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I think the answer to this may very well be "It depends". If the morph that you are creating is a draped shape then MD is probably the way to go, if it is more of a geometric deformation (eg. just making a skirt wider but not adding any sort of drape) then a vertex modeller would probably handle this best.
Thank you all for your kind and positive words. I am encouraged to continue. This is my latest project. The learning challenges here were zippers, indented lines, and the princess style seaming. I drafted this pattern from scratch for G8F. It is draped in Marvelous Designer. The zipper texture comes with Marvelous Designer. I created 3 versions of the dress: zipper closed, zipper partially open, and zipper partially open with "lapels" folded back (as I learned how to do from the DarkEdgeDesign tutorial).
Great design and texture choices - you should look at selling these!
Barbult your creations are a testament to your desire to learn, get in there and get your hands dirty...you have come a very long ways in a short amount of time! Look out PA's!
Well, I think it is just Marvelous the way you have progressed so quickly. I agree that your willingness to dive in has served you well.
One further question, if you don't mind: I notice that sometimes you drape in MD and other times you let dForce simulate the imported garment. Could you say whether you need to play with the dForce surface parameters much or do you just apply a dForce surface modifier and let it drape?
I see what you did there, marble. :)
But seriously, barbult is inspiring me to actually try MD instead of one of the other alternative Blender plugins for cloth sim.
I depends on the style and fit of the MD garment. dForce results are usually acceptable without much adjustment. Sometimes I set dynamic strength to 0 on a waistband to keep it from sliding down. Sometimes I set the cloth to be stiffer or silkier, depending on how drapy I want it. Sometimes I set it to shrink more, if it gets too baggy when I simulate. Sometimes I even create a dForce weight map to modify areas that aren't separate surfaces. dForce results are usually acceptable without much adjustment.
I found a few issues, though. dForce doesn't work well with MD triangulated geometry. dForce works well with MD quadrangulated geometry. I have mixed experience with MD remeshed (beta) geometry. Sometimes it works, and sometimes the garment completely disappears when dForce starts.
These are the pants with the pockets moved to the hips (across the side seams). I finally got around to rendering them. These were draped in MD with an MDD animation. I set "pressure" to 2 on the pleated pockets to make them fluff out a little, like they had something inside.
"Well, I think it is just Marvelous the way you have progressed so quickly".
Thas pretty funny!
Wow! amazing work @barbult ... these are fantastic, can't wait to see your new store at Daz :)
added: aare you using the trial version of MD 9 ? I want to try it and did buy the tutorials but not sure if my machine will run it
Yes, @Kharma, I'm using the MD 9 free trial. Give it a try.
I'm trying to discover whether MD9 is enough of an improvement over MD8 to justify the $120 upgrade price. If not I'll probably wait until next year when the discount is slightly lower but the new features might be more tempting.
Another thing I've tried but failed to get working satisfactorily is to send dForce germents (or even conforming garments) to MD and attempt to drape them there. My efforts have been abysmal so far.
I upgraded but prolly didn't need to. The only reason for upgrading was to try the retopo tool...which I haven't tried yet. Yes, there is a new symmetry but you could actually do the same thing in the older version. I guess I updated thinking newer is prolly more stable.
Thanks, good to know.
Actually, you would probably be a prime candidate to answer the second part of my post - do you have any experience of sending clothers the other way (i.e. DAZ Studio to MD)?
I can only attest to what I've done using my own products, so I'm not sure what would happen with other clothing products (welded, unwelded, etc). I transferred my Pilot Harness from Daz to MD (female Daz version to male MD avatar) to create a morph...worked great. I show and explain what I did in the new tutorial.
Another good reason to buy it. I do have it wishlisted (sorry but I have to spin-out my spending carefully).
The new GPU acceleration would probably help with simulating Daz clothing in MD (or just any OBJ clothing exported inton MD). I say that because previously, whenever i tried to sim Daz clothing, even at base resolution, it was so slow and painful using just the CPU. Granted, i didn't have a good CPU.
