The Marvelous Designer Thread

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  • lilweep said:

    empty said:

     At this point I can't say I want to learn game-ready topology refinement just yet (though in the future I definitely do), so I would settle for just getting a garment mesh and UV into substance painter that I could texture and get back in to Daz,

     

    You can pack UV's very easily in Marvelous Designer itself before going to Zbrush via the UV Editor page. This does not take very long and there are tutorials on it.  Alternatively you could do it in Blender etc. Im sure Googling yields many tutorials on this. As far as your considerations go, obviously the UV islands need to be big enough to paint on with sufficient detail (texel density), so you could also consider splitting the maps into different UDIM tiles if you need more space. That's really your only consideration when packing your UVs.   You claim to be quite proficient at Substance Painter, so if that's the case through experience you would be familiar with what UV arrangements are helpful and which aren't for painting on. 

    Substance Painter probably didnt open your mesh because you had UV islands crossing the UDIM boundaries.  Note: you can edit UVs after export... e.g., in Blender or whatever other program.

    As for retopologising and preparing low poly and high poly models, isnt there a way to do that very easily in Zbrush with the built-in tools?  Im not familiar with Zbrush, but the tools to retopo in Marvelous Designer itself are incredibly painful to use, so i never even bothered with that step.  I noticed many vendors on Daz just use quadrangulated un-retopologised mesh straight from Marvelous Designer, so that's also what i did.

    Many thanks, lilweep, for your help...truly. Yeah, I've got the UDIM arrangement pretty much covered, but I guess what I was trying to say in my very long winded way was that so much emphasis seems to be placed on the topology being correct and precise, and as there also seems to be quite long procedures for doing just that, I didn't want to miss out on learning it properly. I've also seen that many just keep the quadrangulated mesh and use that, so I might just stay on that path myself. Perhaps I am overthinking the whole thing entrirely. After going through a few more YouTube tuts I found that 'thickness', applied in zbrush, seems to have been the enemy of my mesh.

  • JoJoSJoJoS Posts: 50

    Hello everyone. Just found this forum and also just starting using MD, so yeah, I'm a complete noob ha. Anyhow I was looking for some help. I made a 'boyfriend t-shirt' for g.8 female and took it into Daz. Upon dforcing it, not only does the spring count take FOREVER but once it does eventually dforce the outfit either falls apart at the seems or bits seems to flake of the t-shirt when dforcing. Can anyone offer some information how to fix this? Pretty please? lmao

  • barbultbarbult Posts: 23,050

    JoJoS said:

    Hello everyone. Just found this forum and also just starting using MD, so yeah, I'm a complete noob ha. Anyhow I was looking for some help. I made a 'boyfriend t-shirt' for g.8 female and took it into Daz. Upon dforcing it, not only does the spring count take FOREVER but once it does eventually dforce the outfit either falls apart at the seems or bits seems to flake of the t-shirt when dforcing. Can anyone offer some information how to fix this? Pretty please? lmao

    Export as thin and welded. 

  • JoJoSJoJoS Posts: 50
    edited June 2021

    barbult said:

    JoJoS said:

    Hello everyone. Just found this forum and also just starting using MD, so yeah, I'm a complete noob ha. Anyhow I was looking for some help. I made a 'boyfriend t-shirt' for g.8 female and took it into Daz. Upon dforcing it, not only does the spring count take FOREVER but once it does eventually dforce the outfit either falls apart at the seems or bits seems to flake of the t-shirt when dforcing. Can anyone offer some information how to fix this? Pretty please? lmao

    Export as thin and welded. 

    Yeah, I already tried that, been trying to fix this issue for a while. I also tried remeshing it in zremesher because someone told me my mesh might be too high, is there anything else I can try?

    Post edited by JoJoS on
  • barbultbarbult Posts: 23,050

    JoJoS said:

    barbult said:

    JoJoS said:

    Hello everyone. Just found this forum and also just starting using MD, so yeah, I'm a complete noob ha. Anyhow I was looking for some help. I made a 'boyfriend t-shirt' for g.8 female and took it into Daz. Upon dforcing it, not only does the spring count take FOREVER but once it does eventually dforce the outfit either falls apart at the seems or bits seems to flake of the t-shirt when dforcing. Can anyone offer some information how to fix this? Pretty please? lmao

    Export as thin and welded. 

    Yeah, I already tried that, been trying to fix this issue for a while. I also tried remeshing it in zremesher because someone told me my mesh might be too high, is there anything else I can try?

    If you exported as welded, nothing should flake off. Double check your export settings in MD. What pieces of a t-shirt are flaking off? 
    If you have a lot of springs warnings, you may have mesh that is ridiculously dense.
    What mesh density are you using in MD? 10 works pretty well for me. Then I apply SubD 1 in Daz Studio.
    Did you quadrangulate? Daz Studio dForce likes quads better than triangles.

