punkduck wrote:blindsaypatten wrote:
You got me curious so I found a scene that shows more of the room ...
Hard to believe but the room in the scene also seems to have windows everywhere (or a big mirror on the wall or a roof-light). The lockers are also lightened?
blindsaypatten wrote:But I had to remove the glass from the window to get sharp(er) shadows, and then I had to reduce the strength of the sun by a factor of about five. As you can see, there's nothing like the harsh rays of the sun to totally expose the CG nature of your models.
Especially the glass shader is doing weird things, you are right. But even a glossy/transparent shader combination for the window may create disappointing effects. Remember the first picture I did with this filmic render method, the nude girl behind the shutter? I had to delete the glass of the window, otherwise the effect I desperately looked for did not work. For the shadow: the size of the sun determines, how sharp the shadow is, as far as I know you can reduce it to (nearly?) zero.
After stepping away to eat I looked at my scene and realized that the large area of the floor that is being brightly lit will act like a big area lamp and create very diffuse shadows. There's likely a nice sharp shadow on the wall, it just has diffuse fuzzy shadow on top of it.
punkduck wrote:Are you using the cloth simulation directly on the exported clothes or did you apply a subdivision surface modifier before? I'm interrested in your experience. Applying cloth simulation to exported clothes which will not fall apart (zipper, buttons, buckles of my clothes are single geometries and will obviously create problems) will be a good idea for future advanced assets ...
Since you are interested in my experience, excuse me if I ramble.
Whether you need a subsurface modifier depends on how fine the original mesh is and what size wrinkles you want. Bends in the fabric only occur along edges of the mesh so if you have a low poly mesh you will get very limited bending. It's a little like the mesh is made up of somewhat rigid faces, with the structural parameter determining how much the faces will distort and the bendy parameter determining how easily two adjacent faces will bend along the shared edge. With the tshirt in suit06 the mesh was fine enough to produce the draping that I'm using now, I'm trying again with a subsurf to see whether the difference is worth the much increased simulation time. [returns after animation/simulation competes] The size of the wrinkles with subsurf does look more realistic for a cotton fabric.
For the sitting position in this scene I animated the body from a standing pose to the seated pose in order for the cloth simulation to be able to produce something natural looking, just starting with the posed position often won't produce much. In this case, the front of the shirt is pulled way down between the legs when simply posed. On the other hand, so far the jeans have always exploded if I try to animate movement, I think that bending at the hip produces more stretch than I've allowed for. In earlier experiments I found that too much stretch (structural parameter) and the clothes either sag or actually ooze off the body like slime!
Simulations are scale sensitive, I think due to the distance parameters in the Cloth Collision properties. I will have to try dividing those by ten, up to now I've been scaling my model up by ten. I usually export at 1 BU = 1m and with the default parameters clothes either hover away from the body or downright explode.
Once any part of the clothes penetrates the body or non-simulated clothing the simulation is almost certain to fail. The challenge here is poses, or intermediate positions, where body parts overlap, whether it be arms at the side so that the arm and the clothing penetrates the body, joints that have formed a crease when bent, or a finger momentarily moving through another body part/the simulated cloth.
If you do animate into the final pose you will find that the simulation is speed sensitive, move two fast and the body will leave the cloth behind, I used 200 frames to move into the sitting position. There is a trade off between speed of movement and the quality/velocity parameters, but if the movement jumps to far quality won't solve it.
I think the cloth simulation has enough features to deal with your zippers and so forth, but I haven't tried those feature yet.
I hope you got something useful out of all that!