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Yes, Enchanted April really helped out.. I posted some additional notes here.
Steam! That is a clever idea. I have some ugly angled seams on my mittens. Real mittens (and socks) are knit in a tubular fashion, without seams. I couldn't figure out how to do that in MD. Steam might have let me at least do a straight seam, but I'm not going to start over again. All the rigging and weight mapping stuff in Daz Studio is too much to repeat a third time. I hope I remember that tip in the future.
Who is Esher? Do you mean Esha? She is a super expert. There must be some misunderstanding of question/answer at play there. Any shader with a pattern will need a UV. Maybe you could get by without a UV for a simple color, though. I am NOT an expert!
Yeah, sorry, Esha, I'm dysliexic. If I worry too much about spelling I'll never get anything down. You obviously knew who I meant though. Well I could be quoting out of context. But as Richard said. You can have a shader that doesn't need a UV. It's all a bit about definition and, frankly I can't be too bothered with it. It isn't as important as the communcation. Of course, to have effective communication you have to have good definition but people make the definition. The OED doesn't define English it's the pople that defines it and the OED just records it. I'm not sure what the US version of the OED is. Anway. I don't really care as long as we're on the same page when it comes to the problem at hand. MD uses maps and is really good at making them. So we don't have to think about them in general unelss something goes wrong or one is pointing in the wrong direction. :) Like, for me, the Unified UV's wasn't selected in the new MD9 and I hadn't got a clue why the material I was using wasn't working as expected.
:) Yeah, I was determined to solve that ugly converging lines on the back probrlem. Sometimes I'm like a dog with a bone. The Steam can be annoying. I found if you make a mistake, remove it and start again. Try to get the setting right and do it one pass or sett it so you do a lot, inbetween doesn't really work, as it builds up like the Paint brush settings of opacity and flow in Photoshop. It's very sensitive so 10% is usually good enough.
Thanks, I quickly scanned. I need to feel it's relevant to me at the time otherwise it's all just blahdi blah. :) no offence to anyone, it's just the way my broken brain work. :) I'll keep the bookmarekd and come back. The importing is going really well now I've ironed out a couple of the little problems though. I've had to start from scratch though with the clothing in MD9. It's exporting differently and Daz is telling me the mesh doesn't match. It gave me a chance to fix those niggles I'd ignored though. :) Nothing is ever perfect, just good enough will do most of the time. :)
I didn't know the Fabric names had to be all one word. I tend to just use one word for simplicity but I didn't know you had to. I wonder if that way I had some odd results? Obviously yes. I'm rendering now so can't check. Thanks.
I know, people tell you it's been asked before but if you don't search the right thing you'll not get the right result. :) There's lots of non-English speakers too so it must be a total nightmare for them.
MD uploaded these new tutorials:
Hiya! Fellow MD user popping in to say, uh, hello :D
Im confused about somethin.
Is there a way to maintain topology after changing particle distance. Use case:
Obviously for morph loader we need same topology/geometry, so is there any problems with this workflow?
Changing the particle distance from 5 to 20 to 5 isnt going to change topology right?
I don't know. Have you tried it? I haven't, but it would be good to know.
Cool !Follow!
Anyone know how to get ribbons to bind tightly? If i use elastic properties it goes haywire.
See attached for example of what i mean by ribbon.
You could try changing the offset (I've heard about that, but haven't tried it and don't know where it is in the interface). I think that controls how close the cloth can get to the avatar.
Oh i just changed the Shrinkage Weft and i guess it started doing more of what i wanted it to do. I guess that was the obvious thing to try.
By the way, offset is under the 'arrangement' properties of your pattern piece. I believe you have to have the material assigned to an arrangement point before you get options under there, otherwise it just says "not assigned".
That looks perfect! Thanks for the tips about the weft shrinkage anf the offset info.
@lilweep I'll offer an unsolicited suggestion: Turn your sleeves pattern pieces in the 2D window so that they are vertical (sleeve cap at top, wrist at bottom) so that the UV is created the way a seamstress would actually cut fabric. Right now they are on the diagonal, which would make striped fabric run diagonally on the sleeve instead of across or up/down. (Unless, of course, you positioned them intentionally to get that bias-look effect!)
So, I'm trying out my first actual project, and I've hit something I don't understand.
In Blender, my character has a chestplate that extends down to her lower abdomen, from which I hang a skirt to be simulated. I have a script that creates all the empties and pins so that I can basically attach the edge loop at the top of the skirt to the edge loop at the bottom of the chestplate. That works beautifully, but cloth sim in Blender ca still be a bit finnicky. I wanted to try it in MD, where it seems like everything just magically works :)
I imported the chracter avatar and animation as Alembic, the skirt as an obj to garment. I selected all the vertices in the top skirt and made pins on them. So far so good. But when I attach all those pins to the avatar, they are not created at the precise points where I created them but rather seem carelessly place at random points around the precise location. I don't understand why MD would do this, especially when each point in the skirt where I created a pin actually coincides with a point in the chestplate (I made the skirt by extruding existing points).
