About clothing morphs and diffeo.

Pickle Renderer

My character has a dress but the deformations to the dress caused by posing the armature in Blender were bad (sculpting shape key fixes was my least favourite option).  So I exported the dress to Marvellous Designer, simulated it on the posed avatar, then exported as .obj.  Now I want to import and use that as a shape key on the dress in Blender.  However it seems I cannot do it.  Blender applies shapes to the base mesh, not the posed mesh and there's no reverse deformation option in "Join as Shapes".  So after I do it the shape key is janky or just doesn't work.

In Daz 3D I can use Morph Loader pro and make a "morph" (shape key).  It has a "reverse deformation" option on the panel, which I assume applies inverse of the armature transforms to the vertices, or similar.  So, how do I do that in Blender?

TheMysteryIsThePoint

Forget shape keys. Export from MD as Alembic and import in Blender. It works magnificently.

You probably won't have to do anything, but you can use the Cloth To Shapekey addon to make any minor adjustments.

Padone

Just to point out that in blender you can do a shapekey relative to another in the options. So if you have a corrective shapekey just set "relative to" other than "basis".

Pickle Renderer

Thanks a lot guys.  I decided on Alembic, i.e. to do the cloth animation entirely in MD and import it as that.  The only trouble I had was the Frame Offset, as I start my animations at frame 100 (I use 0 to 99 for any Blender sim shenanigans I decide on, i.e. space for keyframes - an old habit).  Anyway it seems to work nicely, as long as you remember to export with OGOWA version of Alembic, not the HDF5 one (honestly, what's the point of having a standard...).  FBX is as shockingly bad as ever... unusable really.

Pickle Renderer

Hmmmm.  You can't add shape keys to a point cache or edit it in any way, of course, so the Alembic version still has problems, i.e. some inevitable clipping can't be fixed later after exporting it from MD.  Also tried Padone's "relative to" and that didn't work either. 

TheMysteryIsThePoint

Pickle Renderer said:

Hmmmm.  You can't add shape keys to a point cache or edit it in any way, of course, so the Alembic version still has problems, i.e. some inevitable clipping can't be fixed later after exporting it from MD.  Also tried Padone's "relative to" and that didn't work either. 

"You probably won't have to do anything, but you can use the Cloth To Shapekey addon to make any minor adjustments."

Pickle Renderer

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

"You probably won't have to do anything, but you can use the Cloth To Shapekey addon to make any minor adjustments."

 Ah, missed that.  Nice.  I'll buy it.