Making a Simple Clothing Item
Hermit Crab
Posts: 841
Hi folks,
I made a very simple clothing item (as I've done a few times before) as a starting point for a range of clothed characters I'll need if ever I get round to an animation I want to create.
From starting in Hexagon to rendering, the whole thing only took about an hour or so.
This is how I play around - unfortunately I rarely complete anything polished. Anyway, the renders here are to show the clothing piece in case anyone is interested in doing likewise.
I went back to the programs I used and made some screen captures of the process which ended up being a video of something over ten minutes. It ends with the clothed figure being animated for a few seconds if anyone just wants to see that.
I see this as a general demo of one way to begin making clothes but, in this case I began with Hexagon using the most basic of modelling functions.
The crude mesh was then draped over a V4 figure in Poser - other software could have been used. The draping process relaxes the mesh and helps it fit the figure.
Then Poser's Cloth Room was used to move the figure into a pose for the render.
I wondered where to post this on the forums but chose Art Studio because I think some participants here might be looking to give clothes creation a go and I think many people may have Poser lying around idly also.
The clothing doesn't get rigged or anything like that but the simple modelling might help any newcomer. I hope if anyone views the video that it won't be too tedious - remember, you can't get your ten minutes back!
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Comments
Great video thanks for sharing! I'm always interested in learning as much as possible about modelling.
Thanks, Marcus. I love seeing workflows. Appreciate the video.
Thanks to you both -and anyone else - for subjecting yourself to my video. Thanks also for the generous feedback.
Both of you can definitely be the ones to teach me many things but I'm glad if what I've shown has been of use to you.
For some reason the video took over three hours to upload to You Tube and before that I kept making blunders in my video editor and had to do it over a few times. So the actual work only took an hour or so but the video process multiplied that many times over.
Anyway, if I might make a couple of remarks:
1 The draping in Poser or anything else isn't a necessary step, but in this case it improved the look and allowed a fit to a different body.
2 The final clothing should really have been exported as two separate items.
3 The top in particular was left very rough around the edges but I was only giving myself some quick practice when I began this.
4 Sleeves could have been extruded after selecting the edges of the hole for the arms.
5 Better modelling would probably involve having the polygons curve in various ways around the abdomen, for example, and definitely around the shoulders and any sleeves.
6 Lastly - no PA's need lose any sleep over my efforts!
EDITED for typos
One other point I meant to make:
Often, when trying to get the polygons to hug the upper body, I delete half of it vertically. That way I can bring the contours close to the figure because I can see inside the 'half-shell' and how closely it fits.
Then I take a duplicate and weld the two halves together.
I need more coffee!
Something else I meant to say for complete beginners - simple meshes like this could be used in DAZ Studio. I have only taken a very quick look but the transfer utility would be used to 'rig' ?? the clothing to Genesis, etc.
I wondered whether to start another thread with 'Animation' in the title but decided to show what I'm doing here.
After the exercise above, Poser actually became my 'go to' application. I do like it very much and have only scratched the surface really.
In spite of having used Iclone for years (just endless small play-around tests) and trying to hand-animate in Carrara also for years, my Poser work developed from a small test to a proper short animation with a simple story. The idea just arose from tests and I was building each scene using my one and only set of aniblocks to start with.
Anyway, I found animating in Poser to be more problematic than I first thought. Renders of several seconds' footage were taking hours. The clothing simulations complicated things - I had to have frames of draping leading into the animation every time and this confused me when it came to where everything was positioned in the scene because everyrhing began at the point where it was first loaded.
If I wanted more than one figure using aniblocks then I had to contend with them moving from the same zero starting point. Editing keyframes in Poser is probably easy enough but I haven't fully been able to master it. Conclusion - everything was going too slowly to the point where making final adjustments was getting out of the question.
So - here is the point of this post - I exported my figures to Carrara and all the aforementioned problems have gone. I still intend to use the aniblocks in conjunction with the Cloth Room in Poser and I will do any other hand-animating there but I hope to bring everything over to complete the animation in Carrara.
Here is a test result of a render in Carrara: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-EVo7APtdw&feature=youtu.be
It lasts 14 seconds and the description gives more detail of the process.
I meant to add a picture.
The figure is V4.2 and the clothing is another of the simple pieces that this thread was about originally.
The clothing hasn't been UV mapped and I would expect that the jagged edges would go if that was done but I haven't tried.
Two things that can help with the poser cloth roon, is increasing the density of the mesh and adding a small wind force, it can add to the realism of the fluttering cloth. Good video.
