Carrara and Marvelous Designer
JoeMamma2000
Posts: 2,615
Well, since it's pretty clear that Bullet is gonna be dead in the water for the forseeable future, and the fact that Marvelous Designer is infinitely better as a cloth sim, I propose we use this thread for those who want to use Marvelous Designer (hereafter referred to as "MD") with Carrara.
Now, there are some tutorials on the MD website, that are 1-2 years old, that deal with DAZ Studio, but, of course, nothing for Carrara. The tutorials recommend that you export your V4, for example, from D|S as an OBJ, which is directly importable into MD.
BTW, if you look at the Import options in MD, they are very limited: Collada (.dae), OBJ, and STL. It also gives you the option (and I'm not sure exactly what it does) to Open a "morph target", which I assume is just an OBJ file.
Now someone mentioned that you can take an mdd file, generated from Carrara via Fenric's plugin, and bring that into MD, but I'm not sure how, since there doesn't seem to be an .mdd import option in Marvelous Designer.
Anyway, here's the challenge:
It seems clear to me that anyone who wants to utilize MD would, in the simplest form, want to take a posed, morphed character, export it to MD, build and drape some cloth, then bring that draped cloth back into the Carrara scene. I'm pretty sure you can do the "posed" part, but I haven't seen anything about the "morphed" part. And it seems to me that if you can't import a morphed character (ie, body morphs) into MD to do your draping, the whole thing becomes of very limited use. Unless you guys only work on unmorphed characters, which I really doubt.
Now, what I've tried so far is this:
I took a posed, morphed V4 in Carrara, stripped away any conforming clothing or other doodads (hair, etc.), and saved it as a Collada (.dae). The result was a file over 3 GIGABYTES. And, as expected, MD scarfed when trying to read it. No go.
Then I took the exact same figure and saved it as an OBJ, which was a file of a few hundred KB or something like that, maybe smaller. And when it came into MD is was the unposed, unmorphed character in a T pose, and the textures were, best as I could tell, totally jacked up. No go.
Now I haven't tried doing this from D|S, and I'm sure it would work per the tutorial. But remember we're dealing with Carrara, the flagship product in the DAZ software line, and stuff like this isn't expected to work.
So, if anyone has succeeded in bringing a posed, morphed character from Carrara into MD, I'd certainly love to hear about how you did it.
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Comments
Okay, first of all let me make it very clear that I'm an idiot. And I don't think many here would argue with that...
What I failed to do upon export from Carrara is to set the option to export Morphs and Skinning when exporting the OBJ. When you do that, you get a fully morphed and posed character in MD. Also, you need to make sure you use a scaling factor of 1,000% upon import, not the default 100%. Think I read that somewhere.
Textures are still jacked up, no big deal since we're only draping cloth, but would be kinda nice....
Now, when you start up MD you get a default female character, which is called an Avatar. What you need to do is replace the default Avatar with your own character so you can do the draping. According to the tutorial, you load a separate OBJ file for each pose/morph you want in the draping, plus a default character in a T-pose.
I believe I also read that there's a way to change the default setup so that your own character comes up every time you start MD, instead of the default character. Not sure how though.
Geez, guy, you really ARE an idiot. That 1000% only applies if you're importing from DAZ Studio, not Carrara....
And in this latest version of MD there's even an easy selector to specify the units on import. Of course they even specify one option for DAZ Studio, but nothing for Carrara, the flagship product.
In any case, we all know that Carrara operates in inches, so just select "inches" upon import and it will give you a scaling factor of 2540%, which is the conversion from inches to mm (which MD uses).
BTW, there is a very nice manual for the software (separate download), and there's even a section under "File" that explains compatibility and scaling with DAZ Studio. But not with Carrara, the flagship product.
.MDD seems to be a feature of the animation plugin:
http://www.marvelousdesigner.com/Marvelous/Plugin.aspx
ask PhilW if you are not on his ignore list! %-P
Thanks. Really, mdd isn't high on my priority list. I'm just trying to get a feel for doing basic, single frame draping.
And yeah, I'm probably on everyone's ignore list, which is why I'm talking to myself in this thread. :)
Anyway, I've put a posed, morphed, OBJ based V4 into MD, did a very quick pattern of a skirt (just a simple front and back polgon that I sewed together), and it's VERY nice. If nothing else, this process gives you a relatively pain-free way of designing clothing that fits well, and then you can bring it back into Bullet for a more realistic draping.
