Making DS4 Clothes: Problems and Opportunities

SickleYield

I thought about putting this in the Published Artist forum, but it's probably most useful to those starting out rather than veterans of the content creation process.

Genesis in DS4 is capable of many things the Gen4's frustratingly were not. Deformations are smoother, poses are more realistic, and every morph, however unusual, is in some way supported thanks to Autoconform. Smoothing and collision eliminate a lot of the need for repeated constant dialing of fixit morphs. And Transfer Utility removes guesswork from the basic rigging, eliminating the horrid dance of trying to get clean skeletons and delete unnecessary bits without destroying a .cr2. Not only that, but the modular .dsf system allows forms of nondestructive editing of geometry and UV that .cr2 content creators could only dream of.

But there are real and definite shortcomings to this process. I will discuss them here.

Problem 1: Discrete submeshes.

It's not that DS4 outright won't handle this, it's that they're likely to be smoothed in such a way that their edges separate from the main body of a garment, giving you hovering fasteners or inappropriately detached piping on hems. If you want to do this, you'd better be prepared to go around connecting up all the edges to the main garment, or add fixit morphs to move all of your buttons back where they belong. You can see this effect if you add a smoothing modifier to the free Magus outfit that came with DAZ Studio, because it wasn't made with this shortcoming in mind.

Problem 2: Beveled edges

THIS is the one the program flat won't handle. Some of my earliest products really only work with smoothing turned off because I didn't realize this was the cause of crashes when items were conformed. This makes certain types of crisp edges almost impossible. They can be regained a little with UberSurface fresnel, probably, but it's a sad loss. Those wishing to make mech outfits for Genesis characters will probably have to get those boxy machine edges either with smoothing permanently off or using displacement maps instead of geometry.

Problem 3: Wrinkles

You can certainly morph them in. The problem is that you'd also better be ready to set the dial for them at 400% for them to show up at all when smoothing is on, or mark them as "turn smoothing off." Wrinkled base geometry isn't as subject to this effect, and this is the path I imagine many will take.

Problem 4: Handles

This is less a "problem" and more of a difference from the old system.

Skirt handles can't be done in the same way they were for Gen 4. Weight mapping is great, but it also doesn't allow overlapping zones that are rigged to values greater than 1, so you can't have a knee bend bone that affects some of the same verts as the front swing and back swing bones. Currently I'm doing upper and lower handles where the thighs and shins would be. This at least is a better solution than just painting straight to the leg bones where skirts are involved (unless the skirt is very short). In some ways I think this is still better, though I miss being able to bend the whole lower area at once for knee bends instead of left and right shins separately.

Problem 5: Real pockets

This was especially frustrating for me, as I long traded on realistic garment features like working pockets. The trouble is that when they are calculated to collide with the body they will burst outward through the clothing. Smoothing and collision prevent accidental clipping with the body of Genesis, but they also prevent deliberate clipping for style or construction reasons. The best I've been able to do with this is to greatly reduce the pocket lining to just a couple of rows of polys instead of a full meshed inside pocket.

Questions and comments are welcomed. It may look like I'm giving away trade secrets, but you'll need to be a fairly advanced user to even run into some of these. Really I'm just hoping to shorten the troubleshooting process when you find a garment suddenly won't look right.

Pendraia

Thanks for the info Sickle it will be really useful...