FirstBastion, I'm so pleased that you took time to look at the video and for the helpful advice which I'll look into.
I'm particularly delighted because, after the first test in Poser of the aniblock motion on the child version of Victoria, I looked for some props in my runtime to give her some surroundings.
I came up with the story from there. It involves a couple of mischievous children in a graveyard at Halloween. Your 'Old Man With A Lantern Statue' is the other character in the scene!
It is a great prop, guaranteed to add an atmosphere to many kinds of scene. Here, he is a ghostly figure. I've uploaded a shot from my Poser attempts where he can be seen. Here you can see the problem of the aniblocks starting at the same spot:
https://youtu.be/12bOgMvPfYk
Another upload shows a little better than before how I have more control over the figures' positions using Carrara - and the renders are super-fast compared to Poser's Firefly on my machine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7t9m2WsCq74&feature=youtu.be
In this video with four children, the two smaller ones were created by exporting one of the original figures as .FBX and then re-importing the .FBX into Carrara. I could scale it and move it around as shown in the vid.
Thanks again.
Just remembered to mention - I heartily recommend the VWD program for cloth and Hair simulations. It's just that in this case Poser's capable cloth room is good enough for my simple home-made stuff.
Very cool.
I enjoyed watching your videos and seeing your processes. Thumbs up!
Back when I was using Poser's Cloth Room (Poser 5 and 6 days) I eventually got to a point where I got away with only simulating certain portions of cloth - like the parts that would best show dynamics. Tighter or less flowing parts of the costume would remain as conforming cloth, sometimes with a few subtle movement morphs for effect. I was amazed at the difference it made to performance of the cloth simulation and reduced the complexity of the project.
The cloth room in Poser can be a powerful thing. It can take some time to fine tune certain settings, and it can be easy to spend a lot of hours messing with it. I certainly did! LOL
Just all of this talk of Poser... it gets me to missing the Walk Designer. I may just have to dust of that Poser 6 and give it a play again! ;)
Great stuff Marcus!
Oh... and I agree... First Bastion ROCKS!
Thanks, Dartanbeck for taking the time to look at this and to respond both here and on the Carrara thread which brought you here.
You know so much more about all this than I do which adds to my appreciation of the trouble you've taken.
The lesson I'm taking from these efforts is that a figure can be animated with a cloth-sim in Poser and then can be opened up in Carrara. It can then be exported as .fbx - which I mentioned already but what pleases me is that it should be possible to build a personal collection of animated figures with cloth movement all ready to be brought into any Carrara animation.
So (if I'm correct, of course) I should be able to bring in the two children shown above into, say, the background of a street scene as part of an establishing shot.
The nice thing about animated figures is that good poses can be frozen (from mid-action) for still shots also.
I'm not on a crusade for Poser here but I bought it and like it very much on its own or as a tool to use in conjunction with other software.
I know I'm well behind the times but I hope to look into importing BVH motions to Carrara via Poser. It seems there are lots of free ones available in large collections (Carnegie something or other). There are also free motions from an older program called Life Forms which was geared towards dance choreography, but not exclusively.
So, maybe in odd moments I can try building that collection... and I must get round to getting shoes for my characters.
For anyone else, I was mentioning my Halloween animation in the one of the Carrara threads.
For what it's worth here are a couple of shots of the extremely simple clothing simulated in Poser's Cloth Room.
Such clothing should - I guess - work in much the same way in the public beta of DAZ Studio.
Yup. I like to store various animated version of my characters directly into Carrara's browser. Then I can bring them into any situation I like. If it's just a simple character animation, I might just save the animation data as an NLA clip instead, to save on storage space. But when I take the time to also animate the clothes and hair, I store the whole thing.
The nifty part about storing the whole thing is that, when I now bring that into a different scene, it comes in as a single group. Perhaps that's due to how I save it? I'd have to check. I've established some efficient conventions over the years. But then I can set the hot point for that whole group and move it anywhere I need it to be within the new scene.
Absolutely. Poser Rocks! It has a lot of excellent tools - especially for use with Poser-compatible figures within Carrara. For example:
Poser has the wonderful ability to let us store animated Pose files (PZ2) to the Pose library. I think we can also save animated Facial Expressions too, for the Face category. Don't remember. But I used to use Poser a lot for saving animation sequences as follows:
I might also store the torso, but usually instead it would be Hip, legs, abdomen and chest if I was going to do that. This will leave the arms, neck and head for me to animate by hand.
