Do all clothing need morphs?

JonasK

So, when I create a piece of clothing like a dress, it morphs weird when the legs move b/c of the rigid attachment to polygons.  I've seen tutorials on how to create morphs and then how to attach them to different JCM thingies (not sure exactly what these are yet).  But my question is, is this the only way to fix this?  Or is there some easier tool?  Like in Maya, I know I can paint weights of bones to polygons to control how they move based on bone movement.

skinklizzard

you can adjust the weight maps in daz studio too, useing the node weight map brush tool.

you'll need to open the tool settings pane (if you haven't already) to see the settings and available maps after you select a bone on the clothing.

weight maps alone are generally not enough for most outfits to look good, hence the JCM things.

you could also add a dForce modifier and use the built in cloth simulation to smooth out and drape the posed outfit, but if you rely on this rather than jcm's you'll have to run a simulation pretty much every time you pose the figure and clothing for it to look ok.

as for what a JCM is, it stands for Joint Controlled Morph, its a morph with its percentage slider conected to the movement percentage of a bone or group of bones so that, for example, as the bone is rotated on the y axis the morph is dialed in the correct amount for that movement.

JonasK

Gotcha.  Is there a list of all the JCMs?

Leana

Skirts are usually not rigged to follow the legs, because that leads to unnatural skirt pose. They use specific bones to pose various sections of the skirt (usually there are at least front, back, left and right handles).

Products like SY Ultra templates provide various custom templates to use with autofit or when rigging clothes like dresses with the transfer utility. The weight maps created might still require adjustments but the templates will give you a good starting point.

JonasK

Leana said:

Skirts are usually not rigged to follow the legs, because that leads to unnatural skirt pose. They use specific bones to pose various sections of the skirt (usually there are at least front, back, left and right handles).

Products like SY Ultra templates provide various custom templates to use with autofit or when rigging clothes like dresses with the transfer utility. The weight maps created might still require adjustments but the templates will give you a good starting point.

Cool!  And how would those adjustments be made?

JonasK

I should note that I mostly want to make dForce clothing but I'm hoping not to have to always simulate from the memorized pose just so the clothes don't distort or start out intersecting the figure.

Leana

DS includes a weight map brush tool which can be used to paint maps.

I found this tutorial example where someone fixes the weight maps on a swimsuit they created:

Obviously the fixes would't be exactly the same but that should give you ideas on how it works.

JonasK

Leana said:

DS includes a weight map brush tool which can be used to paint maps.

I found this tutorial example where someone fixes the weight maps on a swimsuit they created:

Obviously the fixes would't be exactly the same but that should give you ideas on how it works.

Awesome!!  Thanks everyone!

JonasK

I decided to try out pJCM poses for clothing so I could have better morphs for each pose but I'm think this is the wrong approach unless you simply plan to retopo and not make any stylistic changes.  I say this b/c there are no JCMs for combination of moves (like moving thigh out to the right and also bending).  You can see from my results, things look weird in the in between: