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I´m looking for a way to incorporate dynamic clothing and hair, features that are either not supported by daz or octane itself.

I´ve thought about maybe switching to Carrara, but apparently Carrara´s dynamic hair is not supported by Octane.

Then again there might be a way to go with Poser, importing/exporting from DAZ and so on, but I don´t know much about that.

Anyone of you using DAZ as well as Octane and has figured a way to have dynamic hair and clothing?

best

I've been using Marvelous Designer with DAZ for dynamic cloth, and having good results rendering it in Octane.

There are various workflow options to get Marvelous Designer cloth draped onto DAZ figures. My current method is to pose my figure in DAZ, with the final pose being at 30 frames on the animation timeline, and the basic t-pose at 0 frames. Export scene as collada. Import the collada file into Marvelous Designer, and position or create the MD clothes around the t-posed figure. Then tell MD to animate, and it goes through the animation frames, draping the cloth very realistically as it goes. Finally export the draped cloth as an .obj back into DAZ, and the dynamically clothed figure is ready to render with Octane. MD drapes very quickly, and most importantly it allows you to refine and adjust the clothing's pattern and fit during the draping process. It's addictively fun to play with.

I'm interested to read about other peoples' workflows with dynamic cloth and DAZ too. I haven't used the old Optitex dynamic cloth plugin for DAZ in a long time. Isn't this plugin a possibility for you though? Or is it no longer supported? Assuming it works in DAZ still, I would think that Octane recognizes the Optitex clothes as geometry. In the past, I've also worked with Poser's dynamic cloth room. Like the old DAZ dynamic cloth plugin, I grew frustrated with the lengthy drape times, crashing, difficulty working with Genesis, and lack of an ability to pull the clothes into place in real time during a drape sim and tailor them the way you can in MD.

Also, like you I'm very curious about dynamic hair and its possibilities, but haven't found any dynamic hair for DAZ that I like final results of enough to replace the simplicity of standard old fashioned DAZ hair models. I do love how fiber mesh hair renders more realistically, but long dynamic hair in DAZ always looks very unstyled and out of control to me. Like maybe the current solutions work well for fur, short bristly hair, and Afros, but not long flowing hairdos?

Thank you for your explanation.

I've never tried animation, so this is probably a stupid question: Is this an automated process? Do you just set the 0 and 30 timepoint poses and tell daz to use those as keyframes, or do you have to do a lot of work to fill in the intermediate poses?

Yep, it's automated. I'm not an animator myself, I just do still images. So pretty much the only time I use the animation timeline is for draping cloth. Load the zero pose at frame zero, and the final pose at frame 30, and DAZ automatically moves the joints for the frames in between.

Here are some images to show how I use DAZ, Marvelous Designer, and Octane together:

1 - My avatar (a DAZ Genesis 2 model) is exported from DAZ into Marvelous Designer, and some clothing draped onto the T-pose.
2 - Since my avatar was exported as a DAE file, it contains the animation data too. I just push record on Marvelous Designer's animation timeline, and the figure moves into its final pose with the cloth draping as it goes.
3 - I upped the resolution of the cloth simulation, and then exported the cloth as an OBJ back into DAZ. Added some hair to the figure, and set up my Octane materials. I'm using a variation on D.Ordiales Skin v1 from the Octane Live DB for the skin and clothing materials (I think SSS adds a nice effect to rendered clothing), and tonysculptor hair for the hair material. An HDRI is the only lighting.
4 - Here's the final render. If I was to take this further for greater realism, I'd do some work in Photoshop to clean up the more digital looking bits and artifacts. I just wanted to do this image as a quick demo though. I'm refining my workflow, and I find that documenting it and explaining helps me come to grips with it better myself, so thanks for the opportunity to spout off about my process.

Amazing, that looks so much more real than the usual DAZ stuff... I think I'm going to stop buying clothing from the DAZ store and save the money towards MD.

It's a really cool piece of software.

