Dynamic Hair/Clothing Workflow

[larsmidnatt]

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 use the breast fixers as a starting point and touch the rest up in Hexagon a lot of the time. In some situations with some tinkering they can work ok.

But ultimately I agree those breast fixers are not what they are made out to be.

[Squirtle]

Hey garand3d, yes I'm using "import OBJ as garment". Unless you get lucky, most conforming clothes need to have their meshes joined together in a modeling app, to keep them from falling apart. So after I export my clothing item as an OBJ from DAZ, I open it in MeshLab (a handy free tool) and use the cleanup filter "merge close vertices". You'll probably want to play around with the setting to find a balance that works for you. The fewer vertices get merged, the more likely the OBJ is to fall apart when draping. The more you merge, the more detail is lost. Also, if you're handy with 3D modeling, you could always join the separate parts of the OBJ manually. I like the MeshLab gives me a quick and dirty automatic solution though.

I have experienced the same problem that you're having with the drape sim looking good in MD, but the model poking through in DAZ. I believe this is due to Joint Controlled Morphs not translating fully into the DAE animation. So if your pose has a big hip bend for example, G2F has nice JCMs that come into play to make the hip bend in a more anatomically correct way. I think maybe they aren't exported properly in the animation though. (I might be using the wrong terminology - can't remember at the moment if Genesis uses JCMs, weight-mapping, or something else...)

BUT! I found a solution. It requires one more export from DAZ. After your figure in MD4 has been draped properly and is in the final pose, go back to DAZ and export the pose again, but as an OBJ instead of a DAE. Go back to MD, and import the OBJ as avatar (make sure the import scale is set for DAZ) Now MD will replace your DAE avatar with the OBJ avatar. The OBJ has the JCMs intact! It will be poking through your drapery, so let the drapery sim run for a few seconds to allow it to fix itself. There is another side benefit to this procedure - the DAE exported from DAZ is base resolution, which causes the drapery to show facets sometimes. The OBJ however exports at whatever subdivision level you have set, so if you have subD set for level 2 those annoying facets disappear too. Then, finally, you can export the draped MD cloth to DAZ as an OBJ and it should fit beautifully.

[Hydra]

There are a lot of people sharing clothing made with MD4. Can you take Genesis and Genesis 2 and back morph them to gen 4 via MD4?

What are you doing about materials? When you remodel some old clothes, do you get a new UV, and edit that? Or do you just apply the same texture across the entire piece of clothing? How do you deal with buttons? (I've got some clothes with annoyingly distorted buttons.)

I'm currently interested in doing more texture work, but I'm not sure where to start or whether it will give me grief. I've been eying Substance Designer, but it occurs to me that I still need materials or at least initial textures.

I'm not 2D literate though. I use GIMP for the bare minimum of work.

[Squirtle]

Hi Hydra, I'm not sure what your first question is - can you tell me in more detail why you want to morph from one figure to another in MD4?

So with the "import OBJ as garment" function, you do lose the original UV. Once the garment is exported back out of MD4, you should be able to create a new UV for it in other 3D software, though of course that would be time consuming. I've only just started working with "import OBJ as garment". For most DAZ clothing, I was already in the habit of disregarding the UVs, since I prefer to make cloth textures proceduraly in Octane. It does cause a texturing problem with garments that have details like buttons though. For my skillset, it is easier to just paint the buttons, zippers, or whatever the right color and texture on the render in post production with Photoshop. And there are many clothes where this isn't an issue, since they look good as just one material. These drawbacks are what make "import OBJ as garment" still feel like it's in beta to me. Not all ironed out yet, but I really like having it as an option, and I like getting to rescue some well-sculpted old V4 items from the depths of my runtime.

[Hydra]

Hi Hydra, I'm not sure what your first question is - can you tell me in more detail why you want to morph from one figure to another in MD4?

Can I take Genesis 2 clothes are apply them back to Gen 4 characters?

So with the "import OBJ as garment" function, you do lose the original UV. Once the garment is exported back out of MD4, you should be able to create a new UV for it in other 3D software, though of course that would be time consuming. I've only just started working with "import OBJ as garment". For most DAZ clothing, I was already in the habit of disregarding the UVs, since I prefer to make cloth textures proceduraly in Octane. It does cause a texturing problem with garments that have details like buttons though. For my skillset, it is easier to just paint the buttons, zippers, or whatever the right color and texture on the render in post production with Photoshop. And there are many clothes where this isn't an issue, since they look good as just one material. These drawbacks are what make "import OBJ as garment" still feel like it's in beta to me. Not all ironed out yet, but I really like having it as an option, and I like getting to rescue some well-sculpted old V4 items from the depths of my runtime.

So for textures you just grab a sample of say denim, then process it to extract Bump/Specularity, and apply that across the board for the clothing?

[Squirtle]

Can I take Genesis 2 clothes are apply them back to Gen 4 characters?

Yes, it's just as easy/difficult to fit clothing from any generation of character to any other character. All that Marvelous Designer interprets the DAZ clothing as is the exported OBJ file's geometry. And similarly, all DAZ characters imported into Marvelous Designer as avatar shapes to have clothing draped onto are just pure geometry like any other avatar shape.

So for textures you just grab a sample of say denim, then process it to extract Bump/Specularity, and apply that across the board for the clothing?