What I love about MD is that it attempts to do a "shrink fit" with whatever pattern you provide, so, unlike Bullet which just drapes, this gives you the fitting part that otherwise would have to be done with directional forces and stuff in Bullet to make clothes conform to the body shape.
This image is a simple skirt I made and draped in MD, then brought back to Carrara for rendering. The placement of the skirt OBJ got a little jacked up in the process, so it's off a bit. Next step is to tesselate a bunch of times and drape it with Bullet if I want it a bit cleaner.
The downside of the mesh you get out of MD is that its not rectangular polys, so working on it with tools like Looping becomes impossible. And the mesh is very sparse, though there may be a setting to help that. But once you get a feel for the basic pattern making process, which is VERY straightforward, you can put together fairly complicated clothes very quickly.
I believe there's also a bunch of free clothes on their website (Marketplace/Freestuff), but when I tried one I got an error about illegal license or something. Maybe you can't load stuff with the demo version.
not saying you are, no idea actually! ;-P
but
check out his Marvelous designer to Carrara animated videos at least!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AfC6s5ocH8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WBXnsYSiaY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1Zvirp1Jtg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J330vCj1io
Thanks. But unfortunately I'm stuck on a super slow connection today, and any Youtube stuff would take forever. And unless it shows me how to increase the mesh density of the cloth in MD, an "Ooo, look what I did" video ain't gonna help me much.
That's not an attack on anyone or their work, just a fact. But I do appreciate you going to the work of providing the links. I'm sure he's got some wonderful and very impressive videos there.
Anyway, I think I've pretty much got it figured out what I want to do, and it's summarized in what I've posted already for anyone who's interested.
BTW, if anyone does know how to increase the mesh density of the exported OBJ in MD, I'd love to hear about it. Right now it is extremely sparse and ugly when you get it into Carrara.
Wow. This is fun. Once you get the feel for making clothing from a pattern, and figuring out what the pattern would look like, you can knock out a design in no time.
The mesh density still has me stumped, and I'm thinking that maybe they have it fixed in order to provide the fast response for the simulation. There is a Properties value for type and number of triangles/quads, but I don't see any way to change it. Too bad. Because what comes into Carrara is nasty.
With the image below I made a top and bottom in MD, exported, subdivided, then ran a Bullet to make it a little nicer. To make just the top in a modeller, with the straps and the tight fit, and have it fit like that, would be a HUGE chore. And I haven't even broken the surface. Apparently there's also an option for generating an elastic waistband, and probably a lot more.
By the way, for those who were wondering, yes, you can get MD clothes to fit on women with large bazookas.
Can I say "bazookas" here?
But in all seriousness, that's a HUGE benefit you get from something like MD, where it does a "shrink fit". You can simulate the stretch of straps, which is all but impossible with a straight drape like you get in Bullet.
EDIT: Removed ugly image.
One thing you have to get used to with this MD is how easy it is to make modifications, like add frills and stuff. It's very easy, so you have to get into the mindset that you should do it, because it's no big deal.
In this case I took the simple skirt, which is just two polygons joined by seams, and added a slit on the right side, and also a frill along the length of the right hand seam. Basically, to open the slit it's just click on the seam and hit delete. To add the frill, you just draw out a quad, click one edge, then click the other edge where you want it to join the skirt's seam. Very easy. Can't really see the frill down the right side, but it's just a long piece of fabric.
The DAZ guys really need to get this internalized into Carrara so you don't have to go thru the hassle of import/export.
Well, I don't use Carrara, but I do use MD, so I can give a few hints on working within MD.
First: the "Marketplace" items, even if free, *do* have an internal file lock which makes it difficult to use the .mpac files. (It is geared towards making the files-for-purchase more secure, once the formal Marketplace is fully active.) As a better bet, go to the old (little documented) Freestuff page, which allows for the easier-to-access plain .pac files. Most of the folks who post freebies, will also post the same (and more) items there.
http://www.marvelousdesigner.com/freestuff/default.aspx
Mesh density is set by the property of Particle Distance. A smaller number means a smaller polygon, and a denser mesh. If Carrara allows for mesh smoothing (remember I don't use it, so I'm guessing here), you can use and export at a larger PD number. The smallest internal PD inside MD is 3.... which is for very, very fine detail work level. Typical construction/working levels are from 10 to 20.
