above puts you into View-Mode. In this mode the view can be controled with only the Left-Mouse (or only mouse button) and various modifier keys. However, selection and grabbing of cloth is impossible in this mode.

The recommended controls if you have a three-button mouse are to ignore the View-Mode and use the upper set of controls with the Alt key when needed. These controls should always be available.

[Tarampa_Studios]

How do we load a custom G3 character from Daz?
e.g. One of the new 3DU Toon Generations characters?

[jim]

Daz Studio Integration

Installing and verifying install As part of running the installer, you should have automatically run a setup script for Daz Studio that will install several custom action scripts for integration. If everything went well, when you next re-start Daz Studio, you will see an Artful Physics menu shown here in the upper right. [DazIntegraionMenu] If you’re lucky, you’ll also see some actions in your toolbar as shown here to “Send Anim” and “Read Cloth”. These are the same actions included in the m…

This should be covered by the above newly added documentation. Please reply there if things are still not working or confusing.

[Tarampa_Studios]

Thanks Jim.
Yes, I installed the Daz plugin, and yes, the menu and toolbar both appear at the top. Very helpful.

Initial feedback from the installation process:

• I downloaded and used right-click/install as administrator, which worked great.
  It let me install on my M-Drive, where I keep all my animation software, so that was great too,
  and I appreciated the extra stage of double-checking that everything was going to install the way I wanted.

• I love the look of the UI in Tailor.

Some suggestions: (all optional)

• It would be great to have some re-sizing arrows on the UI for when we are resizing it down from full-screen. Just clicking and dragging does work most of the time, but it’s a little hard to tell when it’s been grabbed in the right place without the re-size arrows.

• When we click on the icon to add collar/cuffs/trim etc, I think it would help if we had a drop down window to choose which type we specifically want, because that would also help to reaffirm which options are not available for our particular pattern. (see image below where collar doesn’t seem to be available.)

• Perhaps, as well as an “Import Animation”, it might help to have an “Import Avatar .jsim” so it is a little bit more intuitive/obvious that we can import a character without any animation…?

Progress images;
Loading a basic Daz4 Genesis 3 morph from the Toon Generations 2 Pack looks a little odd at first, but this is nothing to worry about really…

Using your preset patterns (which are great by the way), the t-shirt dress is the only one that will load onto this type of character, and this is the pattern for which no callar seems to be an option…?:

But the “New Pattern” to build our own clothes also works well;

both of which also export back to DAZ okay;

Now to get them into iClone… Rampa goes through Blender for weight mapping, so I’m going to try through Daz… we both have to go through a conversion program called 3DXchange in order to convert characters and clothing to iClone format (very fast and easy process), but either way your clothes from Tailor need to be rigged to the character and weight mapped, or else it looks like this in 3DX;

It looks as if your cloth is double sided, which may also add a challenge to the conversion process, so my first thought is wondering if it’s possible to export a weight map from Tailor for the cloth as well…?

[Tarampa_Studios]

Hi Jim, a quick update:

The more I play with this, the more I love it.
Your pipeline between Daz and Tailor is great!
The only thing that gives me a little trouble is not being able to choose where to “send anim” and “read cloth” every singe time from and to Daz… it always works perfectly the first time, but whenever I have to re-start a project later on, the 2 programs seem to forget where (to and from) they are saving/reading their files.

Please note: I’m a push-to-the-limits kind of beta tester, so I’m choosing to play with extreme character morphs and cloth styles that are a bit tricky - even so, both perform superbly inside Tailor.
It’s never been so fast, easy - or fun - to create clothing for avatars!

Your ap is even great for beer bellies and pregnant ladies (or even just elderly forest creatures with bad posture, as shown below), just by increasing the collision margin to eliminate flesh poke-through around the belly button (and created in under 30 seconds!!!);

It’s only after the clothing is brought into Daz that I start to hit a few walls - so maybe you can help with this, or maybe this would need advice from Daz, or maybe both, (or better yet a pipeline directly with iClone) but either way, I thought you might like to know, if you don’t already, that (for the purposes of exporting the new clothed avatars from Daz as fbx avatars for use in other software, such as iClone/Unity etc) that:

• Inside Daz, we can prepare for export by rigging the clothing to an adult sized Genesis 3 without too many problems - but there’s a resizing issue happening when I try it with an extreme morphs, for example:

1. This Christening gown resizes too small after rigging via the Transfer Utility Tool;
   

2. This Elderly Queen Forest Critter’s dress is also too small after rigging, even though the character is very large, and I therefore I half-expected the cloth to be too big after rigging;
   

• and in all test cases so far, I can’t save the SimMesh to my Library in Daz without Daz crashing, no matter how simple or tricky the mesh and clothes seem to be.