    Show some screenshots of what you see. It is nearly impossible to diagnose problems without a visual reference.

  • JoJoSJoJoS Posts: 50

    I just exported again and made sure it was welded, same thing happened, it seems to be the stitching area that were flaking, at least from what I could tell.

    Yeah someone else told me this which is what led me to trying to remesh it in Zremesher. I just opened up my MD project and the particle distance is on 5 or 10 for each piece of the t-shirt.

    I did not quadrangulate no, I didn't know I could. I just followed a tutorial as this is my first time in MD.

     

    Ok so I left the particle density as is, since it's already on 5/10 and you said that was about right. I quadrangulated it, and took it back into daz to dforce. Unfortunately the same thing happened with the springs and the stitching, see attached image :-)

    Screenshot 2021-06-10 133140.jpg
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  • barbultbarbult Posts: 23,050
    edited June 2021

    A picture is worth a thousand words, as they say. Those topstitches are your problem. I don't know of any way to use those MD 3D topstitches in Daz Studio with dForce in any reasonable way. They are modeled with extremely dense geometry for EVERY STITCH. (See attached screenshot) That is why you are getting a million spring warnings - the vertices of the geometry of those stitches are way too close for Daz Studio dForce. They are falling off, because they are separate geometry, not part of the garment.

    MD 3D Top Stitch vertex density.png
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    Post edited by barbult on
  • You could export both versions, then use a sutiable utility to bake normals from the stitched version for use on the plain version.

  • barbultbarbult Posts: 23,050

    Richard Haseltine said:

    You could export both versions, then use a sutiable utility to bake normals from the stitched version for use on the plain version.

    What are some suitable utilities? 

  • barbultbarbult Posts: 23,050
    edited June 2021

    I usually just bake the topstitch into the textures right inside MD, but that doesn't have the nice 3D effect. I am very interested in what Richard suggested, but I don't know how to do that.

    MD topstitch baked in.jpg
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    Post edited by barbult on
  • I'd use Substance Designer (I have an older version with a permanent license) but there are soem cheaper alternatives, maybe even a freebie (and I'd think Blender could do it - this comes up on a search ).

  • barbultbarbult Posts: 23,050

    Richard Haseltine said:

    I'd use Substance Designer (I have an older version with a permanent license) but there are soem cheaper alternatives, maybe even a freebie (and I'd think Blender could do it - this comes up on a search ).

    Thanks, Richard. I don't have Substance products. I'll watch the Blender video you linked. 

  • barbult said:

    Richard Haseltine said:

    I'd use Substance Designer (I have an older version with a permanent license) but there are soem cheaper alternatives, maybe even a freebie (and I'd think Blender could do it - this comes up on a search ).

    Thanks, Richard. I don't have Substance products. I'll watch the Blender video you linked. 

    I think ZBrush can do it too, and pretty sure Modo can. It's a fairly ubiquitous feature, since a lot of game developers use it to go from high-detail sculpts down to something that a game engine will handle.

  • barbultbarbult Posts: 23,050
    edited June 2021

    Richard Haseltine said:

    barbult said:

    Richard Haseltine said:

    I'd use Substance Designer (I have an older version with a permanent license) but there are soem cheaper alternatives, maybe even a freebie (and I'd think Blender could do it - this comes up on a search ).

    Thanks, Richard. I don't have Substance products. I'll watch the Blender video you linked. 

    I think ZBrush can do it too, and pretty sure Modo can. It's a fairly ubiquitous feature, since a lot of game developers use it to go from high-detail sculpts down to something that a game engine will handle.

    My first attempt with Blender was not successful, but I am going to try again. I got a normal map, but it didn't have any of the stitching on it and it had strange triangles on seemingly random locations. I'm confused by the DS display of the UV map of the garment with the 3D mesh stitches on it. The UV map by node is a big mess of overlapping lines. The UV by material has a UV for a single stitch for the topstitch surface.

    Should I be exporting from DS without surfaces?

    Screenshot 2021-06-11 141139 UV.png
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    Post edited by barbult on
  • barbultbarbult Posts: 23,050

    If I export from MD with Unified UV Coordinates, I get a nice UV, but it has no 3D mesh topstitching on it.

    If I export from MD without Unified UV Coordinates, I get the 3D mesh topstitching, but a strange looking UV (attached above).

    I don't know what to do.

  • The UVs for the stitched version shouldn't matter, it's the UVs for the non-stitched version that are getting baked to. Sorry, although I have done some baking to normals it was a while back and not, as I recall, with MD output.

