Mesh and Texture Stretching, a way to fix?

suffo85

Hi..

Is there an easy way to deal with this stretch issue I run into periodically?  I think Fit-to is causing it, but I'm not sure.  It's a G8 item that was working as intended until I fit it to G9.  The stretch persists even through a dforce simulation...

It's this skirt in the daz shop if curious...

Skirt was/is perfect for my scene, hate that my only work around is to ditch it for another clothing item..., is there some way I can fix it?

 

crosswind

Commonly-seen issue on auto-fitted skirt or sth. like that. If you know a sculpting software like Blender, the best way is to fix the distorted area by using Smooth / Grab brushes, then import as a Fix morph or directly update Base geometry of the skirt.

Besides, for such a dForce skirt, suggest you remove all weight maps on Thighs, then simulate it with Simulate from Memorized Pose option or with a Timeline. You'll get good result.

suffo85

Thanks @crosswind - I'll give this a try.

suffo85

I wasn't able to put some time into trying this out until today.. putting noob hat back on head (although I never really took it off heh).  I feel pretty comfortable in DS, but something this simple kinda defeated me.. after about two hours I gave up.

I did manage to get the Daz to Blender bridge to work but it wouldn't ever let me just send the skirt to Blender, it kept sending the actor and everything.  I wasn't able to get the deformation to occur without the skirt being fit-to an actor and the moment I remove the actor from the scene the skirt reverts back to normal, so at the very least I had to have an actor present.  This is probably just due to my lack of experience with these sorts of things, as I did feel like I was blindly stumbling around to get this to work in the first place.  The only real way I was able to get it into Blender was to export it as a wavefront from DS and then import it normally into Blender, but then ran into other issues that are already commonly reported about the forum (such as loss of textures, etc).  I smoothed it out and then exported it as a wavefront from Blender and tried to bring it back into DS but then got lost as to how to make it a corrective morph heh.  Since I already have the textures, it wasn't a big deal that they were lost during the transfer, I could always put those back on... I'll look up some more tutorials on creating morphs to try to advance past this part, it's been a while since I made or converted anything into one.

I tried this in Hexagon also, and ended up with some weird results, lol.  But I don't have any problems importing and exporting things that way either, so figured it was worth a shot.

Anyway, I'll try at this periodically as my understanding of things improves over time, until I eventually get it right. :)

In the meantime, I found a rather simple workaround.. adding smoothing to the object in DS, and then applying smoothing, will also work.. at least for this item it does.  I'm certain this is not the best method of going about it, and I can't say if it'll work with everything I have that stretches out like that--but if anyone finds themselves in a similar situation as me it might work for you as well.

Simple smoothing in DS method:

• Select desired object in Scene tab
• Navigate to Edit on the menubar
• Object submenu
• Geometry submenu
• Choose Add Smoothing Modifier
• With object still selected in Scene, navigate to Parameters window pane
• If skirt is not selected, use dropdown menu to select it
• Click All to show all parameters
• Find Enable Smoothing, tick to "On" if it is not already
• Increase Smoothing Iterations until desired effect is acquired (check for changes in Iray preview mode if nothing is occurring and I can't guarantee this method will work for everything)

Most clothes already come with smoothing modifiers, but I have had to add them to clothing items before for poke-through problems.  Check to make sure your clothing item doesn't already have it added first (in parameters), although I don't really think adding a smoothing modifier to something that already has it will harm anything.  The higher smoothing and collison iterations you use, the more time to calculate such things is required, and can cause lag in DS when you're trying to work with the model (posing, translating, etc).

@crosswind has the best solution, and if you're able to you should use their posted method.

crosswind

Actually this skirt has Smoothing Modifier already but the vendor just turned it off...for some reason. But yep... asl long as you can get it work with good result. All roads lead to Rome. 

suffo85

crosswind said:

Actually this skirt has Smoothing Modifier already but the vendor just turned it off...for some reason. But yep... asl long as you can get it work with good result. All roads lead to Rome. 

I braved your method today, I didn't get it perfect, but I'll try again until I do.  I had to get a little more comfortable with making morphs, and also with Blender.  Just saying the word Blender gives me high blood pressure.  The Daz to Blender bridge turned out to be utter fail and sent everything over so small that I couldn't even figure out how to get it back into Daz in the correct size, all the conversion options in Daz's import wouldn't do it and I didn't feel like guessing so I just did it all a second time and exported it the old fashioned way, as a wavefront, and then manually imported it into Blender.

I did have a quick related question... the original skirt I posted about was for G8 that I fit to a G9.  The one I fixed this morning was originally for G9 that I had fit to a G8.  If I were to update the geometry of the skirt as a permanent fix, would the skirt then become stretched out when worn on G9?  For G9 I would certainly prefer to keep as few permanent morphs around as possible, my 9's already load slower than usual..  I'm a bit leery to try since I'd have to reinstall the product if it did.

Also thank you for taking the time to share that method.  I do take everyone's advice about things here, even if I don't have the time to immediately do it, I always get around to it at some point. :)

Edit... er, wait, nevermind, I had a brief brain spasm lol, the morph loads onto the skirt and not the actor, so it shouldn't clog up my G9 morphs.  I'll get around to just trying the updated geometry at some point when I have my backup drive easily accessible.

crosswind

Right ~~ even if you updated the base geometry of the auto-fitted skirt, it would not impact the geometry data of G9's skirt 'cause it was a "auto-fitted version" of the skirt that you loaded on G8F, which has different scene id / node name from G9's skirt. So, don't worry about that even if you save it as a new figure asset.