Can anyone provide insight on how to pin more precisely?
And is there a way to select all the points in an edge loop, as in Blender? I had to manually create 200 pins because I couldn't figure out how to tell MD to select all the points around the top of the skirt. That can't be how to do it...
Thanks guys.
Is the chestplate part of the avatar or a separate OBJ that you imported as a separate garment?
Thanks, barbult. The chestplate is part of the avatar. The only garment is the skirt.
I don't know how to pin accurately to an avatar. So I'll try to dream up an alternate scenario.Hoepfully someone else will come along with a better idea.
I would load the avatar without the chest plate and import (Add) the chest plate OBJ as a separate garment, using the checkbox to trace the UV to 2D pattern pieces. Then import (Add) your skirt as another garment again checking the box to trace to 2D pattern pieces. Freeze the mesh of the chest plate, because you don't want to simulate it. Then SEW the top of your skirt to the bottom of the chest plate. Simulate the skirt. Select the skirt pieces in the 2D window and Export OBJ (Selected.)
I tried to mock this up, using a skirt OBJ I happened to have lying around, to represent your chest plate. It is the light blue frozen mesh in the image. Then I drew two brown rectangles in the 2D window, to represent your skirt. I sewed the rectangles to the front and back pieces of the frozen skirt. Then I simulated. Only the brown rectangles moved, because the rest was frozen.
The MD tracing of UVs to 2D pattern pieces is pretty problematic in my usage. You have to have OBJs with UV that are just right, whatever that might be. I've had MD crash more than once trying to do this. I've actually had the best luck with OBJs exported from Blender, so that might be a plus for you. I probably am not selecting the right options in Daz export to import well into MD.
Wow, you've given me some specific things to learn how to do... thanks for the guidance. It seems like your analogous test is pretty much exactly what I want to do. I think the "trick" you've shown me is to not think in Blender terms like "edge loop" but rather in MD terms like "segment".
But I too had MD crash to the desktop when I told it to use the UVs to create the 2D pattern; that seems just too cool a feature to be true :) I'll play around with it to see if I can get it to work.
In any case, thank you very much.
You're welcome. I hope you get it to work. I often have that same crashing to desktop experience. Sometimes it works fine and other times it crashes. I suppose it is something about the OBJ or UV, but I don't know what the magic formula is. I even have it crash when importing an OBJ that MD itself exported. So, it seems pretty buggy.
If you can get your skirt to import as 2D pattern pieces but not your chestplate, here is another idea, but the results will be less accurate.
Load the Avatar without the chestplate. Load (or create) a garment that is a tight fitting bodysuit, panty, or hip band, etc. Stitch it and simulate it on the avatar so that it fits closely to the avatar. You may want to freeze it at this point. Add the chestplate as an additional avatar. Now in the 3D window, use the Line (3D Pattern) tool to draw on the bodysuit garment to trace around the edge of the chestplate. Now in the 2D window, the line you drew in the 3D window will show up on the bodysuit pattern pieces. Trace the line(s) with the Internal Line Polygon tool. (You can sew to internal lines, but not the lines you sketch in the 3D view.) You may want to draw your internal lines a little above the 3D sketched line, so there is no gap between the top of the skirt and the bottom of the chestplate later, since they will not be sewn together. Sew the top of your skirt to the intenal lines you drew on the bodysuit pattern pieces. Free Sewing will probably be easiest. Simulate so the skirt drapes. Select only the skirt pattern pieces and Export OBJ (Selected).
That sounds clever, but you're getting too far ahead of me :) I'll keep that in mind and try to do it, as well. I'm finding that MD is, as one would expect, light years ahead of Blender, but getting them to play nice is a bit of a challenge. But MD is too incredible for me to not invest the time to become more proficient in it. Thanks again. I'll share my results for others less proficient than you, if I can get it to work.
If you are new to MD, I think you will find the Dark Edge Design tutorial very valuable. I knew nothing about MD, but following along with that tutorial taught me a lot. It was exactly what I needed to learn how to use MD with Daz Studio.
Just snagged them both... I'll spend the whole day tomorrow with them. Thanks for the suggestion. I'm looking forward to getting to the point where I can try importing it back with the Transfer Utility. I can't do any more shots until I figure out this skirt.
Another possibility:
Is it possible to have the skirt under the chest piece rather than connected directly to it?
You could create an avatar that has the chest piece positioned away from the character. Then create an ordinary skirt in MD and then use morph target to layer the chest piece on top. Like this:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Z4QDZ
That's interesting as well, analogous to some of the things one does on Daz. Thank you. I've now got more approaches than I've got time in a week to try :) One or more of these techniques has got to work well.