Why we have trouble with clothing textures
cherpenbeck
Posts: 1,413
I've often wonderes with textures like this one (promo picture of Kaoruka for Genesis8, just as an example) look so wrong.
Seems, that some osrtists make their clothing from a straight tube and let dForce or whatever else take care of the fitting. naturally, thus the fabric has to adapt to smaller areas as well as to bigger areas (breast), ant the textures shrink or expand.
THEY WOULD NEVER DO THAT IN REAL LIFE! Especially not on expensive clothing like this dress.
Every tailor would be ashamed of producing such a dress. There is a reason the use things like darts for fitting. And these textured clothing items would look much, much better if they were tailored like real clothing, not shrink-wrapped. Which with dForce became more often the case than not. One of the reasons I don't really like dForce.
The only remedy for now is not using any texture with patterns, only uniform colors.
Question: Is it so much more work to make clothing / clothing texture which behave realistically?
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Comments
The problem, as I see it, not that they are modelled from a tube, but that clothing is modelled to one size.
So whenever you dia the body differently, the polygons will expand or shrink, and the textures likewise.
On your model, you can try to dial the breast to the default size and see how that looks.
If you look at it in wireframe, you can see that the polygons has been inlarged.
There is no perfect solution, but can be partly avoided, if you dial the breast up during dForce.
I don't think people would be happy buying products that only worked for a specific set of proportions. Or paying multiples of what they do now for a wardrobe of sizes.
yes it's the breast size stretching it, a less endowed character near base model would look correct
only solution I see is prop clothes modelled and textured to that shape relying entirely on Dforce
To state the obvious, morphs morph.
Many of the clothing items for sale in the Daz store (and elsewhere) are made based on geometry generated in Marvelous Designer. These items are tailor made for the base G8 (or whatever) figures. The MD program uses darts etc for fitting. The tools mimic sewing tools. The UVMapping of the panels can be maintained for the base so there that there is no distortion.
When you morph a figure, and the clothing is morphed to fit, the clothing and the UVs are distorted.
You absolutely can (1) create a full body morph to match your morphed character, (2) use MD or similar to create morphs for the clothes to fit your character full body morph, and (3) the really ambitious could redo the UV maps and direct Daz Studio to use the substitute UVMap.
The Daz Studio content creators do list which full body morphs have custom support.
Here is the Marvelous Designer interface which you can see has tool icons analogous to real world sewing.
Tailors are welcome to try making 3D clothing that behaves more accurately, but they'll discover the same thing others in this thread have already explained to you: 3D clothing is not real clothing. It's impossible for a creator to account for every potential use case, so they try to make items that work at least relatively well in most scenarios.
So how come that conforming clothing for G2 often shows nothing or notably less of this distortion? Does this mean that conforming clothing is easier to texture? Or did G2 generally have smaller breasts and therefore less distortion?
Threee responses to comments that I would like to make:
1. It might start as a cylinder but that doesn't mean that's what the final product is. Anyone who uses Zbrush know that they have options that allow you to remesh the item which reduces the amount of stretching in a mesh.
2. People are correct when they say that once you morph the figure it will start to distort. The only way I know around that is to create custom morphs. I know that most clothing creators used to make for the iconic characters custom morphs. Most time you don't even realise you are using them as if set up correctly they automatically dial in as you dial in the character morph. However given the numbe of character Genesis now has it would be impossible to do custom morphs for all of them, that's if they even own all of them themselves.
3. Genesis 2 clothing does seem to follow very nicely and I did look at this at one stage and I noticed that the clothing templates were quite high resolution meshes which I think has an impact on how well the clothing follows. I haven't looked at the newer templates for Gen8 so I can't say if they are similar.
I think there are a lot of variables that impact on how well an item of clothing follows a character being morphed. Some is down to the clothing itself, some is the weightmapping, some is the customisation of a particular mesh. Most meshes though aren't perfect.
Conventionally conforming clothing shows the same types of fabric distortions as dForce dynamic clothing. However, those distortions tend to be less obvious in 3Delight than Iray, especially in mid- or long-distance shots. That may be the difference you're perceiving.
