Portfolio 3 Week 3

 

Final Delivery

 

Portfolio 3 - Part 2 (Pivot)

 

Sprint #5 Delivery

 

Portfolio 3 - Part 1 Blockout

  References - 

Research - 

Blockout - 

Unreal Blockout - 

Week 1 - Textures better

Week 2 - Textures betterer

Week 3 - Textures betterest & render

Portfolio 2 Part 4 Final

 

Marvelous Designer Research Project

This research project will cover the my workflow of designing clothes in Marvelous Designer, bringing the model into Zbrush for sculpting, then bringing that edited sculpt back into Marvelous Designer for retopology. 

Cheat Sheet for all the parameters in Marvelous Designer.

(I didn't make this.)

Once you have loaded your avatar of choice, it's time to begin designing your outfit. A very useful tip is that you can load a sewing pattern for outfits online and put it in the 2D view. This will allow you to trace the model with the Polygon tool.

Here is the basic jumpsuit I've created with the help of some pant and jacket patterns. The blue lines on the jacket denotes layers, which help you control which patterns you want to stay on top. I'm using them to keep the upper layers from fighting with the bottom layers. 

Another useful tool that you will want to leverage are internal lines. By drawing these lines inside your patterns, you can create areas that you can sew external patterns to, or create folds. Each internal line by default doesn't visually influence the pattern, but you can have fold inwards or outwards and how strong you want it to appear.

This is my 'final' outfit for the designing portion of this tutorial. Now we'll cover the retopology portion, which is fairly complicated.

Before you export your mesh, it's important to set the particle density to 5.0, then simulate to Accurate Fabric. This will give you the best simulation and quality for your pattern. You also need to go to the UV Editor window and manually make sure your patterns aren't overlapping. If any patterns are overlapping, when we try to re-export this to Marvelous Designer for retopology, it will fail to load the pattern. This is because Marvelous Designer looks at the UVs and re-traces the pattern.

This is my outfit in Blender. I sculpted it in this program for this tutorial, but you can and should use ZBrush. However, it's important you don't add topology or do any destructive edits to the mesh that would otherwise change the UVs. This will affect the UVs and make retopology in Marvelous Designer impossible. Once you've finished sculpting the outfit and adding tertiary details, you can bring it back into Marvelous. Export as an OBJ.

Once you're back in Marvelous, Import (Add) and select 'OBJ to Garment'.

You can see that my outfit has been sculpted to fit into his boots and vambraces. In the 2D viewer, you can begin retopology with this tool. Marvelous Designer has a very rudimentary retopology toolset, but one advantage is that it allows you to work neatly in a 2D view and also provides guidelines to help you keep your edgeloops connected.

I'm just going to do his vest since I don't have time to fully retopologize the entire model. One mistake that I made going into retopology is by starting too dense. Keep your polygons as large as possible, even if they're overlapping the boundaries of your pattern. Focus on maintaining the edgeflow you want. Work from the outside, then patch the inside afterwards.  

After this is done, you can subdivide the entire mesh. I would recommend subdividing once, pushing all the vertices to the outline of the pattern, then subdividing again. You will need to manually rearrange the vertices. I know. Marvelous Designer.. isn't that great in that regard.

Once you're done with your mesh and you're satisfied with how it looks, right click in the 2D viewer and Convert (Replace). This will convert the mesh with your subdivided mesh. From here, you can freely export this mesh out as whatever filetype you want.

And here is the final side by side with my hi-poly mesh on the right, and the retopologized mesh on the left. You WILL have to go and seal the seams by each vertex. It's a lot of work, but when you're dealing with complicated clothing styles, this method makes it a lot easier than regular retopology, especially when your outfit has topology that folds in on itself. 

Special thanks to Aamir Vora for showing me 90% of this stuff.

Sprint 4 Delivery