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Many thanks, lilweep, for your help...truly. Yeah, I've got the UDIM arrangement pretty much covered, but I guess what I was trying to say in my very long winded way was that so much emphasis seems to be placed on the topology being correct and precise, and as there also seems to be quite long procedures for doing just that, I didn't want to miss out on learning it properly. I've also seen that many just keep the quadrangulated mesh and use that, so I might just stay on that path myself. Perhaps I am overthinking the whole thing entrirely. After going through a few more YouTube tuts I found that 'thickness', applied in zbrush, seems to have been the enemy of my mesh.
Hello everyone. Just found this forum and also just starting using MD, so yeah, I'm a complete noob ha. Anyhow I was looking for some help. I made a 'boyfriend t-shirt' for g.8 female and took it into Daz. Upon dforcing it, not only does the spring count take FOREVER but once it does eventually dforce the outfit either falls apart at the seems or bits seems to flake of the t-shirt when dforcing. Can anyone offer some information how to fix this? Pretty please? lmao
Export as thin and welded.
Yeah, I already tried that, been trying to fix this issue for a while. I also tried remeshing it in zremesher because someone told me my mesh might be too high, is there anything else I can try?
If you exported as welded, nothing should flake off. Double check your export settings in MD. What pieces of a t-shirt are flaking off?
If you have a lot of springs warnings, you may have mesh that is ridiculously dense.
What mesh density are you using in MD? 10 works pretty well for me. Then I apply SubD 1 in Daz Studio.
Did you quadrangulate? Daz Studio dForce likes quads better than triangles.
Show some screenshots of what you see. It is nearly impossible to diagnose problems without a visual reference.
I just exported again and made sure it was welded, same thing happened, it seems to be the stitching area that were flaking, at least from what I could tell.
Yeah someone else told me this which is what led me to trying to remesh it in Zremesher. I just opened up my MD project and the particle distance is on 5 or 10 for each piece of the t-shirt.
I did not quadrangulate no, I didn't know I could. I just followed a tutorial as this is my first time in MD.
Ok so I left the particle density as is, since it's already on 5/10 and you said that was about right. I quadrangulated it, and took it back into daz to dforce. Unfortunately the same thing happened with the springs and the stitching, see attached image :-)
A picture is worth a thousand words, as they say. Those topstitches are your problem. I don't know of any way to use those MD 3D topstitches in Daz Studio with dForce in any reasonable way. They are modeled with extremely dense geometry for EVERY STITCH. (See attached screenshot) That is why you are getting a million spring warnings - the vertices of the geometry of those stitches are way too close for Daz Studio dForce. They are falling off, because they are separate geometry, not part of the garment.
You could export both versions, then use a sutiable utility to bake normals from the stitched version for use on the plain version.
What are some suitable utilities?
I usually just bake the topstitch into the textures right inside MD, but that doesn't have the nice 3D effect. I am very interested in what Richard suggested, but I don't know how to do that.
I'd use Substance Designer (I have an older version with a permanent license) but there are soem cheaper alternatives, maybe even a freebie (and I'd think Blender could do it - this comes up on a search
).
Thanks, Richard. I don't have Substance products. I'll watch the Blender video you linked.
I think ZBrush can do it too, and pretty sure Modo can. It's a fairly ubiquitous feature, since a lot of game developers use it to go from high-detail sculpts down to something that a game engine will handle.
My first attempt with Blender was not successful, but I am going to try again. I got a normal map, but it didn't have any of the stitching on it and it had strange triangles on seemingly random locations. I'm confused by the DS display of the UV map of the garment with the 3D mesh stitches on it. The UV map by node is a big mess of overlapping lines. The UV by material has a UV for a single stitch for the topstitch surface.
Should I be exporting from DS without surfaces?
If I export from MD with Unified UV Coordinates, I get a nice UV, but it has no 3D mesh topstitching on it.
If I export from MD without Unified UV Coordinates, I get the 3D mesh topstitching, but a strange looking UV (attached above).
I don't know what to do.
The UVs for the stitched version shouldn't matter, it's the UVs for the non-stitched version that are getting baked to. Sorry, although I have done some baking to normals it was a while back and not, as I recall, with MD output.
Thanks for the response. Your help is always very much appreciated I don't see a clear path forward yet, but I will continue to experiment.
I found another video about baking normals in Blender. This one talks about a detailed object and a simple object. The other video created a normal map from the detailed object and said to be sure it was UV mapped. There was no separate simple object in that workflow. I'll try this new one and see what happens.
And here's another video that goes a lot slower with more discussion.
Ah, bad pick of video on my part then - baking to another, simpler mesh was what was intended.
Your later post about "detailed to simple" gave me the clue I needed to figure out why it didn't work. The Blender Guru video was what I needed in the end. It worked! Here is the normal map applied to my simple mesh in Daz Studio. '
Now, I need to know how to combine normal maps so I can layer this topstitching normal on top of the fabric texture normal generated by MD. Any ideas to point me down the right path?
I could do it in 3delight, with Shader Mixer, and Substance Designer can do it (I think). You could, of course, try making a bump map and use that alongside the existing normals, but bumps tend not to work quite as well (though they are essentially doing the same thing).
there seems to be lots of videos for combining normal maps in blender and photoshop on youtube.
admittedly i havent read all the posts above, but my thoughts are it might be simpler to just paint the topstitches in substance painter/blender rather than create a workflow that converts the MD topstitch.
I found some strong dissenting opinions on the "right way" to combine two normal maps. I teied one method, which seemed to work fairly well.
I made this t-shirt in MD and it dforces fine, I then added some details (seam lines/stitches) and retopologized in zbrush and now it just explodes in dforce, can someone help me with this? :-)
Are your added stitches and seamlines geometry (mesh) or just added with normal maps? If mesh, the polygons are probably way too small, would be my guess. Show us some closeups of your mesh topology. It is hard to tell anything about how dForce would perform from the attached image.
More importantly, geometric stitches add collision with other parts of the mesh.
Very true, when they are separate geometry objects, like MD makes them. I don't know what ZBrush does. I thought maybe the existing mesh was modified to add extra polygons in that area.
Heads up. Marvelous Designer is having a Black Friday sale on personal licenses until the end of December.
I much prefer to hang on to my current perpetual license for as long as they'll let me.
This is a simple dress and apron I made in MD 11. I used the Thickener plugin after posing and dForce was done.
Making Strawberry Jelly