Digital Art Zone

Okay, this is UN-SANE !!!

Took me probably 2 minutes to generate this gown. TWO polygons, that’s it. Traced around the character to draw the polygon for the front (maybe 12 or 14 sides), copied and pasted for the back, tied the seams together, then BAM !! ran the sim and it’s done, as you see it.

Exported into Carrara, placement matched exactly, threw a shader on it, rendered, and it’s done. Whole process no more than 10 minutes.

This is crazy.

Oh, and of course I had to crank up the “slanky-ness” factor on this to around 1,000%... 

And I’m not sure what all that skeezix is down the right side seam, probably just need to tweak the mesh rez or something.

Okay, this is the LAST render I’m posting on this.

I’m serious.

I decided to splurge a little and add a 3rd polygon as a ruffle down the right side. And with that I cranked up the “elegance” factor to about 6. Used a little Force in Carrara to give the ruffle a little flair.

No, really, THIS is the last image I’m posting on the subject. This time I’m really serious. And solely to illustrate a point.

So, I’m looking at the render, and think, “hmm, maybe instead of a long gown I want this to be a combination of a dress and a gown, with separate materials for the bottom part and the ruffle compared to the top part”. Totally reasonable decision, right?

So I go into the Carrara modeller to select the bottom half of the gown, and sure enough, I can’t without getting a real jagged interface seam.

Bummer. No idea how to fix it either. Now I’m all dejected and stuff.

(BTW, yes, I know I can go back to MD, figure out how to insert a seam into the existing polys, rerun the sim, export/import into Carrara, etc., but the other way is SO much quicker and easier).

Okay, so here’s the questions I’ve developed so far in my quest to understand Marvelous Designer. I’d appreciate if anyone can help with any of these:

1. When you load a morph target to your avatar, it goes from the base pose to the morphed pose over, say, 30 frames, and drapes the clothing during that process. Now, once you’ve done that, and you want to modify the clothing and re-do that process, how do you do that? I can’t figure out how to revert to the base (t-pose or whatever) so you can re-run the sim. I know how to re-set the clothing using the “Rearrange all patterns”, but not the pose.

2. How do you go into an existing pattern and insert a seam in an existing polygon? Similar to using the Knife tool in a 3D app.

3. When I import my avatar (V4, say) into MD as an OBJ, the textures for the body come in fairly decent, but the face, head, and neck are all black. What am I doing wrong?

4. I saw the Tutorial writeup on changing the default avatar and scene, but I can’t find the “marvelous.prj” file they talk about, only a “marvelous.zprj” which is not editable. How do I fix that?

Thanks.

To answer your first couple of points:
1.  Load your original OBJ as a morph target!
2.  This is not yet supported - I think they are aware of the requirement.  I think you would need to redraw the pieces as two separate pieces and re-do the seams.  If your “cut” isn’t fully through the fabric, you can add points on an existing edge and then move these.

3 & 4 - I don’t know, not something I have worried about.

To get clean joins for your material regions, a few suggestions:
- You could re-topo the whole model in Zbrush or 3D-Coat or another app that supports Retopo.
- You can use a Layer List shader with a map that is effectively a mask between the two areas.  Using this, you can add unlimited masks and unlimited numbers of shaders without any changes to the mesh.
- You could always go back to MD and make the adjustments. As Rosemaryr said earlier, it it so easy to do, it is often just the quickest and easiest way.

Also, you said earlier that MD was not a great draper - how I laughed at that one!  Have you seen some of the things that clever clothes designers have done with this program?  If you are finding the fabric stiff, reduce the particle distance to get a finer mesh (allowing finer creases) and adjust the materials - there are lots of presets from leather to chiffon which really change the way the fabric hangs and drapes. Plus you can then fine tune with all the individual settings.

Cloth on cloth? Of course.

Okay, no more.

PhilW - 22 July 2012 02:02 AM

Also, you said earlier that MD was not a great draper - how I laughed at that one!  .

Yeah, probably not one of my brightest statements. I was assuming that the goal in their design was speed and response, not necessarily accuracy and high resolution down at the poly level. And to get there I assumed they replaced mesh-level accuracy with visual tricks. But yeah, I’m sure you only need to crank up the mesh and tweak some settings to get some great results. But I think clearly the default settings, especially mesh density, are clearly not what a 3D person would want to use for a final

But I do think there was a legitimate point in there somewhere about doing the final drape in Bullet, because of the additional flexibility you have, and ease in which you can design your drape parameters to better interact with the particular scene. Though maybe with enough planning you can do the same in MD.

I think what most people do in MD (Rosemaryr can correct me if I’m wrong - she has hugely more talent and experience in MD than me) is to use the default settings to do the basic design, because it drapes quickly, and then reduce the particle distance and fine tune the materials, the fit etc before finally exporting.

Just thought I would post a recent example of stuff I have done with MD and Carrara. There is more at my Rendo gallery for anyone who’s interested.  OK, it seems that the forum is no longer letting me upload an image…have a look at this one instead!
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2346525&user_id=380840&np;&np;

Must…stop….

Too much…fun…..

Okay, whoever said the UV maps were nice was absolutely right. Gorgeous. And I love how the shirring works so well once you get the hang of it. Damn, this is wonderful. I mean, marvelous.

