Creating Clothing for Specific Characters

plasma_ring

Hi, folks! I'm currently working on outfits that are unique to specific characters and do not need to be used on multiple figures. The designs are basically tailored to their body shapes, and I think it'd probably be very difficult to model them on a default G9 character and have the end result look right even if I created dedicated morphs. I'd like to use their shapes as reference for modeling the base clothing mesh and focus on making sure it looks good in as many poses as possible.

If anyone here has experience with this, I'd love to know if you have any advice or ran into issues!

crosswind

Tailor-making wearables on a unique character will be easier than starting from G9's Base figure as you don't have to make many full body morphs (bs on G9) on them. Some notes as below:
- after making the clothing, when rigging with Transfer Utility, you need to select "Current" from Source - Item Shape and check "Reverse Source Shape from Target"
- there might be some partial distortion on the rigged clothing, you make fix them with the modeling / sculpting software that you use, and Update Base Geomtery of the clothing (Edit - Figure - Geometry - Update Base Geometry)
- then as usual, go for fixing corrective morphs (cbs on G9) with base poses on the character.
- create necessary Morphs on the clothing as per the design and what you need... (Well, if the character's body morph is very stable, you don't have to do this step...)
- add dForce Modifier as well as setting up properties on dynamic surfaces, as you wish...

plasma_ring

crosswind said:

Tailor-making wearables on a unique character will be easier than starting from G9's Base figure as you don't have to make many full body morphs (bs on G9) on them. Some notes as below:
- after making the clothing, when rigging with Transfer Utility, you need to select "Current" from Source - Item Shape and check "Reverse Source Shape from Target"
- there might be some partial distortion on the rigged clothing, you make fix them with the modeling / sculpting software that you use, and Update Base Geomtery of the clothing (Edit - Figure - Geometry - Update Base Geometry)
- then as usual, go for fixing corrective morphs (cbs on G9) with base poses on the character.
- create necessary Morphs on the clothing as per the design and what you need... (Well, if the character's body morph is very stable, you don't have to do this step...)
- add dForce Modifier as well as setting up properties on dynamic surfaces, as you wish...

Thank you very much, this is super helpful!

sid

Oh, this is like a thread I need for me! How do I follow? :)

What program/s are you making the clothes in? How fair have you got?

I've been using Marvelous Designer and I'm not hugely skilled but I still find it easier to settle the drape on the figure in MD (import animated genesis into MD: t-pose to your final pose), then Import to Daz like crosswind says above, then make minor adjust ments on the pose.

Rigging the outfit is no fun at all, so I don't, but this playlist has a workflow mostly in video 4 It's easy to follow but tedious

You can apply dforce to the imported obj, but I find most of mine are too detailed (or I'm doing multiple things wrong, my outfits ain't that flash), and dforce causes explosions.

You usually have to manually re-set up your texture files in the Surface tab in Daz or edit the mtl (at least I do), so group your UVs logically.

The Daz plugin Thickner plug-in has some nice effects, but if you want expensive-realistic looking seams that render for close-ups you have to fold them in MD or scuplt them (If anyone else has tips here I'd love to hear).

I wish Daz had an MD sub-forum

 

plasma_ring

sid said:

Oh, this is like a thread I need for me! How do I follow? :)

What program/s are you making the clothes in? How fair have you got?

I've been using Marvelous Designer and I'm not hugely skilled but I still find it easier to settle the drape on the figure in MD (import animated genesis into MD: t-pose to your final pose), then Import to Daz like crosswind says above, then make minor adjust ments on the pose.

Rigging the outfit is no fun at all, so I don't, but this playlist has a workflow mostly in video 4 It's easy to follow but tedious

You can apply dforce to the imported obj, but I find most of mine are too detailed (or I'm doing multiple things wrong, my outfits ain't that flash), and dforce causes explosions.

You usually have to manually re-set up your texture files in the Surface tab in Daz or edit the mtl (at least I do), so group your UVs logically.

The Daz plugin Thickner plug-in has some nice effects, but if you want expensive-realistic looking seams that render for close-ups you have to fold them in MD or scuplt them (If anyone else has tips here I'd love to hear).

I wish Daz had an MD sub-forum

It's really helpful to hear your experiences with it! I haven't done more than mess around with it because I didn't want to get started on something that wouldn't actually work (a lot of standard processes for working with game characters just don't play well with Daz, and all the advice I found about making clothing tended to specify starting from a base figure, so I wasn't sure if it wasn't done regularly or just wouldn't work at all). But I plan to use MD and ZBrush since those are the programs I'm most familiar with.

MD was actually where I started thinking about it, since it was way easier to translate the designs I was working from to 3D by constructing them on the character's shape. I started by creating my own textures—sometimes to add missing seams and stitching to give outfits some weight, although Thickener is really helpful—but I found that even outfits of excellent quality tend to look ill-fitting on fat characters, even when I make corrective morphs. From a design/storytelling perspective, the character I'm working with would have had clothes made by hand to his measurements, so this is one way to get that across!

I usually do seams and stitching in Substance Painter using the path tool (the brush I use is unfortunately no longer available, but Milad Kambari has a similar one in his Artstation store). I'm not sure how this would work out for super close-up realism, but the stitches are added to the normal/bump/displacement maps like they would be in a modeling program, and it makes it super easy to change the look and color of the stitches. 

Something I'd like to try for one of my characters is a geoshell outfit. Iululee over on the other store has done these for up to G8.1 and I really liked the way they worked out for characters wearing tight outfits, but since they're UV-dependent I couldn't use them easily on male characters, and they won't work on G9 at all.

sid

plasma_ring said:

Something I'd like to try for one of my characters is a geoshell outfit. Iululee over on the other store has done these for up to G8.1 and I really liked the way they worked out for characters wearing tight outfits, but since they're UV-dependent I couldn't use them easily on male characters, and they won't work on G9 at all.

Assume you've seen https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/597861/g9-templates-with-colourful-borders - although I image things are much easier with Substance Painterbut I keep having great plans to draw up my own tattoos.

I've only had a tiny play with Substance so far. I was wondering if I can still get through free student access while I'm doing my Masters, but I see Steam looks like it has an outright version for purchase, which is tempting! I see all those cool thread brushes pop on in artstation. I've been relying on the topstich property editor in MD.

I think there's many reasons why it's so hard to get realistic Daz clothes in the store. Rarely in real life does one size fit/suit all. Pattern grading for different sizes is a skill, and that's not even mentioning tailoring for stuff like suits. So I think it's only sensible to work to a particular character fit.