Smooth mesh?

[Antumbra]

Hi i would like to know how i can smoothen my mesh? it looks really smooth in blender but then when i upload it to sl and the shadows hit it it looks really bumpy :/ so how can i smooth it? i've tried using the smooth modifier and it doesn't work and i've been using the smooth sculpting tool and its not working much... so is there any other way i can make it smoother? 

[Sassy Romano]

It might help to see a picture of the mesh both in blender and in SL but the first thing to use is "smooth shading" in the toolshelf.

[Antumbra]

[Antumbra]

also I've clicked the smooth shading also it still looks all bumpy

[Sassy Romano]

It looks pretty much the same to me and is what i'd expect.  Bear in mind that MD generates a simulation of cloth.  Pop a texture on it and it will look much better but it's also a side effect of MD, you get what it creates and although you could change the particle size, that's not necessarily going to be a good thing because it will dramatically increase the density of the mesh.

[MIstahMoose]

Er...

I wont go into retopology and all

but if you really feel like smoothing it out further you can always change over to sculpt mode, and select the smooth brush with a low strength and do a quick pass over the model as well.

[Gaia Clary]

But isn't that exactly the point ? The underlaying topology of the mesh from MD is not well suited for the usage in SL, neither for animation nor for texturing.

The MD Meshes are made for a completely different physics simulation that allows much more realistic draping. The  meshes should therefor be optimized for the weight based animation system that is used in SL. At least that is how i understand it.

So retopology would be necessary to:

 

• keep triangle count low (to keep Land Impact low)
• make fluent animation possible (weight based animations benefit from Quad based meshes)
• Improve the look of textured surfaces (I found that using triangles could possibly (not always!) cause ugly shading artefacts)

 

[Sassy Romano]

She can but the moment you touch MD mesh with the sculpting tools, it pretty much plays havok with the UV map that comes out of MD and that then needs work after to avoid very localised texture stretching.

[MIstahMoose]

@Gaia (because my phone doesn't let me quote) I agree with everything you say but have honestly given up being snapped at because of my suggestion of people doing things correct, rather try and give them the lazy easy answer they want to have.. But yes, in every way you are right, but I am a tired moose and preaching what people don't want to hear has burnt me out. Most don't understand nor will want to do anything that makes it more complex than hitting a button to "make art"

 

Sorry to the poster this is not a derogative of you !

[Astrid Kaufmat]

Several programs have a built in crease angle tool. I don't know if you used the one in your program or the one in the uploade. just in case you didn't try the crease angle in uploader give it a chance too

[Jake Koronikov]

Marvellous Designer produces meshes that are really not suitable for SL directly. It is much too dense and triangulated mesh is really hard to handle in Avastar for example (Avastar is great! But dense tri-mesh is by it's nature hard to weight paint). Also, the MD mesh contains "bumpy" details generated by cloth simulation.

I find it sad, that people think retopology as difficult, time-consuming and boring work. Personally I find retopology process interesting and even fun. The whole process is somewhat non-standard, but for example Blender has one great add-on to help re-topology. The name of this add-on is BSurfaces and it is nowadays included in Blender package. All you need to do is activate it from the add-on settings.

A video about Blender retopo process in general level, including several options for retopo:

..And a good tutorial for BSurfaces retopology using Blender:

http://cgcookie.com/blender/lessons/3-retopology-method-3-bsurfaces-add-on/

One-hour retopology work will usually save huge amount of time and pain in weight painting, uv-unwrapping, texturing, LOD desing, Land Impact problems, and so on....