Sorry for the delay in responding, Joe…. I work nights in RL, so my online time is screwy compared to most people.

For the current problem of ‘cutting a pattern’ as with scissors, my own method is to 1) place extra points on the seams where I want to cut, then 2) duplicate that pattern, then 3) on one of those duplicates, select and delete everything to one side of those cutting points, repeating the process on the other side for the second duplicate pattern.  This leaves two new pattern pieces which then can be sewn together on the resulting seam which is formed by the cutting points I added.

Let’s see if the new forum will let me post the image….

PhilW - 22 July 2012 02:41 AM

I think what most people do in MD (Rosemaryr can correct me if I’m wrong - she has hugely more talent and experience in MD than me) is to use the default settings to do the basic design, because it drapes quickly, and then reduce the particle distance and fine tune the materials, the fit etc before finally exporting.

Pretty much, that’s the method. 
There are a few times that I will go to a smaller PD earlier: usually if I need a fine detail piece early on in the construction time-line.  I tend to do some complex items that need an occasional foray into the dense mesh jungle.

JoeMamma2000 - 22 July 2012 01:07 AM

3. When I import my avatar (V4, say) into MD as an OBJ, the textures for the body come in fairly decent, but the face, head, and neck are all black. What am I doing wrong?

4. I saw the Tutorial writeup on changing the default avatar and scene, but I can’t find the “marvelous.prj” file they talk about, only a “marvelous.zprj” which is not editable. How do I fix that?

Thanks.

3.  I think it has to do with where the texture files are stored, whether or not the texture files are in the same folder as the mesh file…. sometimes my loaded obj avatars come in with textures, sometimes not….  Since I don’t do final renderings inside Md, it never really bothered me.

4.  Good news.  I’ve experimented, and it seems that the MD team made some changes since that previous information was released.  What you do it now this:
Load whatever you wish to be your default avatar.  Then choose Save As: Project The default save spot and name is the default “Marvelous.zprj”  file.  If you overwrite that, your chosen avatar should load on the next start-up.  Of course, you should save the original file somewhere else to be on the safe side.

Thanks Rosemaryr, I very much appreciate all the effort to answer my questions…

Now, while on the subject of fabrics, I know this is a little off topic but might be helpful to someone out there who is doing fabric shaders. I’m in no way an expert on them, but there are some basics that might not be real obvious, but might be helpful to consider.

Often you see clothing fabric in 3D renders that looks very thick and heavy, when it’s supposed to be light and soft and comfortable. Part of the reason for that is the shaders.

Face it, fabric shaders are difficult to do well. And part of the reason is this:

Many times I’ve said that there are three things that light can do when it encounters a material:

1. Bounce off
2. Bounce around inside, then come out
3. Pass thru

What makes fabrics so challenging, and often complicated, is that with many fabrics (of course, not all), light does all three things.

To see this, myy biggest recommendation is to try something simple to get a feel for how fabrics respond to light: take a sample of a fabric outside, like a typical, comfortable knit t-shirt or shorts, and hold it up to the sunlight. What do you see?

Well, you probably see a speckled light pattern of sunlight coming thru. And you probably see the fabric even glowing a bit. Why? Well, think about how the fabric is at the thread level. It was made by weaving threads in a consistent, criss cross pattern. And the threads themselves are generally made of much smaller threads wrapped together. Clothing fabrics are generally designed to be comfortable, which means light and airy and soft, which means that they’re generally not going to be very opaque and thick and heavy. Of course, there are exceptions. But the vast majority are designed to have air pass thru, which means lots of light passes thru. You probably don’t want to wear a fabric that isn’t woven, and doesn’t let air/light pass thru (like a rubber, or example).

So it becomes very clear that light is doing all three things I mentioned.

It must be bouncing off and into our eyes, or we wouldn’t see it. That’s easy. But it’s also passing thru, but in a speckled pattern, consistent with the weave. And it’s also bouncing around inside the fabrics, then coming out and into your eyes because of the properties of the thread. That’s what gives it a slight glow.

What does that all mean? Well, it becomes pretty clear that you’re going to need many of the material properties applied to your fabric. You’ll need color, bump, and highlight, but you’ll also need some alpha since you saw how light passes thru, and you might need some translucency. And the alpha isn’t uniform, it’s in a weave pattern since the light passes thru the spaces between the threads. But due to the translucency of the threads there’s also light passing thru them. But light also bounces around inside the fabric, then comes out and into your eyes. It’s often a subtle effect, but just as often it’s the subtlety that really makes viewers believe it. And what describes light bouncing around inside and coming out and into our eyes? SSS, of course. Or maybe even a Glow.

So my only point is that texturing fabrics is a challenge, and is not as simple as you might think. It requires some thought, and I’d suggest that if you want to make really nice textures you study the fabric first before you attempt to build a shader.

And as we inch ever closer to our first presentation render using Marvelous Designer….

A little punch here, a little tweak there….

Really, the problem with this is that it’s so easy to do stuff that you keep telling yourself, “hey, in about two seconds I can add this doodad here and a gizmo there”. You really need to exercise some restraint….