Advice on Creating Thickness in Clothing
bigraspberi
Posts: 1
Hello ! I was wondering if anyone could shed some light on how content creators are creating clothing with adequate thickness. I have Marvelous Designer, Blender, & Zbrush installed on my computer to help with this process but none of the fixes I have come across work the way I need them to. I do wish to sell my creations commercially, so personal use methods (ie: skipping steps or use my posed character in Marvelous Designer as an avatar) are not an option.
I have tried:
1. Exporting with thickness in Marvelous Designer & welding the mesh in Zbrush - however, that doesn't really weld it because the seams still fall apart when a smoothing modifier higher than 2 is applied.
2. Exporting it as a thin mesh & welding it in Marvelous Designer then importing it into Blender to extrude the hem of the clothing - that made the extruded edges of the textures look stretched & the edges were overall very sharp looking.
3. Exporting it as a thin mesh & welding it in Marvelous Designer then importing it into Blender to apply the "Solidify" modifier - it appears the modifier applies to the whole mesh instead of certain areas I'd like to be thickened & it tends to occasionally destroy the beautiful wrinkles Marvelous designer simulates.
I've attached a picture of the stretching textures from method 2. If anyone could give me any tips or advice, that would be awesome ! Thank you !
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Comments
2 with adjusted uvs would seem the best approach.
I agree with Richard the second method seems to be the best option, it just needs some additional steps to make it work.
After adding the extruded rim geometry in Blender you need to unwrap the UV again.
I'm refering to Bender v2.79 shortcut keys.
In Blenders Edit Mode (Tab) create a seperate Material Zone for the rims (can also be handy in Daz Studio lateron), select edgeloop Ctrl+Alt+Click then grow selection Ctrl+NumpadPlus and assign a material. Open the UV/Image Editor select the clothing without the rims and Pin (P) the original cloth UV, then press 2xA to select all and finaly press E to unwrap again. The pinned clothing UV will stay in place and the additional extruded rim will unwrap around that original UV island.
Have a look at Blenders left side Tools pallet (T) section Mesh Tools.
Welding mesh in Blender can be done with the Remove Doubles button, this action is limited to the current geometry selection, you get options on the bottom left for Merge Distance.
To smooth the rim mesh select it and use Deform: Smooth Vertex also from the left side Mesh Tools menu you get options on the bottom left to to define the smoothing factor.
Or do it the same way real clothes are sewn: Fold over the edge and sow it to the inside. Then export as thin welded mesh.
This works also if you add dForce later, but you need to make sure that the folded edge isn't too narrow. The part you fold over should be at least about as wide as the average polygon size in your mesh.
Yes the "Folded Edge" can look better if the inside of the clothes can be seen, for example on an opened jacket or collars. I did this myself to enhance some old V4 clothing products that I converted to fit to Genesis.
To sew the folded edge back to the clothing select the outer edge-loop of the rim and a nearby edge-loop of the clothing and in the Tools pallet under Loop Tools you can find the Bridge command.
Before dForce arrived I tend to fit clothing with DFormers and Smoothing Modifier collisions like a shrinkwrap method. Unfortunately the rims thickness collapsed in some areas by doing this. My solution was to model a flat rim in the base mesh and have an inflated rim morph (done with the rim Polygroup selected in ZBrush: Deformation: Inflate) that can be added after the Smoothing Modifier collision. Maybe also a good idea with dForce fitting.
You can also sew it directly in MD
The Solidify modifier, like many others, can be controlled using a vertex group and weight painting so that it only affects part of the model as required. Create a vertex group and assign all the verts of your model to it with a weight of 0, then paint the areas you want to solidify with values above zero. There are various tools to smooth the transition from higher weights to lower weights (smooth, blur, smear, gradient). (In the images, I have used a negative offset so the thickening is on the outside and more obvious; if you use a positive value, it will thicken on the inside.) You don't have to apply the modifier in Blender, just export to OBJ and check the Apply Modifiers checkbox.
To round off the sharp edges, you can use the Bevel modifier stacked below the Solidify. In the image below, I have selected the top edge loop of the cylinder and defined a Mean Bevel Weight of 1 for that, then chosen Weight as the Limit Method of the Bevel modifier.
Happy to give more details if you want them.
Great idea with the Solidify and Bevel modifier I've never used it with vertex groups. The weight paining is another thing I never tried in Blender it seems that a vertex group is not just for geometry selection but can also become a weightmap.
The combination of vertex groups and weight mapping with modifiers is a powerful toolset.
I forgot to say that in the parts of the mesh that has zero thickness, there are 'doubles' which would need to be remove using Remove Doubles option after applying the modifiers if you are going to export an OBJ for use in a product that doesn't handle doubles well.
