MD -> Blender

[beanster Potato]

Hello

I've noticed that more and more people are using garments made in marvelous designer for SL without doing anything on retopology.. at least it does'nt look like they do by the look of the cages (I've bought a lot of full and non full perm mesh garments, some come with obj. files). I own this software as well but I have'nt been using it for SL.. apart from the high polycounts, I keep on running into another problem. After copying weights and baked to Tpose using blender/avastar, the garment shows very bad distortions at the armpits area which makes sense seeing the difference in the MD default pose and SL's Tpose. But since i've seen quite a lot of mesh in SL made with this software that does not have the same distortion, I must be doing something wrong.

Weight painting does'nt seem to be able to fix this (?) Also, i tried to import the SL avatar in Tpose into MD but the draping fails around the neck and top of the shoulders with that pose. Since I know its possible, im very curious how other people manage to use MD clothing for SL without the distortions as shown below. Thanks : )  

 

[Gaia Clary]

The default settings in MD are not optimal suited for game engines like Second Life. I know of 2 issues:

 

1. As you already mentioned the MD models are mostly high poly. But note that you can change that in the MD properties somewhere. Sorry i forget the exact location, but i know you can create low poly garments with MD.
2. MD creates a mesh that is optimal for their implementation of the garment animation (they use a physically more correct model which takes physical material properties into account during animation). This differs greatly from how animation is implemented in Second Life (which is only based on weight maps). MD has promised to add a mesh mode that is better suited for us (that is, create Quad based meshes, which can be weighted much easier). I don't know if it is already implemented.

Your particular problem with your garment IS a weighting issue. You have 2 options here:

 

1. You can use retopology tools to create a new mesh that is better suited for animation (quad based, and low poly) That would make it easier to weight the model.
2. You can tweek the area that shows the distortions in T-Pose. It should be possible, however that is a challenge because weighting triangles is a bit more tricky than weighting quads. This video might give you some help:

One last word about weight maps copying: This is not a magic way to easily create perfect animatable mesh items. It is only meant as a starting point for further manual optimizations. Especially the T Pose bake tool ensures that your mesh looks like the original when your Avatar is in thae bake pose. Depending on the Mesh the T Pose may look more or less distorted. So you will have to work on that if you want your model to also look reasonable well in the T Pose

[Ashasekayi Ra]

First, I'd *highly* suggest that you retoplogize the .obj files that you export from MD. Yes, I know there are people that don't and sale them in SL. But, truly, you will save yourself a lot of hassles and polygon counts if you go ahead and do the retopology work up front. Also, it is much easier and more efficient to tweak weights on a model with quad topology versus one with Delaunay triangles.

You can use A-pose instead of T-pose to get better arm shoulder draping. In Blender, rotate the avatar's arms down by 45 degrees.  Apply the armature modifier and export out the .obj file as usual. (I scale up the avatar before export by a factor of 1000 to match the scale in MD.) After you finish the clothing, bring it back into Blender. (I scale it down by 0.001 to get it back to the scale of the avatar in Blender.)  Then, you can use the Bake to Tpose method Gaia explained with Avastar. 

Here is a non-Avastar method for dealing with non-Tpose poses:

1. - Rotate the arms of the armature down in Pose mode to fit model (45 degrees in this case). Apply the armature modifier on the avatar.
2. - Select all the bones in Pose mode. Go to Pose -> Apply -> Apply as Rest Pose.
3. - Go back to your avatar add an "Armature" modifier from the modifier list. Pick your armature's name in the dropdown for "Object".
4. - Now, go to your clothing model and do your parenting and weight painting.
5. - Once you are done, go back to Pose mode in the armature. Rotate the arms back to their T-pose defaults.
6. - Apply the armature modifier on the clothing model and the avatar.
7. - Select all the bones in the armature in Pose mode. Go to Pose -> Apply -> Apply as Rest Pose.
8. -  Go back to your avatar and clothing item and  add an "Armature" modifier from the modifier list. Pick your armature's name in the dropdown for "Object". 
9. - Tweak weights if needed, adjust geometry etc.

As a side note, if you still want to just use that raw MD model as the upload, I'd suggest you make the weight mapping a little easier on yourself by constructing at least a basic, low poly quad cage for the item. This proxy item can be easily weight painted. Then, you could transfer those weights to your MD model.

[beanster Potato]

Thank you both for the respondses, you're always super helpfull : )) I have'nt been using MD for SL yet because it takes me too much time to do the retopology (because im also still new at that) plus the weighting is tricky which is why i only used blender for clothing so far. Only because you see so many people using clothes made in MD in SL now, i became curious on how they were solving those issues thinking i was missing something. Anyway, guess for now its back to ignore MD or at least untill they come up with some sort of a quads option. Thanks again, sorry for late responds, did'nt get an email notification. 

[Ashasekayi Ra]

If you are interested in using clothing patterns to make your models, check out the Blender sewing patch. It doesn't have all the awesomeness of MD, but you can use a real world clothing pattern workflow and quads together..

LINK: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?258004-Patch-for-Sewing-Clothes-in-blender

P.S. Demohero posted a link to a Win 64 Blender build that contains the patch at the bottom of the page.