  • barbultbarbult Posts: 23,050

    Richard Haseltine said:

    The UVs for the stitched version shouldn't matter, it's the UVs for the non-stitched version that are getting baked to. Sorry, although I have done some baking to normals it was a while back and not, as I recall, with MD output.

    Thanks for the response. Your help is always very much appreciated I don't see a clear path forward yet, but I will continue to experiment. 

  • barbultbarbult Posts: 23,050
    edited June 2021

    I found another video about baking normals in Blender. This one talks about a detailed object and a simple object. The other video created a normal map from the detailed object and said to be sure it was UV mapped. There was no separate simple object in that workflow. I'll try this new one and see what happens. 

    And here's another video that goes a lot slower with more discussion.

    Post edited by barbult on
  • Ah, bad pick of video on my part then - baking to another, simpler mesh was what was intended.

  • barbultbarbult Posts: 23,050
    edited June 2021

    Richard Haseltine said:

    Ah, bad pick of video on my part then - baking to another, simpler mesh was what was intended.

    Your later post about "detailed to simple" gave me the clue I needed to figure out why it didn't work. The Blender Guru video  was what I needed in the end. It worked! Here is the normal map applied to my simple mesh in Daz Studio. '

    Now, I need to know how to combine normal maps so I can layer this topstitching normal on top of the fabric texture normal generated by MD. Any ideas to point me down the right path?

    Blender baked topstitch normals 2.jpg
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    Post edited by barbult on
  • I could do it in 3delight, with Shader Mixer, and Substance Designer can do it (I think). You could, of course, try making a bump map and use that alongside the existing normals, but bumps tend not to work quite as well (though they are essentially doing the same thing).

  • lilweeplilweep Posts: 2,218

    there seems to be lots of videos for combining normal maps in blender and photoshop on youtube.

    admittedly i havent read all the posts above, but my thoughts are it might be simpler to just paint the topstitches in substance painter/blender rather than create a workflow that converts the MD topstitch.

     

  • barbultbarbult Posts: 23,050

    lilweep said:

    there seems to be lots of videos for combining normal maps in blender and photoshop on youtube.

    admittedly i havent read all the posts above, but my thoughts are it might be simpler to just paint the topstitches in substance painter/blender rather than create a workflow that converts the MD topstitch.

    I found some strong dissenting opinions on the "right way" to combine two normal maps. I teied one method, which seemed to work fairly well. 

  • JoJoSJoJoS Posts: 50

    I made this t-shirt in MD and it dforces fine, I then added some details (seam lines/stitches) and retopologized in zbrush and now it just explodes in dforce, can someone help me with this? :-)

    Screenshot 2021-08-21 193932.jpg
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  • barbultbarbult Posts: 23,050

    JoJoS said:

    I made this t-shirt in MD and it dforces fine, I then added some details (seam lines/stitches) and retopologized in zbrush and now it just explodes in dforce, can someone help me with this? :-)

    Are your added stitches and seamlines geometry (mesh) or just added with normal maps? If mesh, the polygons are probably way too small, would be my guess. Show us some closeups of your mesh topology. It is hard to tell anything about how dForce would perform from the attached image.

  • GordigGordig Posts: 9,036

    barbult said:

    JoJoS said:

    I made this t-shirt in MD and it dforces fine, I then added some details (seam lines/stitches) and retopologized in zbrush and now it just explodes in dforce, can someone help me with this? :-)

    Are your added stitches and seamlines geometry (mesh) or just added with normal maps? If mesh, the polygons are probably way too small, would be my guess. Show us some closeups of your mesh topology. It is hard to tell anything about how dForce would perform from the attached image.

    More importantly, geometric stitches add collision with other parts of the mesh.

  • barbultbarbult Posts: 23,050

    Gordig said:

    barbult said:

    JoJoS said:

    I made this t-shirt in MD and it dforces fine, I then added some details (seam lines/stitches) and retopologized in zbrush and now it just explodes in dforce, can someone help me with this? :-)

    Are your added stitches and seamlines geometry (mesh) or just added with normal maps? If mesh, the polygons are probably way too small, would be my guess. Show us some closeups of your mesh topology. It is hard to tell anything about how dForce would perform from the attached image.

    More importantly, geometric stitches add collision with other parts of the mesh.

    Very true, when they are separate geometry objects, like MD makes them. I don't know what ZBrush does. I thought maybe the existing mesh was modified to add extra polygons in that area.

  • Heads up. Marvelous Designer is having a Black Friday sale on personal licenses until the end of December.

  • NathNath Posts: 2,713

    I much prefer to hang on to my current perpetual license for as long as they'll let me.

  • barbultbarbult Posts: 23,050
    edited January 2022

    This is a simple dress and apron I made in MD 11. I used the Thickener plugin after posing and dForce was done.

    Making Strawberry Jelly

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    Post edited by barbult on
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