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For anyone else interested, the thirty day trial period resets with the release of a new version and so you can still try it even if your machine has evidence of a previous expired trial on board.
MD is awesome! you won't regret. (If daz would start take animation more seriously it can only become more fun)
or replace optitex with MD plugin system :c) in 2020 computers between 10 and 20cores would and realtime render be mainstream included with powerfull enough gpu's as they would promote al the VR stuff in every house in 2020.
for tutorials i can to advise the one from CGelves or Pluralsight (Creating-a-Detailed-Dress-in-Marvelous-Designer) or Lori Griffiths book on Amazon or her channel on youtube.
...nice work. Love teh ST-TOS uni
This is esactly what I like about MD. I used to work with theatrical costuming and thus I find it so much more intuitive than a traditional modelling programme.
@JamesJAB, I really like the placeholder textures on your Star Trek II style uniform. The belt looks kind of plasticky, but the cloth parts look better than in the movies.
I use an old version of MD to make my free clothes and I love it. Wish I could upgrade to MD 7 but too expensive at the moment.
Lori Griffiths has a website Fearless Makers that have a few free tutorials that might help.
I'll have some time this coming weekend so I'll be downloading the trial. I'm still worried about justifying the outlay but I've just had a rebate from my electricity supplier that covers almost half of the cost, so I'm slowly talking myself into it.
@JamesJAB, may I ask how much practice it took to be able to make those clothes? And how long it takes to create a scene with your figure posed and clothed?
My current way of working is to select a garment for my character, pose her (or him) and then use Blender to adjust the fit and attempt a drape by morphing with the sculpting tools. That works for fixing poke through and adjusting the cloth so that it rests on the limbs, etc., but it is not a natural drape. So I'm guessing that sending the pose to MD would probably take a similar time but with much better results.
The dress was made from the pattern that came in an old Star Trek book, then tweaked and adjusted. It was my first serious creation in MD.
The jumpsuit was completely from scratch with only photographic refferences as a guide.
Once you have a basic understanding of how things work in MD it's very intuitive. If you get stumped on how to do something, there are lots of tutorials on youtube.
In MD after you have loaded your DAZ person as the avatar and made your clothing item... Setup your scene in Studio, then move your morphed and posed person to world center and export as an obj file. In MD import your morphed and posed person (making sure to select as a morph and set a number of frames (depending on how extreme the pose is, you may need to create intermediete pose exports) Once you click ok to import, MD will simulate the cloth as the character morphs to the new pose/shape. after complete and you have made any adjustments needed, select your pattern pieces and choose export selected to save as a .obj.
Import your item into Studio, and it will load at the right size and position. Set materials and render.
Hwen you say "set materials" do you need to texture the garment in some other software or just use Shader Presets?
Sorry for my ignorance but I've never gone down the texturing path. So are you saying I could open the UV in something like Gimp and texture it with jpeg images?
OK - so you apply the tiles in MD itself? And these materials are exported back to DAZ Studio?
You can do that if you want. I do not, though. I just make the parts that I want to have different patterns different fabrics and then apply materials in DS directly. I am going to make a dress so I will write up and take screenshots of a bit of the process and post it here.
Excellent, I'll look forward to that. Thanks.
Set up your character in DS in the base pose, then export as obj (base resolution, no maps or materials for the mannequin look). Load this obj into MD as an avatar. Make sure the scale is set to cm for DS.
Select the Line (Avatar) tool in the 3D window toolbar.
Draw lines on one side of your avatar how you want the top part of your dress to be styled. Ctrl-click for curve points. Doesn't have to be perfect but make sure the patterns are closed.
Switch to the Flatten tool (just to the right of the Line tool) and click on each section of the pattern to flatten to the 2D window. It might hang for a bit especially the first flattening operation.
There's half your dress top. Edit the patterns using the 2D pattern tool to straighten lines, etc. For example I did a lot of selecting lines with Edit Pattern, right-clicking, and choosing delete all curve points to straighten them out. Also fiddled with the individual points a bit.
Sew together the appropriate segments.
Now, select the patterns with the Transform Patterns tool (2D window), right click, and choose Symmetric Pattern (with sewing) and mirror your pattern.
Sew the two sides together, and simulate. I changed the fabric color to gray to see better.
The chest is really pointy! So I adjust the points on the front pattern. Because we mirrored the pattern symmetrically, changes made on one side automatically reflect to the other.
Much better! Because we started out with the not so good looking pattern already draped on the model, when we make adjustments it is easy to see quickly exactly how they affect the pattern. Simulate every now and then while adjusting to check what is going on. In this case, the dart sides needed to be brought closer together (normal, they should not be at nearly 90 degree angle but this is what flatten pattern gets you at first).
Now we have a very serviceable start to a top and I will work on the skirt next.
Sounds like the Bone Doctor's Relax Pose feature would be a big help here.
I've had MD on my wishlist for years. I'd probably jump on the perpetual license now, if there was a discount for getting it when a new version is released. As it will cost the same in a couple of months, I'll wait until I've got a few other things paid off. But reading this thread sure makes it hard to wait!
I am going to do a simple circle skirt. To do this I need to know two things. First, how long do I want the skirt to be? From the 3D toolbar I select the Basic Tape Measure and measure down Victoria's leg from the base of the top.
