How do I make my characters' clothes distort for specific scenes?
Magic Dragon 3D
Posts: 116
in The Commons
The title of this thread may seem confusing, I apologize if it wasn't clear because it's very difficult to explain in words, but well, I would like to know how I could distort my characters' clothes (t-shirts, pants, underwear, etc.) for specific scenes! For example, how could I make the pocket of my G8F's jeans "expand" if she reaches into the pocket? Another example: she wants to grab her jeans and pull them so she can see underneath of her pants, and obviously the pants, being "elastic", will distort. How do I do this effect inside Daz? Thank you to anyone who can help me!
Comments
There are several methods that can be used, each with their pros and cons. "Inside Daz" Studio one can use the Mesh Grabber plug-in [separate purchase] and/or dForce. If you can squeeze a modeller into the workflow, quick morphs can be made using Hexagon or Blender, etc.
In Out Of Touch's G8F Megawardrobe, the Superjeans have an 'Open' morph for the pockets, as shown in the pose set below.
A jacket like 'Hypertaf's Winter Trendy' (now at a different shop from DAZ) also has pocket open morphs:
You need to look in the morph lists for the clothing on the sale page.
Regards,
Richard.
Thanks for the answer! The clothes that my character is wearing doesn't have D-Force, so this Mesh Grabber could be useful, since I don't know how to use Blender properly lol. By chance with this Mesh Grabber could I, say, make the clothes distort if I pose my character by taking off her clothes? I'll see if I buy this tool, as it will be useful for a 3D comic series I'm working on.
Thank you for your recommendation, but I would need to apply this "deformation" to my character's own clothes. I will understand more about how the Mesh Grabber works before purchasing it, as it appears to be useful for deforming the meshes of my character's clothes without having to use external software such as Blender or 3DS Max.
You can also try with a D-former. It is included in DS an dthere are many tutos available.
For within daz studio, mesh grabber as mentioned is great. However, it is limited compared to using something like goz to zbrush, but zbrush is not a cheap application. All these things are of course limited, none of them will be able to do pocket open if there is no actual pocket mesh to open. A lot of times pockets are just there in the texture, and not actual mesh to manipulate. If you are looking for undress type things, another product worth looking at is fit control, it injects a lot of those kind of morphs into any clothes.
Oh, nice to hear that! I thought D-Former was a paid tool lol. Great! At least one free aid. I'll test it tonight when I get back from work and watch some tutorials. Thanks!
I understood. I actually don't want to do anything too complex, but rather apply a deformation to the clothes if, for example, a character of mine puts his/her hands down his/her pants, or when he's/she's going to "pull" them. By the way, I took a look at the "Fit Control" you mentioned, and it brings exactly what I was looking for hahaha.
A Push Modofier may also help. Both Push Modifiers and dForms can be weightmapped to control which areas they affect.
There's two important limitations to bring up with Mesh Grabber:
1) It can only drag around the mesh that's there. It can't, for example, make a character unbutton their trousers if the fly is just painted on on the textures and the clothing is a joined mesh. Mesh Grabber has no capacity to split the mesh.
2) It's also proximity based. Separating two surfaces that are very close - even if they're not actually joined in the mesh - will be very difficult.
Blender - while it still has to follow some rules to keep changes you make compatible with the original - can make such changes.
Characters taking off their clothes is very difficult to achieve well; with an exception of maybe products that provide specific pose/morph sets for specific items of clothing (and even then it's rough around the edges), this is advanced stuff, and you can't expect any one product to handle it magically.
Though Mesh Grabber has limitation and is not almighty, there're still quite a few tricks, as per the case you have. For instance, it has no flexible selection function as well as mask, but for "opening a pocket", as long as there're separate surfaces (or you create separate surfaces yourself...), you can quickly make it by using Geometry Editor + Mesh Grabber, as shown in the ss. Only fine-tuning the shape will take some time...
As for making "take-off shapes", only using MG may not bring you 100% good results. Though it depends on the result you want to get, better wisely use the ways of MG, dForce, dFormer + Weight, Transfer Utility, etc, as others mentioned above.
So, if you don't want to learn Blender for the time being, going for using Mesh Grabber may be a good choice. But still, as a Blender user, I strongly suggest you learn it. It's a game changer for DS users...
I discovered that Fit Control can apparently facilitate this process of manipulating and distorting clothes, and the result I saw in the images on Daz Shop is very close to what I'm looking for at the moment. I don't know if Mesh Grabber can achieve the same result because I didn't used it first, but if the result is better with Fit Control, I will definitely use it instead of Mesh Grabber or the native option that comes with Daz.
I actually know a little about Blender, but very little because I don't find the Blender interface very intuitive or very easy to learn. There are so many shortcuts and commands that I get confused and forget them relatively easily. Before I ventured into Daz Studio, I used 3DS Max a lot, which for me has a more "friendly" and easy-to-learn interface compared to Blender. The problem is that I don't have 3DS Max installed on my PC because it's paid software, and unfortunately my student license has expired 2 years ago and I won't be able to get back to using it so quickly without paying a fortune!
Well, about the Mesh Grabber, I'll buy it and test it later on my characters' clothes to see what the result looks like, but I'm going to say right away that for me, Fit Control seems to have a better result for what I want to do, since I looked at the product description and its images on Daz Shop, and the result I saw is exactly what I need in terms of "distortion" and "manipulation" of the meshes of my characters' clothes. It doesn't have to be something very advanced or extremely realistic, but at least it would have a satisfactory result and I really liked what I saw in Fit Control.
Yea, at the end of the day, it'll be always up to you choice. I also own Fit Control, but I have to say it's just limited... to those provided morphs... In quite a few cases, I still had to deform the mesh on wearables with other tools to make them more natural...
But if you find those in-box morphs quite meet what you need, then it would be a good choice.