Please note: I also tried dressing an ordinary Default Genesis3 Male in Artful Tailor using the male christening gown, and once again, it worked great in Tailor…

… so I was hoping that I could rig and save it in Daz to re-size it manually to other characters using the vertices or re-fit tools…

but Daz crashes every time I try to save the SimMeshes to my library.

So for exporting to other programs, it seems as if Rampa’s Blender method, or War Lord’s 3DS Max method are currently the most viable for exporting from Tailor to iClone… so far they’ve been using default characters, so I’ll try their methods next using more Toon Generation Morphs and see how I go.

As for exporting the SimMeshes from Daz to iClone, it may be that I’m missing a simple step. I export other poser and daz clothes to iClone regularly, but I’ve never had to rig or weight map them first.

And in the meantime, if anybody can suggest a solution for exporting the SimMeshes from Daz to FBX, iClone, Blender, Poser, Maya, Unity or wherever, please let me know.

Kind regards until then.
This ap is AMAZING!

[John_Andrew_Grogan]

See my Bug Report description - AT UI icons of Magic Wand, Fist, Stacked Cylinders are in need of documentation. I’ve made educated trail & error guesses at some of it but AT might have more functionality that I haven’t been able to guess at.

Mouse hoover over UI icons brings up no Help Information blurbs.

[jim]

@Tarampa_Studios

It would be great to have some re-sizing arrows on the UI for when we are resizing it down from full-screen

I hadn’t even noticed this - but you’re right and it is annoying. I think that it is a Unity issue

@Tarampa_Studios

When we click on the icon to add collar/cuffs/trim etc, I think it would help if we had a drop down window to choose which type we specifically want, because that would also help to reaffirm which options are not available for our particular pattern. (see image below where collar doesn’t seem to be available.)

I’ve gone back and forth on the best design here. If you saw my much older video on “The Shirt” you can see that I started with a bunch of sliders and dropdowns for controlling things. Over time, I moved towards more of the direct manipulation version you see here. I want to continue pushing in the direct manipulation direction for right now, but please share if this is annoying and/or more seriously getting in your way. The lack of a collar in the image is just a bug.

@Tarampa_Studios

Perhaps, as well as an “Import Animation”, it might help to have an “Import Avatar .jsim” so it is a little bit more intuitive/obvious that we can import a character without any animation…?

Good thought - but I see this as mainly useful if more interesting things can be done with just an avatar and want to hold off on this until progress is made there.

@Tarampa_Studios

Using your preset patterns (which are great by the way), the t-shirt dress is the only one that will load onto this type of character, and this is the pattern for which no callar seems to be an option…?:

My guess is that your character is “too short”. Obviously, this is a bug in Artful Tailor that this isn’t handled. Can you try scaling your character up to the height of a standard character and trying this again? If that works it would be a great short-term work-around since the clothing should scale up or down with the character for your final renders.

@Tarampa_Studios

both of which also export back to DAZ okay;

These screenshots make me ! Thanks for sharing them.

The cloth really isn’t designed for weight mapping - the idea is that you will be using simulated cloth rather than weight-mapped garments. Would fully simulated cloth be an option for what you’re doing?

@Tarampa_Studios

The only thing that gives me a little trouble is not being able to choose where to “send anim” and “read cloth” every singe time from and to Daz… it always works perfectly the first time, but whenever I have to re-start a project later on, the 2 programs seem to forget where (to and from) they are saving/reading their files.

I used to have this problem too, but fixed the scripts so that they worked for me… Have you found the properties on “ArtfulPhysics/Simulation File” that is added to your main figure? This property should be pointing to the .jsim file and the program will look for the resulting simulated mesh based on this file.

@Tarampa_Studios

So for exporting to other programs, it seems as if Rampa’s Blender method, or War Lord’s 3DS Max method are currently the most viable for exporting from Tailor to iClone… so far they’ve been using default characters, so I’ll try their methods next using more Toon Generation Morphs and see how I go.

It is looking like some of my most interested and interesting initial users are trying to integrate with iClone. I will not be able to help much with weight-mapped or physx cloth models. However, I would love to figure out if there is a reasonably easy way to work with actual simulated cloth vertices instead of this mapping.