Yes, exactly. I love detailed texture maps, but for clothing models they are often overtextured to compensate for the model's lack of sculptural realism. Like, the texture of a pair of khakis in real life is pretty much just the weave of the khaki cloth (unless they're really worn out and stained.) over the whole pair of pants. If the pants have interesting and realistic dynamic folds and their OBJ mesh is high resolution enough to show those dynamic details, they should look good with just a khaki material pattern over the whole thing. In the renders I did earlier in this thread, the girl's t-shirt doesn't have any texture maps, it's just a green RGB color with some subtle sss. For the red swimsuit, I just chose a red RGB color, and put some slight turbulence in the bump channel, but again no texture maps.

For things like worn out blue jeans, or a t-shirt with a print on it, you wouldn't want to "import OBJ as garment", since there's no easy way to add the needed texture maps. You'd want to create them as a regular MD4 garment where you can position texture maps on the garment in MD4. Which is a breeze. Just position your texture on the pattern in the pattern window, and it's UV mapped automatically.

[garand3d]

WOW!! Thanks for that solution, Squirtle!! I totally didn’t think of that extra step, very helpful indeed! And the side benefit is certainly very welcome; I’ve had to take my garments to a modeling app (ZBrush) to smooth out those facets every time… especially on and around the buttocks and the breast area.

One workaround I used once to alleviate the faceting issue is to export the A-posed G2 figure at a higher subD as OBJ in the first place and later load the final pose as a morph target in MD, which doesn’t give an accurate simulation and it can give you a messy result, although when it works, it works. DAE export is definitely the way to go for posing despite its current limitations, and thanks to your workaround I won’t have to deal with those ugly faceted looks anymore.

Before I knew MD, I have experimented turning V4 conforming clothes into dynamic clothing in Maya, with varying degrees of success, by turning the clothes into n-cloth (Maya's dynamic cloth solution). With the onset of MD now I just prefer to start from scratch as it's intuitive, it's fast and even mediocre result still looks more realistic than most conforming clothing out there IMHO.

I will definitely play with the "import obj as garment". I don't really mind losing UVs as there are some great tools out there that can make laying out UV’s fun and fast. I personally use Headus UVLayout these days, it’s an awesome tool, makes UV-ing really fun (to me at least) although maybe quite pricey at 200 USD (for their “Hobbyist” license). There’s a free alternative called Roadkill UV which is also quite awesome. Both are easy to learn especially if you’re already somewhat familiar with laying out UVs.

[Squirtle]

Cool, I'm really glad it helped!

I didn't even know about DAE export for the longest time, so I started out in MD just working with OBJ files. It made some poses very difficult to achieve, when the arms would shrink into the body etc. I had to do a lot of in-between keyframes. So I noticed the faceting problem right away when I switched to the DAE technique, and popping an OBJ of the posed avatar in at the end seemed like a good way to get the best of both worlds.

I hope you post your progress with "import OBJ as garment" in the future. If not here then on the MD boards. I don't think many people are diving too deep into that feature, since it's easy to be put off by the initial hurdle of dealing with unwelded meshes, watching your clothes fall to pieces. I think some clothes actually work better in MD with that technique though, such as swimsuits. I'm especially curious to see how your work with applying UVs to imported OBJ garments goes. Good luck!

[garand3d]

A little report on my first try importing a conforming clothing as garment in MD. I used a dress called “Alibi Dress” for G2F from the DAZ store. I just wanted to see how it works right out of the can, so I exported it as OBJ from DS, and brought it straight into MD by importing OBJ to garment. I used the default female MD female avatar to simulate it against. After some nudging around to position the dress as best I could, I hit the simulate button…

The dress is pretty dense, I believe it's around 48K triangles, so even though it has no thickness and has a fairly even quaded topology MD was really struggling to simulate it to the point of becoming unresponsive, which was expected. Plus the dress also has two little waist strap thingies that are composed of small pearls that aren’t vert-welded, which fell apart as soon as I started the simulation.

Like Squirtle says, sometimes you get lucky sometimes you don’t if you do it without any clean-up beforehand. I remember when I was experimenting in Maya, my clean-up job includes merging unwelded vertices, deleting inside faces/thickness and (rarely) retopologizing the mesh to be more suitable for simulation. And even with thorough clean-up jobs, some clothes just won’t simulate well because their topologies are not built for simulation. You would either need to remesh the whole thing or use it as a template for creating a more simulation-friendly duplicate version of it.

I suppose with simpler garments like panties, t-shirts or the one-piece swimsuit that Squirtle experimented with, it’s feasible to turn them into “true” dynamic clothing. But with the more complex ones, it’s more trouble than it’s worth IMO.
Not saying you should avoid doing it this way, if you can make it work and thus get more mileage from your old Gen4 and 5 clothing, by all means do it.

Personally though, I just find it faster to make a garment from scratch in MD. I still have much to learn about making cloth patterns, I’ve never been a tailor and the closest thing to sewing I’ve ever done is fixing the buttons on my shirt. But the beauty of MD is you can tweak your patterns on the go to get exactly the right fit you want, and it plays fairly well with the apps I use these days, DS being one of them.

[garand3d]

I did a Fallout 3 Fan Art project for my portfolio to showcase Octane DS, as well as other apps that I specialize in.

This is a test render of my Fallout 3 character (A female Lone Wanderer) in her dynamic jumpsuit that was modeled and simulated in Marvelous Designer. Her gloves are also dynamic clothing made in MD. Texturing was done in Mudbox, praise MD for letting us use the cloth patterns as UV.

The Pip-boy 3000 (that thing on her wrist) was modeled and textured entirely in ZBrush.

It's just an empty DS scene lit using Octane HDRI#1, or might've been #5.