The setting you mentioned about making polys tris or quads is not yet active... the development/research team at MD were anticipating a future development that is currently one of their main bugbears. There are several threads in the MD forum about conversion methods to quads, but they mostly boil down to doing a re-topo in another program for now.
I'll keep an eye on this thread and try to help with questions from the MD side of things.
EXCELLENT !! Many thanks, Rosemaryr, I very much appreciate it.
No problem, Joe!
Also, if I know of a question that is well covered already in the MD forum, I'll post the link. Many of the newer MD users have trouble finding an appropriate phrasing for a situation (usually because of terminology from real-world sewing and clothing creation, that don't quite translate into 3d modeling terms) that may have considerable discussion there.
Hi Joe,
No I'm not ignoring you! Thanks to Wendy for letting me know about this thread.
I tend to design the clothes in a default A-pose, so I have a V4 posed like the default avatar as an OBJ which I load as the new avatar.
When I have deigned the clothes on that (and saved them!), I go back into Carrara and decide on pose and morphs to use for the final image, and export that out as an OBJ (using the option to save the skinned / morphed version as you said earlier). Then in MD you can load that OBJ as a morph target, and MD will generate a number of interim frames over which the default avatar will be morphed into your saved pose, draping the clothes as it does so.
Adjust the particle distance as Rosemaryr has suggested (Hi Rosemaryr!) and now export the clothing from MD to an OBJ (I think I select all the export options, this exports the UVs better), and load that into your Carrara scene with the posed/morphed figure. It should matched for position and scale exactly. I usually texture stuff in Carrara rather than MD but that is just more what I am used to. I love the way that the UV maps apply textures to the flat patterns, just like real life, so the texturing of the clothes looks great!
There are a lot of people wanting quads, but tris work fine providing you don't want to edit much. And they work well with bullet soft body too.
The method for using animation is similar to above but using MDD files (with Fenric's great plugin) in place of OBJs to import and export the animated figure and then the animated clothing in the reverse direction. One point to watch with this is to ensure that Linear is the default morph when you import the MDD into Carrara, or the clothing goes haywire! But as before, the scale and position can match exactly, meaning a lot less fiddling around.
I hope this helps.
Oh, okay....didn't know I was expecting a response from you....but thanks, I guess...
Actually I'm pretty much where I want to be with this, it's pretty simple and straightforward. So far my biggest pain point is the tris instead of quads. Not only makes it almost impossible for future editing, but setting up shading domains is also impossible if you want to have a straight dividing line, for example, between materials, colors, or alphas on a piece of clothing. That really sucks.
But as long as they're on the hunt for a fix that's good.
My next task is to get the shirring settings right for an elastic band, but it looks pretty straightforward. This thing is just incredible in how you can generate fitted clothing so quickly, compared to all the monkey motion you had to do to get something even close in Bullet.
Yes it is a very cool program!
To get different shader areas, set them up as different pieces of cloth in MD. You can select the pattern pieces you need and make them a different material, which then exports as a separate shader area in Carrara.
That's what I usually do when making stuff for Poser: just using different colors on the different pieces; that's all that's needed to make a new material zone on export from MD. But, the material zones are usually just numbers on export, so I rename them in UVMapper to something more descriptive.
Also, just spotted a previous question: How to change the default (starting) avatar)...
From the MD team here's the lowdown on the how-to:
--------------------------------------------------
Find the file named Marvelous.prj
Default location is in C:\Program Files\Marvelous Designer 2
open the Marvelous.prj in a note pad and look for the line
body: Model\\Avatar\\woman_west\\woman_west.DAE
you will need to change that to your V4 model like
body: Model\\Avatar\\woman_west\\V4.DAE
Put your V4 model in the Avatar folder using the Collada format such as V4.DAE
then it would be the line in the default would be
body: Model\\Avatar\\woman_west\\V4.DAE
----------------------------------------------------
Personally:
I keep a separate folder with ready-made starting pose Obj files for most of the major figures in two poses: One is a straight T-pose (arms out, legs together) to use for shirts, and other upper torso clothing. The second is what I call a Split_T pose, with the legs at a 10 degree spread each, to use for pants and such. Doesn't take much time to simply click on Load Obj to pop in a new avatar to work with.
Thanks. However, what I'm talking about is being able to change materials "on the fly", efficiently, and when you need it. If you know when you design the cloth all of the possible uses it will have throughout its life, then you can design all that in when you run it thru MD. Most of us can't, or don't want to do that.
