Opinions on Marvelous Designer…
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Yes I made the belt - it is not ideal as the "buckle" slopes inwards. As I remember it was made using a very stiff fabric like leather.
I think that method looks fine. I guess a quick way to make a more stiff 3D belt would be to just use the MD fabric as a placeholder and then add an actual buckle OBJj in Daz before rendering.
The workflow would be similar to this one:
But in that video he uses Collada export when he exports from Daz studio. If you do that, and then try to export your MD garment as an OBJ to use it in Daz, it might not match up with the pose in Daz because the positions of the Collada avatar it is not vertex exact. So you have to either:
1. Export your pose transition animation as Alembic instead of Collada when exporting from Daz. (EDIT: Or export as MDD cache as mentioned by marble below)
Or alternatively:
2. Do morph target method using OBJ files. See this video for loading morph targets from Daz into MD:
Note: You may have to load a series of incremental morph targets if the pose transition from the base A-pose to the destination pose is drastic.
As you wish!
I lengthened my tank top and made it a tank dress.
I followed the tutorial instructions for tracing an existing pattern and created this dress. I borrowed the belt from a purchased Daz store asset. I added "elastic" to the waist of the dress in MD. This was from an old pattern I had sewn for myself many years ago.
Here's a longer version of the circle skirt in plaid.
@barbult - terrific work, the fabrics you have used on these look great tioo.
Thanks, Phil. The fabrics are from various shaders I have purchased from Daz over the years.
@peenwolf, thank you very much for the info on the morph targets.
I don't have the Alembic exporter (I assume that is necessary to use that method??). I will try the morph targets later today.
Still need to fix a few things, mainly was just seeing how complex i could make something.
That is pretty amazing! It looks very real.
I tried to follow the examples to to an animated drape of the garment in MD, but I couldn't get it to work right. This is all new to me, so I could be doing something wrong. I guess I need the (coming soon) Dark Edge Design tutorial.
I tried the morph target method. The beginning and ending poses in the animation look good, but the tween poses have distorted the arms and hands so much that the cloth doesn't drape well at all in that area.
I tried the Collada method (keeping in mind the issues mentioned by @peenwolf about reimporting OBJ to Daz), but the end pose of the animation is not correct and joint bends are distorted, so it is worthless for draping the clothing. (Viewed rotated to show that hands are not behind head and joint bends are bad)
This model is base G8F.
Do JCMs help me do an animated drape of my clothing in Marvelous Designer in some way? Will your new tutorial show how to drape clothing on a pose like the one with the arms up and behind the head? Sorry if I sound clueless - I am!
I figured out a scheme that works for me, based on a comment from peenwolf about maybe needing multiple morphs. Here is a comparison of a loose fitting dress created in MD and draped in Daz dForce vs. draping in MD. MD kept quite a few additional wrinkle details that dForce wiped out. The difference is very visible. I can see why peenwolf prefers the MD draping.
dForce draping in Daz Studio
Marvelous Designer draping with morph targets
Have you tried using MDD to export the animation from DAZ Studio? You will have MDD if you have the paid version of Animate 2.
https://www.versluis.com/2015/03/how-to-export-animations-from-daz-studio-for-use-in-marvelous-designer/
Not really, the problem is that a morph moves each vertex along a straight line from start position to end position, so it fails on rotations like this. Intermediate morphs might improve matters, but ti would still be using a series of straight lines to approximate an arc.
I've done MDD export from Carrara before now using Fenric's plugin and that works well, so it should be similar for Daz Studio. I was able to simulate in MD and then re-import the sim-ed clothing back into Carrara and have it match up perfectly.
The woman's clothing in this video was done like this - the animated part starts around 4:00.
Excellent video Phil. Like the music too. :)
Oh that is a helpful tutorial/link.
Animate2 is a lot cheaper than the alembic exporter so MDD cache is probably a better option than alembic. And that said, I guess the OBJ morph target method is still a free alternative for people who dont want to pay for an export option from daz.
I seem to remember that Alembic exporter was on sale for a huge discount but I missed it (I now have it wishlisted waiting for the next huge discount). But that was how I happened across the MDD tutorial and I do have the paid version of Animate 2. All I need to do now is try it
MDD basically exports a series of morphs, 1 per frame, so it is accurate to the source limb positions on each frame.
Ooooh, so much to learn! I do have the paid version of Animate 2. I will try exporting MDD. Thanks for the tip, marble.
MDD works perfectly so far. I draped the clothes on both of these women in MD. One is wearing the dress I created. The other is wearing the pants I created and the men's t-shirt freebie from Marvelous Designer. The dog didn't get any clothes, poor thing.
Looks good. The wrinkles on the shirt kind of accentuate the twisting motion of the pose.
So to be clear, you are now doing all the draping in MD and importing the garment back to DAZ Studio as an .obj file which covers the pre-posed character already in your DAZ Studio scene, right? No dForce required, no conforming or fit adjusting either - perfect fit for that particular pose. And if you change the pose slightly, you need to go back to MD and re-drape? Are you finding this an efficient workflow? Just interested because I have been intending to do the same for months and have just not got around to it - I think I keep putting it off because of the belief that I need to do all the MD tutorials before I get to that stage but you seem to have reached it in no time.
As long as you finalise your pose before doing anything else, that aspect of it shouldnt be much of a concern.
But perhaps there is a way of using Morph Loader Pro to make the process a bit easier (i.e., that way you could just apply the moprh of the clothing rather than loading in the garment OBJ into Daz from scratch and loading in all shaders/textures again with the surfaces tool, which could be tedious if there are many many material zones).
Also im wondering what the pipeline would look like if you wanted to use unique textures instead of Daz shaders. Like, a workflow that uses Daz, MD, and e.g., Substance Painter.
Yeah, "finalise the pose" seems like good working practice but I am never sure when a pose is finalised. I keep tweaking and saving, then noticing something else not quite right so I tweak some more. Bad enough doing that just in DAZ Studio but to keep having to export/import to and from MD would likely be a great time consumer. As you say, finalise must be literal - all the tweaking done for certain.