One feature that I'm just starting to work with is the ability to import OBJs and convert them to Marvelous Designer cloth. There are some snags to it, like the imported OBJ loses its UV map, but it's giving my old Runtime of DAZ and Poser clothes a new life. I can import for example an old V4 jacket or dress as MD cloth, and drape it on any figure I like.
It's a more limited technique than building clothes from scratch in MD, but it's a shortcut that makes use of old DAZ and Poser clothes that don't auto-fit in DAZ the way you want them to. Auto-fit is especially problematic for me if my figure has a lot of morphs in it. And there are some things that always look astonishingly bad when auto-fitting conforming clothing on V6 (like cleavage). It amazes me that as much as DAZ models are marketed towards the pin-up crowd, V6 looks generally horrible in clothes when using cleavage morphs.

Here's an old swimsuit from the Renderosity marketplace built for V4, and auto-fit to V6 in DAZ, to give an example of auto-fit gone wrong:
And here's the same V4 clothing model imported into Marvelous Designer as an OBJ, draped, and exported back to DAZ:

Squirtle wrote: It amazes me that as much as DAZ models are marketed towards the pin-up crowd, V6 looks generally horrible in clothes when using cleavage morphs.

Because every generation they sell new cleavage fixers and such to actually make them look right...it's part of the business

I never realized MD allowed you to give cloth a dynamic look. I will give it a look.

For fun, I added hair and did another set of renders to compare auto-fit with MD4's "OBJ to cloth".

I should note that Marvelous Designer's OBJ to cloth converter still feels very beta phase, and it takes some time to figure out how to make it play nice. Most conforming clothing models are not welded together properly for use as dynamic cloth, so the mesh needs to be joined together in a modeling software or else it falls apart at the seams while draping. (I use the awesome and free app MeshLab's "merge close vertices" filter, which welds everything together automatically).

It is like a super useful bonus feature of MD4, once you get the hang of it. Hopefully in the future it'll become more fully featured, like retaining the original OBJ's UV map. (Regular MD4 projects have great and intuitive UV handling, it's just the OBJ to cloth feature that doesn't support it)

Ha, larsmidnatt, if only products like "Clothing Breast Fixes" actually worked well! I haven't had much luck with it. I shouldn't have expected much from it though - the promo images for the product don't exactly look too great, and I assume those are like best-case scenarios.

I'm a big fan of the current Genesis 2 models, and think they're a huge leap in almost every way from the earlier DAZ models. G2F and G2M are pretty much all I use now. If I look back even to Victoria 3 though, (a model which is over ten years old), and V4, the clothes fit the bust much more naturally than with Genesis 1 and 2. I guess it's a tradeoff for having a much more morphable figure.

Squirtle, great tips! Thanks. I've been using the workflow you described for a while, I'm an MD4 user myself. I've never tried the OBJ to cloth converter, it looks super useful I'm going to play with it for sure. Is it the one labeled "import OBJ as garment" in MD?

One question, does your .OBJ garment always import okay into DS or would you have to do some tweaking to it because it interpenetrates with your G2 character even though it looks okay inside MD when you export it?

This happens to me every single time even with vanilla G2 characters (i.e. without any morph). I would export the character with the animation as DAE from DS, the character would load fine as MD avatar, I would drape my garment against them and hit the pose button for the final pose. As a final step, I would up my garment resolution (usually by setting the particle distance to about 5) and when I'm happy with the result I'd export the posed garment as .OBJ (using cm for scale).

Inside DS, the same character is still in the same final pose, untouched, but when I import the OBJ garment, boom, I'm getting interpenetration here and there. Something definitely changes either with the character or the garment during the conversion process. I'm wondering if there's a button I forgot to press or something.

If I'm working on a still image, I can easily fix this in ZBrush. However as one can imagine, for animation this is near impossible to fix with the character moving around and whatnot. This issue began with DS 4.7 for me, I never had it when I was on 4.6.

Has this happened to you as well? I know I'm not the only one because I remember a while back there was a thread on the DAZ forum about someone having the same issue (with MD3) but now I can't find it.