If I design, say, a simple skirt, run it thru MD, and bring it into Carrara for rendering in a scene, I may decide during my scene work, "hmm...I'd really like to change the length of that skirt using alphas", or, "hmmm, y'know, I could convert that dress into a shirt and a separate skirt if I could just define two shading domains and apply different textures to each". Or maybe 6 months later, I might decide I can use that same mesh for a different purpose, and need to be able to edit it quickly and efficiently and modify its textures. Tris make that VERY difficult. That's how professionals operate, and it's a good work practice, to make sure your workflow is quick, efficient, and allows you to put stuff in a library for future use.
If you have quads, and can use all of the tools that allows, you simply use Loop, Grow, or whatever tools you want, and select the skirt half of the dress, assign a domain, and BAM, you have a separate material. Invert selection, and BAM, you have the shirt material. Same thing goes for alphas. And UV map generation becomes simple and clean. The skirt is a simple, clean cylinder. There's a very long list of reasons why we shouldn't accept tris for stuff like this.
Yes, there are workarounds, but the goal shouldn't be to workaround, it should be to do it quickly and efficiently. I just want to make sure that everyone sees what a big deal this is so we don't settle for something that will make our lives very difficult. Tri's are a really bad thing, man. For those who are bending the ears of the development team over at MD, please, think about the ramifications of tris, and don't let them get away with not fixing it. :)
By the way, one area I could use a little help on Rosemary is the shirring settings for an elastic band. I've tried tweaking the settings all over the place, and increasing the mesh resolution (hoping that would help the scrunching effect), but I just can't get any different results. Is that feature not connected, or maybe there's a trick to getting it to work?
Thanks.
Thanks, actually I saw that mentioned in the Tutorials section of the MD site, and couldn't get it to work.
I was looking around for the Marvelous.PRJ file and didn't find it. I found one kinda similar, which was a Marvelous.ZPRJ, which I assume is a packed version of the .PRJ file. And of course when I tired to open it in Notepad I got a lot of gobbledy gook. Any idea how to deal with that?
Perfect and timely example of the tris vs. quads I was mentioning...
Trying out my hand at making a simple pair of pajama bottoms (incredibly easy, BTW, only two polys and you're done...). When I'm designing it I figured all I needed was the front and back, no fancy waistband since pajamas are usually pretty straightforward, no separate waistband, just the top of the fabric folded over and an elastic inserted inside. So I run it thru MD, render in Carrara, and voila I've got some PJ's. Still working on the shirring, but anyway.
So then I monkey around with a lace alpha to see how that looks, and wow, that's pretty cools. That's a keeper too. But UH OH, ain't got no waistband, and it sure needs one. So now what? Well, there ain't no way I'm gonna make a separate shading domain in two clicks, or even 20. So basically you're out of luck.
With quads it's click, click and you're done.
Tris, like booleans, are of the devil.
BTW, for anyone interested in the mesh generated by MD, here's my attempt to select a waistband from the previous example...
In any case, I think I set the particle distance down to around 10, which gave me over 30k polygons for the pajamas. It's dog slow in the Carrara modeller, and virtually impossible to do any UV modifications since it doesn't even respond with that many polys.
nice mesh :)
what happens if you extrude that top edge
does that give you quads?
And to continue my ramblings, I think my main recommendation for anyone who wants to use MD as a supplement to Carrara is that you strongly consider using Bullet for your final simulation and render after you've generated the clothing and draped it in MD.
MD does a wonderful job of generating clothing, incredibly quickly. However, it is not, I'm assuming, designed to be the world's best draper. The mesh it uses as default is way too sparse, and the resulting drape often looks way too stiff. I really recommend you set your Particle Distance to get a higher mesh, then when you bring it back to Carrara you run a Bullet sim on it. It can make a HUGE difference. Yes, MD has wind, and with a high density mesh you can probably get better results, but Bullet gives you a lot more flexibility, and once in your scene you have a better idea how to manage the mesh and draping and forces to better interact with the scene.
Personally, I think the draping results from Bullet the way it is now are really pretty decent. AS LONG as you have a very dense mesh. Also, as I mentioned before, if you want the cloth to conform to the body and show realistic wrinkles and some degree of clinginess, I strongly recommend you insert a Directional Force and apply it to the cloth during simulation. Just make sure you set the value at no more than say 2.5 or 3.0, or it will push the cloth thru the figure surface.
Here's the latest render using those parameters with about 30k polygons and a directional force. Certainly makes the cloth "feel" a bit more weighty and clingly and dynamic.
