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I read this in a comparison review:
All that suggests to me that the point of sculpting is to work in high resolution which, to me, means more polygons or subdivison - both of which are not allowed for morphs. Nevertheless, I use it because I just fix poke through or simple movements. I don't really sculpt.
It depends on what you're trying to make.
I started with clothing, so to get a clothing product done, you should have the knowledge of the following:
- General 3D modeling skills
- Knowing Blender's modeling interface and some of it's modifiers available to you
- Knowing at least something about Blender's cloth simulation, it really comes nowhere near the quality of Marvelous Designer for example, but can be helpful sometimes
- Being familiar with the UV image editor
- Being familiar with Blender's sculpting mode
- The ability to bake normal/displacement maps based on your sculpt
Two things you do not need to concern yourself with when it comes to clothing are:
- Rigging, this will be done in Daz Studio
- Materials, those will also be set up in DS
In addition to this, to make a clothing product you of course must be able to create textures for it in a 2D image editor of your choice (Gimp, Photoshop).
One saying that is very true here is that practice makes perfect.
With every new creation you learn a lot, or at least I do.
Look up Blender modeling tutorials on youtube, there's tons of them. Those are the best way to get into 3D modeling : )
OK, threads merged.
Many sculptors in Blender model to a certain level of likeness / accuracy for their desired product and then switch over to sculpting to refine their product when they are done.
If you do the Pilot and the Goblin tutorials by Darrin Lile on youtube he does box modeling on the pilot and sculpting on the goblin in Blender. My feeling is if you do those you will have an understanding of how to do want to create morphs you want but you probably will need to repeat those tutorials 2 or 3 times each with a different character you decide to create each time before you are really good at creating morphs on DAZ characters. Even then, you probably still won't be really super fast, I handwrite and type as slow as I have always done.
Man. I can't even figure out how to retopo. Hrm.
LOL, well that's sort of why I stick with box modeling with sub-divide turned off - ultimately I want a model I can use in a game. It's also why I licensed DAZ and Poser as base models I can create morphs for and re-texture because they've already got all that done quite professionally. Not if I wanted to be a professional at this well then...
The big thing I'm missing in my character design flow is something like Marvelous Designer.
@marble I use a combination of sculpt and edit modes to make morphs. Sculpting can be more visual, and the smooth brush is invaluable for making sure a morph doesnt have any wierd lumps. Edit mode I am still more comfortable with for fine details like, say, adjusting eyelids; also things like scaling eyes.
@timmins Blender doesn't currently have any automatic retopo things like Zbrush, but then again neither do modo or 3ds AFAIK. THere are many different ways to retopo. THe 2 most common ways are to build a mesh ontop of your base mesh with snapping. Or build a mesh that resembles your higher res mesh and snap it via a shrinkwrap modifier. If that sounds a lot like modelling, thats because it really kinda is. THere are a lot of workflow addons to make retopoing quicker, but, no matter the program, (well other than zbrush I guess) retopoing isn't something you can just quickly do without knowing how to model stuff. (and even for zbrush you need a decent understanding of how a mesh is supposed to look)
The closest thing to automatic retopo currently in blender would be decimate modifier > collapse + subdivision modifier to get quads. but its not something I would recommend for anything your looking to be rigged, the topology is heinous.
THere's also this, which I've fiddled with
J Cade: Yeah, I just picked up Instant Meshes and it looks very promising. I need to test it with a better starting mesh, what I made ended up all pointy and messed up.
(With the Dynamic script thing, it occurs to me I could make some simple clothing and dip my toe in, and have the ability to have it work without rigging)
Vertices are the building blocks in both mesh modelling and sculpting; both just adjust their position; sculpting generally uses far more - and can be many millions.
Sculpting is about the shape the artist is after, whereas with traditional modelling the shape is also the desired result, but the topology is also very important; this is why sculpted models are often retopologised - to get them with a reduced poly count and to create good flow; topology flow will, as an example, follow the lines of muscles to aide bending and morphing.
Can't help you on weight-mapping in Daz. In general, it is to assign how much influence an effect has. So the vertices move more or less depending on the weight painted - I presume that is the case in Daz too?
To really answer this, it would be good for you to give examples of what you want to make. Sculpting can be done on low poly, but it is different than working on high poly models that will be recaptured for use as low poly (retopo or other methods).
