what program is the best or at least good for creating good clothing for Daz characters?
Drekkan
Posts: 459
in The Commons
Do many people use Blender to create clothing items for Daz Genesis 8/Genesis 3 characters? am looking around online and am just wanting to get some idea what programs stand in the forefront when it comes to this.
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Marvelous Designer
https://www.marvelousdesigner.com/
while that certainly looks the business I cannot afford it. Is it monthly sub cost?
I tend to prefer as a customer clothes not made in Marvelous Designer
I can usually tell if it has been,
People make awesome stuff in Blender even Hexagon,
Arki has lots of tutorials for Hexagon
why's that?
MD stuff tends to be paper thin as mostly needs dynamics (Dforce) to look good IMO.
others feel differently, it's just my view, I love stuff by people like Luthbel for example
Marvelous Designer, Blender, Hexagon, 3DS Max, Maya, Modo, Cinema 4D - there are shed-loads.
It's more of a case of finding one that suits your budget and preferred way of working.
I bought MD - and I love it, but I still use Blender.
No matter the method and tool used, make sure the clothes have depth (I've been ranting about this since before Dforce made an appearance; I do love a good rant.
). It is one of the first thing that can kill a good scene for me - infinitely thin cloth, which also goes hand-in-hand with perferctly smooth edges. From a distance it is less noticable, but straight lines aren't perfectly straigth; curves aren't perfectly curved; there are tiny imperfections.
Edit:
Note budget doesn't mean cheap, it means finding something within a set of parameters that also include cash; costs don't just mean how much cash we part with.
...for myself MD is much more intuitive for creating clothing than standard modelling software, just that my version is very old and they have since gone totally over to subscriptionand my old system doesn't meet the requirements for MD10. A single year at the personal level would almost pay for the former perpetual licence.
Marvelous Designer + Zbrush + Substance Painter is a good combo.
But even if you dont know how to use Zbrush or Substance, there are lots of good purely Marvelous Designer marketplaces now which didnt exist 2 years ago.
https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/game-dev?q=marvelous§ion=trending
i think albin does use blender
https://www.cgtrader.com/albin
It's up to the PA.
Using MD clothing in MD vs using Daz clothing which has been made with MD are two separate things and it's not clear what OP's use case is.
Admittedly many a MD-made clothing is left paper thin so it works in Dforce in Daz Studio. But if you intend to use Marvelous Designer's simulation engine, you dont need to worry about a garment's thickness. You can have multiple layers and thickness in Marvelous Designer itself and still have successful simulations.
FWIW, my 2 cents is this:
In the real world, all clothing starts as a flat, 2D pattern. The pieces are then sewn together, and gravity does the rest. In general, unless you want to get real fancy, no sculpting is required. And since you're asking, my guess is you're starting and don't want to get fancy at this point.
So I tend to follow the same procedure as the real world. In Blender draw out the pattern, or sometimes you can even use a portion of a simple cube or sphere, and import that into Studio. Then let gravity do the work. I use an inexpensive and wonderful plugin called VWD, which allows you to do physics/cloth on a simple OBJ object in your Studio scene. While I agree with those who say Marvelous Designer is (at least for my needs) almost ideal, it is expensive and I don't get fancy or use it enough to justify the expense. I've found that if you have a good cloth simulator you can do wonders with converting very simple mesh objects into nice looking and hanging clothing. And in many cases what sells it is less about the mesh and more about the textures/materials.
At the end of the day, there is no "best" or "good" for everybody. It all depends on YOU and your needs. Are you doing animations or stills? What's your budget? Are you willing to build your own objects in Blender or whatever? And so on....
If you ask 20 different people what the "best" of anything is, it's guaranteed you'll get 43 different opinions, none of which may be relevant to you.
something that we dont see enough of is Photogrammetry clothing. In my opinion, this type of clothing can look the most realistic.
Polygon Miniatures had some on Daz Store and many more on his website. There are various other sites out there that sell them, like turbosquid and tootoscans.
The GPU mode of Marvelous Designer is good at simulating them. (The standard CPU mode is quite slow at simulating them.)
There is a Garment Tool addon for Blender, that does not cost as much as Marvelous Designer.
I have no skills yet to create decent clothes myself, so it does not matter what program I will choose.
I have the old permanent licence of Marvelous Designer and could not create anything nice to show up.
If you have skills, even using Blender itself without any add on, could allow you to create decent clothes.
There are literally tons of tutorials about using Blender to create clothes - one just need to invest time in it.
More about Garment Tool
And making clothes in Blender without add ons:
Do not forget, that we have here at Daz 3D, a free Daz to Blender bridge, which was recently updated.
https://www.daz3d.com/daz-to-blender-bridge
It looks actually even better in Blender 2.9 series...
Unless it's changed, Hexagon 2.5 Beta is free and I believe when you get Daz you also get Hexagon...free.
blender's also free if that helps.
Blender is awesome these days. It does so many things very well and is well-supported with YT tutorials and plugins. Hexagon is unfortunate. I really like it when it works, but its bad behaviors make it untenable. Arki works magic with it, but it even misbehaves during her tutorials. if you happen to have it, Carrara remains a capable option.
Just wonder what kind of clothes, you want to create, to start with?
I know, that pants are the hardest to create right.
Blender has changed [for the better] a lot over the past few years. While "yes" have Hexagon installed as it's marvellous for many a task ... given the amount of time involved in learning how to use any 3D modeler, try Blender. Lots of "bells and whistles" and abilities to do basically anything that needs to be done.
There are available for sale some meshes made in MD over at ArtStation if you want to see examples of what can be produced. My findings are that they take more work to make usable than they are worth acquiring UNLESS they were released properly for to truly fit G8 in default position in Daz Studio - thin unified mesh. For some reason [probably works well in MD but not in D/S] several like to make fancy outfits that come in a billion pieces, double mesh, and does NOT land on the target figure as required. Is nightmare. For those with MD, there are tutorials in the wilds to assist with these matters ;-)
............
Thank you Artini - I need to study those ways :-)
...with Bllender I'm, still at the stage of very simple props.
any program is as good as your skills into it.
asides MD that is only specific focused on cloth, there is no bad or good program for modelling clothes, can be Silo or Maya/Zbrush whatever.
did anyone mention 3d coat? is a couple hundred less than md