Hey, excellent idea !! Seems to work okay in Hex, though the Carrara "modeller" gave me some weird, trashy polygons. Of course, it and I don't get along, so there may be a nice way to get it to work.
Sounds like a nice workaround for the specific case where you can add some geometry (of course, most of what I was discussing doesn't involve that particular case), and don't mind the extra. Or the additional work to get there.
Loop selecting and adding a shading domain is just so much quicker and easier. But thanks, that was fairly brilliant.
Reading through the previous posts:
If I'm understanding the question about an elastic top to your pants: There are a couple of ways.
1. Select the upper *edge* in MD, and in the Properties panel, "Basic" tab there is an entry for "Selected Line" and a check box for Elastic On/Off Have that check on, and set the elastic to about 30-50. (Think of it as a percentage of the full length of the line)
Problems: If you try to animate this in another program, this setting may not hold the garment in place. (I know it doesn't in Poser's dynamic Cloth room manipulations. The cloth just relaxes into it's full length.) It would only be useful in a static image.
2. Create a waistband ****which is shorter in length**** than the upper edge of the pants. When you sew the two seams together, short to long, the MD program !!automatically!! gathers the fullness of the pants into the waistband. This should hold up through other programs' dynamics (I have tested this in Poser).
-----------------------------------------
Yes, editing a garment using tri-polys is problematic in other programs which use quads. But MD's easy creation and (IMHO) superior sim abilities make clothing creation too easy to worry about it. It is so easy to create or alter a pattern inside MD, that some users don't even bother saving their MD files; they just whip up a new one when they need something. (Me: I'm a packrat....keep everything. *grin*)
Oh, yeah, and in response to your first comment:
THAT MESH MAKES ME WANT TO VOMIT !!! There, I said it. And yes, I have some unresolved issues with triangles. And I have sought professional help.
Anyway, I suspect that if you even asked someone outside the 3D world, say someone who is a fabric weaver or a sewer, what they think of that mesh they'd scratch their heads and wonder what the heck someone was thinking...
The vast majority of fabric is woven in a neat, crisscross, rectangular mesh. So why make a triangular mesh? It's just so wrong, on so many different levels.
And yes, the MD has heard an earful about the tri vs. quad issue since the beginning. The request for Quad mesh thread is the longest in the entire MD forum. The research team *has* come very close: so close they announced it would be 'soon', but to make it 100% quality quads is a very elusive goal. I would say that they are at the 95% stage, but that last bit is tricky, if you want a real good mesh.
But you have to understand where the history of the program is coming from.
First, the company is actually quite small: I think it's less than maybe 20 people. (Guess-timate...) They have only been in operation about 1 1/2 to 2 years. And tremendous progress *has* been made in functionality in other areas. They *do* listen closely to what their customers want.
The original program (Clo3D) was meant **solely** for use in the real-world garment manufacturing pipeline. Their goal was rapid prototyping of a design concept, and outputting a pattern for CAD based factory machines. Tris gave that the easiest method of rapid, rapid output.
It wasn't until some 3d people spotted it's usefulness for 3d-only purposes, was when the Marvelous Designer version of Clo3D came out. And Poser-type users went wild, because of the ease of 3d clothing creation. But that's when the need for quads was raised. And converting from tris to quads in a programming setting that assumes tris to begin with, is difficult. But, (and this is purely opinion) I think that they have found that the Poser-type users have been spending more money and time on the program, than the big real-world manufacturing people. Think 3 sales at the top-end level, and 100's of sales at the lower end.... who gets the most attention?
They are trying to solve the issue.
ACK !!!! That's what I was missing. I thought the manual was saying that you just select an edge, such as the waistband-area edge on a pair of pants, and turn Elastic ON, and the simulator automatically pulls that EDGE taut and bunches up the fabric connected to it. But I guess it doesn't make the EDGE elastic, it makes the fabric connected to the waistband elastic and scrunchy.
Okay, I think I've got it. And if all you want is the scrunchy part, not the waistband itself, I guess you do that procedure you mentioned, but give the waistband material a zero Alpha.
Hey, you don't have to convince me about how good the company is. I've been doing this stuff professionally for many years, and I can't recall the last time I was so impressed with the brillance of someone's software concept and design. As someone else liked to say, "it's insanely good".
In any case, thanks on the waistband. I think I have it, though I need to play with the scrunchy-ness settings a bit.