Oh now I see how this works the Solidify Modifier gets applied to the whole geometry and the Vertex Group / Weightmap controls the thickness.
In Object Mode I would Dublicate (Shift+D) the item and apply the modifiers, just in case I want to go back and edit the modifiers. Next I would apply the modifiers, add an UV checker map in UV/Image Editor and have a look at the UV map. The modifiers will add geometry but you will need to unwrap the additional UVs again, otherwise they will most likely just stack on top.
Hello folks,
Trying do create a thick cloth (a fur cloak) for G8F, From Marvelous Designer to DS ; I'm still bothered by issues about thickness...
I wish to get a bit of thickness for realism, and the leather base with separate UVs for texturing each side differently (wich is not possible with a thin piece), and I run on multiple issues, from UVs to mesh issues (tris/quads), and hard time getting a clean piece of thick fabric back onto MD, to simulate all needed JCM (and with the exact same mesh and properties, obviously).
My desired pipeline :
- Create cloth in Marvelous Designer, obtain clean (quad) mesh with flat UVs
- Add thickness somehow with backface on other polygroup (on the same single cloth piece)
- Simulate all JCM (in MD) without altering mesh or UVs
- Import the whole thing + morphs to DS and fit to character, before adding fur (thanks to Hair Based strand new tool) and correcting weight maps
- Texture/Pose/animate/render
- Enjoy
My actual pipeline (wich fails actually) :
- Create base piece of cloth in MD (single shape wich is pinned on neck area before creation of the closing brooch), creating UVs from flat piece.
- Export to OBJ with thin geometry
- Import in Zbrush, create thickness with zremesher, and UVs with UVmaster after polygrouping the two materials separately
- Zremesh the whole thing to gets clean and quad topology (before UVs)
Aaaand now its failing big time :
- Reimport into MD as a single piece of leather > problems : 1. UVs are destroyed in the process and 2. Mesh is converted to Tris again (I just cant ZRemesh every JCM and hope keeping same vertex count, it won't happen).
- Try to reimport into MD as separate pieces > Ok, I got the two pieces apart, and apparently UVs stay, allowing to use different materials, but : 1. The two pieces (back and front) are now separated and fall apart (needs ugly sewings that wont act as a single piece of leather), and 2. Now that doubled the material physical properties, acting like 2 pieces of the same leather I'm trying to simulate (I can't divide all physical settings by 2).
Either way, I'm trying to reimport thick mesh as a single piece, but I'm bothered by UVs remaking : since I lost the flat base shape in MD, creating UVs from this (or on any other soft, I tried Zbrush and 3DCoat) will leads to ugly/random flattening of the leather piece (since it's shaped onto the character).
Basically I cannot get both clean thick mesh, quads AND separate UVs on a basic single piece of cloth to make all needed morphs/JCM.
And it drives me mad...
What I'm doing wrong here ?
Since I don't think creating thickness in clothes and doing the MD > DS pipeline should be so hard, and after trying (unsuccessfully) to find any info or tutorial to explain this process, I'm wondering if 1. thickness worth the hassle, and 2. Is any workaround currently exist for such result ?
Thanks !
Is there also a way to do it in Daz Studio?
I love Child clothes and have a good Rain jacket, and it have good morphs for open/close. Now, I ask myself, is it possible to make a thiccer version of it so it can also work well as winter/skijacket?
That might be functionality that could be added to Mesh Grabber? If we could take the edge loop of a garment and turn it in a bit, that might give a good result if the texture supports it?
yeah, would be nice, Manfriday is planning to make a Scale tool so maybe there will also be a "volume" tool :)
So you can easy make flat or fat gloves for summer as biker gloves or in winter for snow.
Same for making big fluffy socks :)
... oops
I got the best result by going to edit -> Object -> geometry -> Add Push Modifier ( in the middle there), then adjust it in Preferences, standard is always too much, but you can make things very thicc with it or fix pokethroughs without meshgrabber. You can also use it to flatten things.
Btw. if you add a image, make sure its not TOO big, doubleclick it (in edit mode) and change the wide to 400-500 ;)
Thanks but, that doesn't work very well it just distorts the whole thing and doesn't actually add much thickness.
well... for me it added always thickness :D
Okay I tested it now with 2 Towels, Towel 1 did got Fat, Towel 2 did only moved up/down with the push modifier :D
So you need a other Towel with a better structure!
Standard:
with Push Modifier on 1.0:
And now you have a thick towel ;)
Add smooth modifier, add subD and set a high res. and then you have a thick fluffy towel.