So, I will go with 62 cm. The second measurement I need to know, is what is the circumference at the bottom of the top we just made? This will let me make a skirt that fits exactly to the top with no extra wrinkling. There is probably a better way to do this, but I take the Segment Sewing tool in the 2D window and hover over the seam lengths to tell me what they are, then add them together. I found that the measurement is 6.03 + 12.07 + 13.42 = 31.52 for one side. So both sides is 63.04 cm.
A circle with a circumference of 63.04 has a radius of 10.03. This is the waist radius. Adding the length of the skirt means the total skirt radius is 72.03. Select the Circle tool in the 2D window and click somewhere. Type in 72.03 (twice) for the radius.
Now there is a circle in the window. The waist has to be cut out from the center. Select the circle with the Transform Pattern tool (2D window), right click on the skirt circle and choose Offset As Internal Line. Offset by 62 cm (the length of the skirt).
The circle is the waist. Right click on it and choose Cut. Then delete the little cut out circle.
In the 3D window, rotate and move the skirt pattern so it is more or less centered under the top. Sticking a bit into the model is normal because this is a close fit.
In the 2D window, choose the Free Sewing tool and sew each top segment to its place on the skirt. I recommend starting at the front and working around. The Free Sewing tool should be used to sew the top to the bottom rather than vice versa, this will let you preview where on the skirt to stop the current seam and start the next segment.
Simulate and use the Select/Move tool (3D window) to drag the skirt out of her arms if it is stuck there.
Shape looks alright but very stretched out at the straps. This can be solved by using another fabric type. In the Object Browser (right of the screen) select Fabric, select the default fabric that is being used, and in the bottom of the screen select a different Physical Property (you can also make straps thicker by editing the pattern some more).
For this one I chose Wool. Notice that there is no longer very bad stretching all over, the fabric mostly holds its shape while still draping.
Next I will get into saving different fabrics so that DS will be able to use them as different materials.
To apply a different pattern to different parts of the model they will need to be two different fabrics. Select the skirt in the 2D window, right click and choose Assign To New Fabric. This will create a new fabric with default properties. Choose the new fabric and set its Physical Property to whatever the top is unless you want them to behave differently.
Rename the top fabric Top and the skirt fabric Skirt. This does not always transfer over to the OBJ model for whatever reason but usually works. Even if it comes out with a goofy name the materials will still be separate.
Now the dress has two different fabrics.
See all the jaggedness around the folds? This is caused by the Particle Distance. Particle Distance should be kept high when doing quick simulations and draping clothing as you model it so everything is speedy. But when doing the final pose and drape, it should be lowered so the fabric will look and behave much nicer, interacting in a smaller scale.
In the 2D window, select all the patterns, and on the right side, change Particle Distance somewhere in the 5-10 range (I am actually using 10). Hit simulate for a moment and watch how the fabric smooths out.
Go back into DS and load a pose for your character. I am going with a simple one so we do not need to do tween poses. For some complex poses you will want to make multiple tween poses and load them as morph targets sequentially. Export the posed character using the same settings as you exported the base avatar character. Then, go into MD and choose File>Import>OBJ and choose your posed character. Load it as a Morph Target and make sure that scale is still cm.
The avatar will move into the pose you have chosen. It will be pretty slow since we have a low particle distance. Wait until the pose is complete and all fabric draped nicely then exit the simulation.
Now export the garment. File>Export>OBJ and name it. I use these settings usually. Make sure again that cm is selected and make sure Avatars is not selected or you will get a double Vicky.
Next is importing and texturing in DS.
In DS, File>Import and choose the exported dress. Import at DS scale.
The dress comes in with different materials groups that correspond to the different fabrics set up earlier. Now I apply the Iray Uber Shader and then set the diffuse textures to different fabrics.
That doesn't look right at all! This is because for some reason MD is set up to use very, very different tiling sizes than DS. I expect this is a scale setting somewhere I have not found yet. But it is easy to fix in DS. Change the tiles to something very small, around the 0.01 scale.
Much better. And that's that. Notice on the top that the fabric patterns exactly follow the base fabric as they were cut. The front seam could have been minimized by rotating the patterns and lining them up close to each other for example, or even joining them at the center line, or we could have made the front out of a stretchy single piece of fabric. Also, if you apply a texture to the fabric within MD, it can be rotated and moved around for each individual pattern piece to align them better on the model.
These seams can be avoided by retopologizing, but I prefer so far to deal with MD patterns like they are actual fabric.
Puppeteer works exceptionally well for this.
@agent unawares
Thanks you so much for posting this mini-tutorial. I'm sure it will help anyone new to the product (as I hope to be shortly). I can hardly wait to get started on a project but am still dithering about the funds.
I have the Steam version of 6.5 and I got that at an introductory price...it was $250 US? Somewhere in that area ;). It will probably be somewhere close to that. Or at least I hope. I probably won't upgrade just yet...maybe next version :)
Laurie
"agent" - Just wanted to add _MY_ thanks for taking the time to show the process!
Good stuff there Agent. Thanks for the tips and info!
..that works really nice.
released today for 356 Euro
if someone grabs this please tell how it works
where did you get that price from ?
cannot be its at lower price in Dollar
I think the biggest difference is that the Steam version doesnt have "upgrade" option. MD 7, 8, 9 ... you have to pay full price. With perpetual license from MD, you only have to pay the upgrade fee.
Steam store. You have to have Steam client on your PC to use it.