What I'm more interested in doing at the moment is adapting and morphing things items that I already have. Mostly clothing. However, the limitation is that I am not allowed to add or delete polygons or subdivide. I thought that might be a gentle way into getting used to the tools because the alternative is to learn modelling, sculpting, UV mapping, texturing and rigging all in one go. As you can see here, I'm finding it difficult to find anyone who can answer the question about weight mapping for G3 based figures.
If I understand your question correctly (got a bit lost when threads merged) you're looking at the difference between TriAx weighting (G1, G2, three maps per bone, one each for X, Y and Z) and General weighting (G3, one map only per bone). General weighting is used by some other programs, including Maya, but it necessitates some different methods. Twist is handled by a second bone for many on G3, because the twist needs to have a second, gentler map than the main and side-side bends, but that map is no longer a default part of every bone.
This also means that a lot of bends can't be fixed by tweaking the weight maps any more, because when you tweak to fix one axis you'll break it for another. As a result, we have to do a lot more Joint-Controlled Morphs or JCMs to fix the bends of clothing or character morphs than we did with G1 and G2.
Thank you SickleYield. So, going back to part of my question, are the tutorials for Genesis figures now outdated? If so, are there any which describe rigging G3 figures? I started a thread in the DS forum about the problem with panties and shorts and the subject of JCMs came up - again it is all way over my head, unfortunately. This was one comment:
So, again I'd say that I'm interested in adapting the clothes I have more to make them versatile - either by morphing or by adding bones or both. Most come with so few movement morphs that they are only good for standing poses. I'd like to get them to fold more realistically too, add wrinkles and such. But that seems to require high res sculpting which would break the mesh on re-import into DS.
Correct, for morphs, you would not add or delete or subdivide geometry. You can subdivide meshes and add details if you want to generate normal maps/displacment maps. If you use ZBrush, while you need to use the base resolution, you can see what it will look like with subdivision by using Dynamic Subdivision which doesn't physically add subdivision to the mesh.
I'm afraid that ZBrush is way out of my budget. I did have access to it before I retired so I still have the GOZ plugin but I had to return the PC with ZBrush when I retired. Nevertheless, Blender has sculpting tools too - maybe not as sophisticated but useable.
If I were to start being serious about creating content I might eBay a few of my gadgets and scrape together enough for 3D-Coat or a Mudbox subscription (although I really don't like subscription). But then, are they so much better than Blender? I read a little about retopology this morning and I finally understand why it is so important - being able to sculpt in Hi Res and then let the software create the mesh for you - wonderful. I does tempt me to start modelling.
There's a modifier in Blender called Shrinkwrap Modifier; it keeps the vertices touching a target model, so makes the retopology a little easier; I've not done retopology in ages, so no idea if its changed. It was only ever something I experimented with, so can't offer advice really either.
CG Cookie had a good free tutorial on it iirc.
I too am amazed that FirstBastion makes his incredible models in Hexagon. I persevered for ages with that program, having bought instructional videos and wanting to get my money's worth, but in the end just could not get to grips with it's interesting yet undocumented 'Random Crash' feature. After much experimentation with other programs, what little modelling I do is done with Metasequoia 3D, which isn't free but has just about everything. One of the things I like about it is that you can bring the help file up to one side and set it so that it automatically shows the entry for whatever tool you're using, which makes learning the program pretty quick. The guy who wrote it is Japanese (I think) and so there's the odd minor hiccup in his translation, but he updates the program often with new features.
The 'auto help' thingy wasn't what sold me on the program (although in it's way, it might have been, because I'd learned to get what I wanted from the program well within the trial period), but I agree with Will that time taken to learn a program is just as much an expense as any financial outlay. For a long time Photoshop was totally unintuitive to me and threatened to end with a nice lie down in a darkened padded cell, but then I set aside a couple of days to learn it properly. That time proved to be one of the best investments I've ever made, but I can't 'afford' to make the same investment in Blender for the foreseeable.
Hi Will, I don't know if you've seen this video, is someone using Blender and Meshes, might be helpful.
Also very good short video on sewing cloth in Blender, Warning nipple alert, demo using Make Human female.
Link removed
I loathe video tutorials with the heat of a quasar. :)
But it's cool, I'm having a good amount of luck using Carrara + Instant Meshes (and UV Mapper)