I can't think of a reason why conforming clothing should be easier or more difficult than dForce clothing to apply textures to. I don't notice a clear difference when retexturing clothes. It's the same set of problems related to unnatural/unrealistic stretching & contraction of fabric as the figure's sliders are pushed. The problems are somewhat/sometimes addressable, but the problems are nonetheless annoying.
Obviously, providing the user with a figure that can be pushed to proportional extremes without perfecting automated clothing fits is an area that Daz should be working on. No telling what their priorities are.
For exaggerated morphs, one can make morphs for the clothing and/or one can make new UV sets for the exaggerated clothing morph. In your modeller, use a checker template for guidance. The concept is to keep the squares, square.
Just a note-- that image you attached shows the G2 Victoria which most certainly had a custom morph and not an autofitted one for that dress.
Blenders free .you can adjust textures.
...well I do feel that G3 characters seem to have larger default breasts than G2 (save for the child and pre teen ones).
I have one character who is a slender "Twiggy" like individual and having a devil of a time gritting the GoGo Outfit to fit and look as it should (particularly using the black & white "mod" texture) . Also dialling breasts down past a certain point tends to distort the underlying breast structure (similar to what used to occure with V4/A4) which also affects the look of the fit as well. One issue I constantly run into with "less endowed" characters is anything with a stripe or linear like pattern (such as gingham or plaid) which tends to warp badly instead of remaining in straight lines as it should. Usually it means having to mess with projection morph sliders to try and get things to look right. but that can cause other issues as well.
I just picked up Zev0's projection Morph Manager and been experimenting with it. It seems to do an OK job if the character is to be more in the background, but close up minor distortions can be seen and there is occasional; poke through. I have to crank up the smoothing integrations quite a bit just to keep it from crumpling after autofitting.
What is needed is a true "flat chest" morph not jsut a Breasts Small or Breasts Gone one that also reduces the diameter of the breast area (back in the Gen4 days someone did create such a morph which made it easier to create pre teen and "tween" characters but textures still suffered at the time all clothing was designed with the adult Vicky/Aiko in mind). Even the Breast Volume morphs in several morph resourse kits don't reduce the diameter of the pectorals without distorting/crumpling the areola.region
I don't think G2F avoids the problem of morphs morphing. Here is a default load of G2F in a shirt with vertical lines. See what happens when a Full Body Morph from a character in the Daz store is applied (Lotus for G2F). The problem is not the efforts of the PAs or DForce. As several have mentioned above, it is a feature, not a bug, that clothing in Daz Studio can morph to match the morphs of the figure. However, there is a trade off. If the clothing morphs, the textures are distorted to some degree. As true for G2F as for G8F.
I think I am over my head here...
But could you create the bust area as a seperate material zone in geometry editor, and then adjust the tiling of the texture's pattern to bring it closer/back into scale with the other parts of the dress?
I think you are on the right track, except that there are morphs that affect the whole figure. The creator does not know whether users will apply an emaciated body morph or an obese body morph. To sort of automate adjustments to tiling requires the equivelant of substituting a new UVMap for each stylized morph. On the one hand, yay, multiple UVMaps can be created and substituted for the same clothing item. So for full body morphs with a lot of distortion, like 'The Girl' series, you could have a UVMap tailored to 'The Girl' morph to be applied if the morph is on a high setting. So far so good. But the problem then becomes that there can be only one UVMap at the time of rendering, but multiple stylized morphs can be dialed on the figure and copied to the clothes at the same time.
One way I have reduced the effect of distorted textures over the breast area is to create a new UV map for the garment. I have done this by exporting the distorted clothing item, and using 'Roadkill' to relax the UV map whilst keeping the edges of the UV map fixed in place ( this ensures the textures still fit the relaxed mesh). This works pretty well for breasts which are larger or smaller than the default, and it avoids any break in the texture. This works well if you have a figure whose shape you are happy with, and does not rely on the vendor providing the fix.
Forgot to add that I dforce and simulate the clothing item on the mophed human base before exporting, so that the mesh is relaxed as possible.
...so it sounds like the technique won't work with fitted clothing. I rarely bother with dForce as I primarily work with G3 and have old hardware on it takes forever to run a sim . I also am aware that applying dForce to non dForce clothing can result in the clothing item "exploding".