Note that if a piece of clothing isnt welded, just like in D force, it will fall apart when simmed in MD.
In terms of simulating OBJs in MD, i noted that the PA 'Polygonal Miniatures' has a huge library of these low poly photogrammetry scans of complex clothing, and i was always curious how they would perform in MD (and even Dforce for that matter). I feel like any hard surface trims, such as buttons, would completely collapse and look weird.
I bought the new tutorial, but I haven't started it yet.
A question for the experts, which would really push me over the edge into buy-it:
I think I'm done with dForce. I know that the reason this sim fails is because of intersections, but Daz doesn't have soft body physics, so things, especially limbs, are just going to intersect sometimes.
Does anyone think that I could export the non-simulated stuff from Daz to MD via Alembic, along with an OBJ for the stuff to be simulated, simulate the cloth animation in MD, and then export everything to Blender via Alembic?
I am actually tempted to leave this monstrosity in, and work it into the storyline :)
I know that you can export to MD using MDD (if you have Animate2) so I would guess that Alembic is possible too.
Yeah all of my stuff is welded that's why I can go back and forth from Daz to MD
Thanks for responding, guys.
But is MD any better at dealing with intersections than dForce?
It seems like it. If pieces are poorly placed before simulatiuon, it can create an explosion-like mess, but MD seems to recover from it. It helps that you can grab and drag the fabric into a better position during simulation. In my short experience with it, I've never had an unrecoverable explosion, like with dForce.
If you have an intersection (like in your image of the figure's elbow resting on their leg) which leaves no space in-between the limbs for the material to flow through, it can look weird but won't ruin your simulation. I attached an example of an MD simulation i did like this. The figure's forearm is intersecting with the thigh, and the cloth looks weird in that section, but MD was happy to allow the limbs to go through the clothing. Then it's just a matter of resimulating and negotiating the fabric to do what you want.
As Barbult said, in MD you can pull the cloth during your sim to reposition weird looking pieces of cloth. You can also pin cloth using the 'W' key and move it to where you want it to be either before or during sim (the same way you can use the Dforce Magnets).
In terms of the workflow with Alembic, I have successfully exported into MD from Daz using the same workflow you described. In terms of exporting to Blender, Im not 100% sure of how this works so dont quote me on that, but I see that MD has two alembic export options so Im assuming it would work.
In general for both dForce and MD, you should allow a little space for the cloth to exist. So for the sitting figure above, allow a small gap between the elbow and the leg and also between her rear and the seat. Otherwise the cloth has nowhere to go and you risk at best odd looking cloth and at worst a complete explosion of the mesh. I think dForce is more likelly to explode and MD is more forgiving, but the best approach is to avoid having the issue at all. After all, in real life there would be no actual intersection.
Yes it would be best just to avoid this problem altogether by not having an intersection.
Also with simulating from one pose to another pose, you can probably be strategic in how you do your pose transition animation (by using intermediate poses) to get the draping you want. Like, using the above example of the woman on the chair, maybe the figure puts her elbow down first and rotates her forearm down into place, so you get more of the depression from her forearm, rather than sliding her forearm across her thigh and causing a problem with the simulation.
I've been playing with MD Thickness and Topstitching. This was draped in MD and exported as a posed (huge) OBJ file back to Daz Studio. Each stitch of the topstitching is a 3D shape, so it makes the OBJ huge. Daz Studio seems to import it and render it OK, though. I suspect it wouldn't work well as clothing to pose or dForce in Daz Studio, though.
I think it does add a certain element of realism to it, so if you can afford the memory it could be worth it.
But the same thing can be achieved in texturing. I wonder if there is an easy way to convert and apply the topstitch to texture maps instead.
Should be possible, by exporting the undraped mesh at high (with top-sttich) and low resolution and using one of the tools to bake to normals or to displacement.
Richard, what tools would I need in order to bake to normals?