So now I have a collection of motions I can apply very easily using the Poser Runtime file structure - which is very convenient in Carrara.
If I also animated clothes and/or hair to match that motion, Poser will let me make animated pose files for them in the same way! I think VWD works that way in Poser - makes keyframed animations of the shaping data from the resulting simulation. (I haven't tried it in Poser yet) So if that's the case. we could also save the pose files that way too - which we could apply to the same clothes or hair in Carrara if we saved the morphs which were also created via VWD. I haven't looked into that, but doing that sort of workflow would add a nice level of control of resulting dynamic simulations. ;)
It's not my fault you make such interesting conversation!
Wow! That's a ton of interesting stuff I knew nothing about - to add to the other things you said.
There is, it seems, a much tighter integration of Poser assets with Carrara than I realized. You've given me a lot more to look into on top of the other things I was considering. The one question mark I need to solve concerning my idea of a collection of already-simulated clothed figures as .fbx files is whether they can be placed anywhere on the Carrara timeline or whether the action will always begin at frame 1.
I guess that keys can always be moved along if it is the latter.
But you tell me that Poser animation sequences can be saved in Poser using all or part of the figure and these can be read directly into Carrara - that's fantastic to hear.
We have some great tools here.
Another drape in keeping with the thread title:
Awesome cloth drape! Very nicely done!
Poser PZ2 files can be loaded into Carrara anywhere along the timeline, same as importing aniBlocks.
That said, when I'm importing animation data, either from a PZ2 or an aniBlock I usually slide the yellow range slider on the left of the timeline to the 1 second mark, making that my frame 0 when I hit the rewind button. Then I make sure to hit that rewind button to set the time to 1 second.
I do this to retain my default character pose. I don't quite use the T-pose as my default, but pretty close to it. I save my characters with their arms down at their sides and maybe a subtle pose of the legs - but pretty close to the zeroed T otherwise. So then, if there are parts of the animation I don't want - or would rather animate by hand and end up wanting to delete all keyframes for a certain joint, I can easily grab all of those keys due to the space between them and true frame 0, and then that joint snaps to my default rotation.
Although my AniMating in Carrara article is mainly about how I work with aniBlocks in Carrara, most of the workflow will also be relevant in Poser as well. Too, Poser's PZ2 data, once applied to the figure, may also be stored in Carrara's NLA clips.
One more thing on this, if we're using pre-Genesis figures (V4, for example) Fenric's PZ2/BVH Exporter for Carrara can also save our Carrara animations to animated (or not) PZ2 files - it will even read any NLA clip data for the figure, and include that. It's a fine tool along with his other Pose helper plugins for Carrara. They save me a lot of time.
► Fenric's Tools
A brief overview of Fenric's amazing Carrara plugins
Yes, and I find that to be incredibly helpful.
This is why I haven't really found a need to go looking everywhere for motion data, like BVH. I have a decent collection of PoserMoCap's stuff from here at Daz3d, as well as GoFigure's aniBlocks and a few from SKAmotion (they also have their own site with more motions there) as well.
I like to go through these motions from time to time onto a single-shader (gray clay) figure and render a quick low-res animation to see how it feels.
Anyway, I'll be working on an animation - starting with one of those aniBlocks or animated PZ2 (my PoserMocap are PZ2) and, almost always, I'm looking for something somewhat different than what I'm starting with. So again, I set the time start at 1 second and import the data, then delete what isn't going to work.
Well, I might remember a certain motion from another file that might work well for the part that isn't working from this one.
If I import that data to Carrara at this point, it'll over-write and/or otherwise mess with the key frames I already have in the timeline, so I have a few options to avoid that:
Note that when I am making an NLA clip for animations that start at 1 second (frame 30 for me) I make sure to change the radio button in the NLA creation dialog to "Scene Range" instead of the default, which will begin at frame 0. Scene Range = the space along the timeline between the right and left yellow markers.
Also note that we can "Load Data From Clip"
With a NLA clip or pose in the Clips tray, Select the figure, in the NLA tab click Load Data From Clip
But know that, when doing this, our placement along the timeline doesn't matter. It will place the key frames where they were along the timeline when they were recorded. So in my examples, they'll come in on Frame 30 (1 second for me). This has only been a nuisance to me early on - before I knew about this behavior. Since then I just know about it so it's not even a thing.
NLA clips kick arse though. So easy to stretch, loop, slide either way along the timeline - whatever.
Sorry for going on... I was thinking of this as thread-related!