marcusfinnigon - 28 August 2012 03:03 AM
Just out of curiosity… Because I have NO IDEA lol… What plug-in and or Program is THE THING to use when constructing clothing for genesis? I imagine it’s something rather complex for your average 3d renderer person. If I could develop the knowledge and skill, I think it would be a great skill to have. Thus I envy you clothing masters lol
I do allot of concept design artworks, via digital painting (and set construction experience in 3ds Max), But never had the knowledge to actually create the costumes for figures (eg. Genesis) in a 3d environment.
DAZ Studio 4’s Content Creator Tools. The Transfer Utility is practically a “make clothes” button. You can then tweak rigging in the building room, but some people don’t even bother with that part (the utility has templates for pants, shirt, skirt, etc.). The B25 rigging kit provides some good skirt handles if you really want smooth iteration between thighs/shins, and it’s been on sale lately.
But as for the actual creation of the obj that you put through the CCT - there’s no THE THING on that. You could do it in 3ds Max, and that’s not a bad solution if you’re already familiar with it and have a commercial license. Other people do it in Hexagon, Modo or Maya. I use Blender, because it’s free and I was trained in it and am comfortable with it, but I’m a crazy person.
The most important things to remember when creating your obj are these:
1. Don’t bevel edges. Smoothing and collision cannot handle two or more verts occupying the same space. Bevel and then smooth to prevent errors at hems. If your rigged item crashes the program when smoothing is turned on, this is probably what you did.
2. Use separate submeshes judiciously. They, too, will be problematic with smoothing, not for crashing but for tending to scrunch up, peel or ‘drift” away from the main garment. When possible, weld everything and use material zones to distinguish different areas. I do real buttons on my items, but I also do a lot of extra morphs to make them work.
3. Don’t clip the body if you can avoid it. With Gen 4 items you could pass geometry right through the figure if that was useful on a clothing item. With Genesis it will be “pushed” out to the figure’s surface by the collision. If you do jewelry, do earrings as smartprops, or don’t add a smoothing modifier to them.
4. Unless your item is very hi rez, you need denser polygons in the chest and crotch areas, the former for when Genesis is morphed to females and the latter for smooth bending. If transfer utility gives you pants with a giant weird bulge there when doing splits, add more edge loops. The bigger the female breast you want to support, the more polys are needed (Iconic Girl 4 is very demanding of autofit clothing items, for instance).
