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I had a free trial version of MD 6 sitting on my computer for quite a while which was (pun intended) "marvelous."
I thought I'd pay for a one month subscription for MD 7 and I've been having problems. It turns out that you need an NVIDEA graphics card and the Radeon I have isn't good enough. I assume that's the problem at least because anything I try to do in the 2D window is painfully slow.
It would have been nice if they'd made the system requirements more obvious although I must concede that it's probably my own responsibility hunt down such info before paying money for something.
HOWEVER - now I can't even get access to the program. "License start, end date is invalid" says the little message in the window, this despite the fact that I paid for a month and only about five days at the most have elapsed.
Someone else on the MD forum is having the same problem and they've paid for the yearly subscription.
So far MD haven't answered my entreaties for help and three days have gone by. Maybe they're busy.
So far, I'm happy to recommend MD 6. Maybe I'll recommend MD 7 in the future too. Not today though.
Okay - it's still a bit slow in the 2D window at times. I don't quite get that seeing as the GPU I have is 8 gig and the one they recommend is only 2 BUT they've solved the access problem, the features are great and I really do recommend MD7.
I've been using Marvelous Designer for several years now. Yes, it is pricey and there is a bit of a learning curve.
Personally, I haven't created DAZ clothes for sale but several of my clients (who bought my MD courses) use it all the time to create clothes for DAZ marketplace.
For my own projects, when I need to render a DAZ avatar, I simply export the DAZ avatar to MD, make the clothes in Marvelous Designer (it's pretty quick once you know how to create clothing) on the DAZ avatar, then import the desired poses into MD, drape the clothes in all the poses I want the avatar in, and then export the Marvelous clothes and DAZ avatar and render them elsewhere.
I find Marvelous Designer is great for creating clothes. I guess it's different when one creates clothes for sale (for my projects I don't have to rig the clothes do topology etc.).
Example Marvelous Designer dress created on Girl 6:
Well it gets better with every release. Now you can add topstiches and also just decostiches inside MD directly, without having to tweak them in Photoshop, just to find you the still don't fit when you rig the cloth in DAZ.
I think it will get easier to create cloth. As Camille said, it has a bit of a learning curve, but it's fun to learn (especially with her lessons, and no I am not paied to advertise, they are just great and cover a lot).
With Dforce, i think, a great addition to MD was made. I create and drape all cloth in MD. Then i import and rig them in DAZ. Then i create the morphs in MD and import them as well. Sometimes, there have been big problems and hours of work to paint the weightmaps, just to see that a skirt still has very ugly stretchings in your texture. And you can't create a morph for every pose. So i think, now you can just dforce the cloth after posing to correct those. Haven't tried yet, but shoudl work. As dforce and MD are quite similar in simulation, all cloth that works in MD without exploding, should work in dforce with no or minor tweaking as well.
So i have some things still in the pipeline and work on several things simultanously. And i think you can add another level of realism with the new version combined with dfoce inside DAZ.
Camille,
This is an amazing frock. Have you considered releasing it commercially?
Cheers,
Alex.
that is awesome work
So where would one find your MD courses @camille?
It's in her signature, but here you go:
Learn how to create any clothing you want using Marvelous Designer.
MD is amazing! I posted this uniform I made in MD in the Michael and Friends thread. I will post it here too :>
Thanks, @L'Adair, I often read the forum without logging. I never noticed that signatures don't show up unless you are logged in. And I confess I didn't look when I did log in.
@mal3Imagery certainly seems to pretty good at using MD.
The dress is awesome & so is that uniform. i have the dynamic British Uniforms & British soldier for Genesis in my wishlist today. They look like they may of been made in Marvelous Designer.
Don't know if it was mentioned, but there's a Steam version of MD available for somewhat less than buying direct.
It's a fabulous program and, for me at least, simple and intuitive. Perhaps that's because I was trying to implement a similar concept in Poser several years ago using plane primitives and the mesh editor. Lay a figure down, drape a plane over them, trim the excess, flip them over, repeat, then try to find a way to stich the two planes together.
Did not even think about using cones, torii, or spheres to do the same thing lol
I did make a poncho with the round plane though lol.
But MD and dForce practically eliminate the need for rigging clothes.
I wouldn't say so. dForce (and also MD) still take a lot of time to tweak and compute. So the best results would be a mixture: Rigging for very fast posing or animating, and dforce for the finishing details. It would take way too long if you would only use dforce for every pose you hit. especially in the beginning when you somtimes drastically change poses and scenes.
