Natasha

June 23, 2016
495 Downloads
12 Likes
Blender 2.7x
Render: Blender Internal
Creator: MajorNightmare
License: CC-BY

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Description:

Kept hearing about Marvelous Designer, got the demo and was impressed how quickly clothing manufacturing was possible in this app. The 30 day trial ended, within a day, I was already missing MD, and bought it. Finished my Blender to Marvelous Designer testing, so here it is. Detailed text explanation in the file. The 2 main issues were getting the shader/rendering in both apps to look the same and exporting with and with/without animations. Learned a new animation format in the process, Point Cache(.pc2). Good for clothing animation, but also the only way to get character animation into Marvelous from Blender. I tried every format flavor or the these, collada(which is what MD uses) .fbx and .obj formats and 3 or 4, 3rd party converters, nada, nothing worked. OBJ Point Cache finally worked for me. Hope it helps someone in MD. Since Natasha was designed as an avatar for MD, the poly count is medium high, wouldn't take much to drop to games res.

Marvelous Designer avatar Exporting animation Clothing materials

Comments:

MajorNightmare

added the red dress MD renders from earlier on the process, red dress not included. Cheers

Written June 23, 2016
MajorNightmare

added a screengrab from Unity. Bullets and clips spit out by a particle system while the gun barrel rotates. smoke billows from the gun and the hot spent ammo on the ground. Used the PBR calibration scene free from the Unity Store. Textures looking pretty much the same in, Blender, Marvelous and Unity. The power of PBR! Even though Marvelous and Blender aren't PBR, the 4 texture PBR workflow, diffuse, specular, ambient and normals, work well enough in both with minimal tweaking of the materials or lighting.

Written June 24, 2016
FM5

You're The Master!

Written June 27, 2016
FM5

GIVE 1+ LIKE TO THIS!!!

Edited June 27, 2016
padone

This is a very interesting software to couple with Blender. Thank you very much for pointing it out !!

Just a question. How did you get to export the avatar in quads ? I can only get tris. I also tried the user settings - mesh - quad option in MD5 but it seems it doesn't work. Actually I found the way to get quads on clothes by the 3d garment - quadrangulate menu. But i can't quadrangulate the avatar.

Sorry to bother you but didn't find anything working on the web.

Written June 28, 2016
MajorNightmare

Hi Padone, The Avatar doesn't need to be quads in MD, it will get converted to tris on import. Never tried the quad option. When you export from MD, just export the outfit. I used Zbrush to convert the MD clothes to quads, but for pieces that don't convert well, I'll make a new mesh and bake out the ao, normals and textures and use the simplified blender version.

Written June 28, 2016
padone

hi Major

Thank you very much for your reply. And again to point out MD5 that is awesome indeed. As for the quads thing, yes I know MD doesn't need quads. But I'd like to export the avatar in quads to use it in Blender. Unfortunately I can only export quads for the clothing (3d garment - quadrangulate menu). I didn't find any way for the avatar.

Now, in your blend file that you uploaded here the avatar is in quads. So I'm just wondering how did you get it. Did you use zbrush to "quadify" the avatar too ? Or did you find a way to export it in quads from MD5 itself ?

Thanks again and happy Blending :)

Written June 29, 2016
MajorNightmare

Hi padone, exporting MD Avatars will come out in tris, you can try converting from tris to quads in Blender. My avatar was created in Blender with quads, using the exported MD avatar(tris) a guide. Same for the clothes, Zbrush was making too many endless loops, so I just imported the MD version and made a new quad'ed mesh. Then baked out whatever details were in the MD exported non-quad version. Hope that helps. Cheers

Written June 29, 2016
padone

Well now your workflow is clear thank you very much. A bit tough for my taste though. I'll see if I can find some easy workaround. Thanks again for your reply bye.

Written June 29, 2016
Designeren

This is very inspiring! Thank you!

Written June 29, 2016
padone
Well at the end of my quick research I find MD native avatars almost useless. The best workflow I found so far is to use MD to create clothing for Manuel Lab. Basically:
- import Manuel Lab base figure in MD as avatar
- make clothing in MD
- export clothing back to Blender
- use Manuel Lab to fit the clothing and create characters
https://youtu.be/X-gSNDBDPM8?t=324
Written June 30, 2016
MajorNightmare

I actually installed Manuel's Lab add-on, still haven't tried it. If you look at the types of tight fitting costumes in the examples, much like mine, armature animation works. However like my original plan to make a flowing dress, armature animation wouldn't work well for cloth like sims you see in The Witcher and Star Wars BF. Those may not be point cache i.e. pre-baked, could be real-time, Unity Store has a realtime cloth sim for free. Point being if you are doing tight superhero costumes = armature, flowing wispy girly natural, =point cache. Next project I think. Get Natasha doing the runway walk like the Marvelous Designer Female Avatar does. Cheers

Written June 30, 2016
padone

hi Major

The benefit of using MLab is that you can change the size and proportions of the character and the clothing fits by itself. At least for the most part, then some adjustements may be necessary, mostly in the "floating" parts of the clothing as you pointed out.

This also works in a very similar way in DAZ Studio.

As for animation, I usually tend to stay away from automatic clothing fx since in my experience they are very hard to control and you may spend too much time trying to fit them to your needs. So I tend to animate clothing with bones too. Unless very little control is needed in the animation. So I am more interested in MD to create clothes than to animate them. But should I need cloth simulation, I'd give a go to blender sym rather than MD. Just to have some more control.

As for real time cloth simulation, it may be done in both ways depending on the type of clothing. For example Miku Miku Dance uses dynamic-driven bones to animate tails and short skirts and it works quite good.

But at the end I agree with you that bones and cloth simulation have each one its own domain of application depending on what you need.

I'd add that it is a pleasure to exchange opinions with you. You seem to be one of those rare people where technical and artistic skills match. Good luck with Natasha :)

bye, Alessandro (Italy)

Written July 01, 2016
MajorNightmare

Hi Alessandro, That Miku Miku Dance software is pretty cool. Yes good discussion on the topic. Likewise nice to see someone with indepth knowledge on the subject and the alternatives to get there. iClone looks pretty cool as well. This is what I'm shooting for eventually. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLNV5zSFadPdkNIL6pSSa2UkYPFJAVaAaZ&v=o-McOx3iDiE.

Written July 01, 2016
padone

here

https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?402185-simple-cloth-simulation&p=3069985#post3069985

Written July 02, 2016
vladimir91832

Natasha - my moms name.

Written July 25, 2016
MajorNightmare

https://youtu.be/5WyQlWBrIDg animation I made after posting original.

Written August 04, 2016
MajorNightmare

Hi padone, found out to get quad's in MD. Select all, right click on the mesh, brings up popup menu select quadrangulate, found it here... https://cgelves.com/marvelous-designer-5-to-zbrush-workflow-tutorial/ Works ok, but still needs conversion, quads but not nice quads... Cheers

Written September 11, 2016
marthana80

Nice!!!

Written July 22, 2019