MD is absolutely great I did test a demo version some time ago and it was amazing. Best simulation I ever saw.
That said, for those of you on a low budget and that already use Blender as a support tool for DS, there's a plugin that may be interesting. I believe it's at its first stage and has time to grow up better. But for simple outfits it does good and the draping is from the blender engine so it's not bad at all.
https://blendermarket.com/products/cloth-weaver
I am curious ..does MD have any option to thicken cloth??
That military uniform is certainly a nice design however the obvious
lack of thickness in the upright collar and offset lapels
is completely Destroying any chance of a realistic depiction of cloth.
This is Also why I am not at impressed with any of the "Dforce" cloth
I see Simulated in DS4.10
Daz Studio already has a non destructive cloth modifier
in the form of the "push modifier" but it adds no edge thickness.
Hexagon has a nurbs thickness type option however it is not
Nondrestructive in that it adds new geometry changing point/vertex count
Not an issue for stills so much, but for animation involving cloth simulation
it presents an obvious problem.
In C4D or Blender I can apply thickness to my animated cloth sims exported from Daz studio
via MDD, without buggering up the vertex count which would
kill to MDD data.
Stiil early days but the Artful Physics Tailor over at patreon can do realistic cloth thickness. It remains to be seen though whether he will add all the tailor tools needed to make anything as sophiticated as the British soldier uniform mal3imagery made. Have to texture & rig though in DAZ & other 3rd party programs. The bridge between Artful Physics Tailor seems nearly instant and is easy to use.
Beautiful work!
Yes.
As you note just a mere moment later, DS has MDD export which allows dForce animations to be used exactly the way you are using Optitex animations.
Then you'll be delighted to hear that since your last stop in the thread MD also still has MDD export, it hasn't been mysteriously removed.
@wolf359 Yes, you can add thickness to cloth in MD (you can even make real thick rubbery fabric/carpets).
To add thickness to MD clothes, click on the patterns you want to add thickness to. Then in the Property Editor raise the "additional thickness rendering" and "additional thickness simulation".
Thickness simulation will only effect simulation (so if one layer has a lot of thickness it will push the upper layer away from it) but not have a visible thickness (layers will still appear to be thin).
Thickness rendering will make the clotehs look thick but unless you also set thickness in simulation it won't have an effect in simulation (and sometimes clothing layers will appear to go through each other).
So best to change both numbers to the same (or similar) value.
To control the color/texture which appears on the thick side of the fabric, you'll need to change the fabric's "side" options in the property editor.
Thank you, Alex! :)
I did consider making DAZ clothes some years ago but I'm just not techy with rigging, topology etc.
So I decided to just make tutorials and posed clothes for my own just-for-fun projects.
The solution here is to move to frame 60 and then find the pose you want, set a keyframe on it, then tweak across 30 more frames to finalize it, then start the sim at frame 0.
When I Export an optitex Cloth Sim I send the cloth out in a separate export
After baking the sim to morphs with optitex.
The cloth must be separate so My Cloth thicken modifier can be applied to it alone
without thickening the underlying Character in C4D.
I assume you have to hide the figure in DS
to export a Dforce cloth sim to obj/MDD During the simulation
as Dforce does not Bake to morphs after the fact
so not exactly my same workflow but should work for those rendering outside DS .
Are you saying that the MDD exporter in DS only works right if every frame is baked to an individual morph first? Because holy crap that sounds fun awful and I do not envy you.
Actually you have to delete the figure from DS before exporting. DS doesn't give you the option of exporting the selected object, it exports everything. I keep hoping they'll fix that.
But once you have the sim, the clothing will do its thing without the figure, as long as you don't hit Simulate again.
mCasual has a script (TeleBlender) that will export every frame of an animation as an OBJ. I use it to export the terrains I make with dForce so I can have a wider range to choose from and don't have to export them manually one frame at a time. It appears to work for dForced cloth as well.
No.... You misunderstand the animate2 MDD exporter will bake the entire
scene MDD During export just like Alembic.
Clearly you do not animate.. because Baking or caching
cloth sim key frame morph Data is major workflow enhancment
for us animators
We can live scroll/playback a baked to morph cloth sim and look for problems
before rendering or export
without your machine having to recalulate the simulation if no issue are found
Also you can scroll through a baked to morph sim in realtime and pick a single frame to export as single movment/ wrinkle morph target for conforming content development.
nothing "Awful" about that trust me .
All professional Physics simulators have a baking or caching feature
for Cloth some even for rigid body collisions, ragdoll even Dynamic hair & particle physics.
Dont take one mans word for it however
Google "Maya, Max, Houdini C4D, importance of caching "
and educate yourself about this important ability in
moving animation data between applications.
Oh. And here I was thinking you were talking about something that didn't exist with dForce. I have exciting news again. You can still do animation with dForce! Including looking along the timeline for specific frames! And exporting objects from those frames! I legitimately don't understand why you think Optitex can do this but not dForce.
@Szark Thank you! :)
@KevinH and @L'Adair - I also have some free MD feature tutorials on my website/youtube and a free Marvelous Designer dress workshop here:
https://cgelves.com/free-marvelous-designer-renaissance-dress-video-tutorial-workshop/
In this workshop I teach how to create the above renaissance dress from start to finish.
If you use MD you can download the Marvelous Designer garment for free here:
https://cgelves.com/free-marvelous-designer-dress-garment-file-patterns/
You can learn from it or even create your own DAZ clothes from it since I allow commercial usage of it. :)
That's good to know. I don't have MD yet. But I did take advantage of your offer and bought the tutorials. Though I suspect they won't make much sense until I have MD to play with. It will be a couple of months at least, before I get the perpetual license. I'll probably do the free trial first, too. I'm really quite excited about MD, as sewing is something I've done most of my life. Using a pattern to create clothing just makes more sense to me. Traditional modeling, not so much. Or at all!
Thanks again for your generosity.
Not the same as Live scrolling through a baked simulation
https://direct.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/207296/dforce-vs-vwd/p1
That thread you linked to doesn't actually offer any evidence of this, it's just you repeating this same statement without support, while showing an animation that you can create with dForce as an example of something dForce can't create.
So how, exactly, is "being able to scrub through the timeline in real time and export individual frames from an Optitex simulation" different from "being able to scrub through the timeline in real time and export individual frames from a dForce simulation"? Both methods offer access to individual frames as morphs. Both methods offer real-time playback. And both methods are going to result in a a morph for every frame when you bake to MDD, unless (and this is a big unless) Animate is too stupid to recognize dForced objects and winds up just exporting a single frame or something.
Unless Optitex is simulating from the start, then it has to calculate the simulation, same as dForce. When you're scrubbing through the timeline, you're viewing the animated simulation. You can remove the figure the clothing is attached to and the clothing item will not crumple to the floor. If this happens with Optitex, then I'd say they were different. Otherwise, simply moving the playback head along the timeline (i.e. scrubbing) is identical between the two. If Optitex can't recalculate a single frame, it's doing exactly what dForce does.
If you jump to frame 122 and reposition the arm of a figure wearing a draped cloak and Optitex recalculates on the fly and it's not being corrected as part of the item's normal following morph, then you could say it's doing something dForce isn't. However, dropping a deformer or tweaking a morph during the timeline to control some small bit of pokethrough or to detach the front collar of the cloak from the figure's left breast because one vertex decided it wanted to pass through and stick into it even though it was floating above it at the start of the sim will become a part of the animation, and not the actual simulation. Moving that one vertex and recalculating the simulation in dForce will change the simulation, since it's no longer being pinned at that point.
If Optitex recalculates that when the correction is made, and the rest of the cloak drapes from that point as if it had never been pinned, then you can say it does something dForce can't.
However, that's assuming we're talking about the actual MDD in something besides DS and not the original DS file you exported as MDD. If the MDD format does allow such on-the-fly tweaking and recalculates in the new app, then it definitely does something dForce might not be able to do, assuming a dForce animation exported as MDD into another app somehow doesn't conform to the MDD spec.
@L'Adair: Marvelous Designer is so incredibly intuitive in pattern making that you'll probably hate yourself for not getting it sooner. I could not believe that anyone had made such a traditionally complex 3D process so simplistic. If you can draw 2D patterns with a point-by-point series of mouse clicks, very much akin to selecting areas of an image with a point-to-point selection tool in an image editor, then you can make clothing patterns in MD. Stitching is a bit tricky sometimes because the stitch lines want to flip, and with the rotation of the back vs the front and how the stitching has to criss-cross, but once you nail down those simple quirks (or get into the proper techniques of not having to cross stitches, which clearly I haven't) then you'll be rolling.
With the ability to control weft and waft and material density, and the host of new features they've added since I've been using it (started with MD5), it's just an absolute joy to behold. I've never used a program that was so easy to use right out of the box. I downloaded the 15 day trial and bought it on the 2nd day, it's just that awesome. The tutorial videos on the website are also very short and simple but because the program is so easy to use, they don't have to be complex or very long.