Mesh & Marvelous Designer Issues

[Teanna Kytori]

ive been playing with marvolus designer for hours trying to figure it out.

 

i cant!

 

problem 1: i dont see any tutorials that tell you about adding a design on top of the texture. so ive been trying to find a way to get the object in photoshop so i can paint on a design. if i put on a texture inside marvelous designer, it will tile across the whole item. if you dont knoww hat im talking about, its like tring to put a smiley face on the middle of a shirt without tiling smilet faces all over.

 

problem 2: i dont know how to upload a mesh that comes from Marvelous designer. SL dosent take OBJ files & i dont see any tutorials to help you upload mesh items or that tell you how to save a file as a file that SL will upload.

 

im new at it! trying to figure it out

[Medhue Simoni]

Well, you have to apply that texture onto the clothings UV map, which is the meshes all unfolded into a 2D image. You don't have to texture it in MD tho. You can export that obj, and then import that OBJ into Blender. From there you can texture it, and then rig it to the SL avatar if you need to.

I don't actually use MD, but I have done all the rest for creators that do use MD.

[Chic Aeon]

I don't use MD either but from board posts here I do understand that there are many issues using it. Sorry, but true.  And as was said you need to import the obj file into Blender or another 3D program so that you can texture and weight paint. So LOTS in the creation stream.  Little by little is the key and you might want to look into making clothes directly in Blender or other 3D programs if you have them. That seems to be what the pros hint at .   Good luck. Try looking up AVASTAR and see if that helps some.

 

If you do a SEARCH of this board you will likely find many bits of info that are helpful about marvelous designer. I found a very long list of topics.

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/forums/searchpage/tab/message?filter=labels%2Clocation&location=forum-board%3AMesh&q=marvelous+designer

[Medhue Simoni]

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Chic Aeon wrote:

I don't use MD either but from board posts here I do understand that there are many issues using it. Sorry, but true.  And as was said you need to import the obj file into Blender or another 3D program so that you can texture and weight paint. So LOTS in the creation stream.  Little by little is the key and you might want to look into making clothes directly in Blender or other 3D programs if you have them. That seems to be what the pros hint at

.   Good luck. Try looking up AVASTAR and see if that helps some.

 

If you do a SEARCH of this board you will likely find many bits of info that are helpful about marvelous designer. I found a very long list of topics.

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/forums/searchpage/tab/message?filter=labels%2Clocation&location=forum-board%3AMesh&q=marvelous+designer

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It's not a bad program to use, as it does simply how to make 3D clothing with stitching that will hang like real clothing. It makes very professional looking clothing, but that is all the program does. I would not be against using it. An OBJ is an OBJ no matter what program you use to make it. Blender did just implement some updates to their system to make clothing that can hang on your avatar, but I haven't played with it much and seems quite complicated at the moment.

The toughest part about making any clothing tho, is rigging it, and making it move the way it should.

[Teanna Kytori]

ah! ok

please tell me how to see the 2d images in photoshop. When i export it as a obj (in MD) i trytoput   it in photoshop and it dosent give me 2d images to draw on. just either a 3d object that i cant draw on or one layer that, if i take off, turns the object from white to shaded,

[Medhue Simoni]

Like I said, I don't use the program, so I don't know where to tell you to look. There should be something that looks like your clothing unfolded flat. You need to export that flat layout to a png, or jpg file format to use in Photoshop. You can also bring that clothing obj into blender, so you can apply the texture to it there and see how it will look.

[Sassy Romano]

As has been said, there is more to the workflow than MD to SL on its own.

Best suggestion is to import the object into blender, the pattern layout that you used in MD will be the UV layout.  You can then export the UV layout as a png (grid lines in effect) which you can then load into Photoshop.  Depending on what you've done in MD though, it's highly likely if not guaranteed that this UV layout will not be optimal at all.

Be aware that the MD effort is about 20% of all that's required.  Weighting it so that it moves and other refinements is the heavy lifting part, done in tools like blender.

Avastar plug-in for blender is your friend, it's not free but neither is MD and Avastar is very inexpensive.

(It might be worth trying to approach this from the other angle, make anything at all in blender, do some basic weight painting, export UV's, basic textures etc. first, so that you know what you're aiming for.  Then go back and import the .obj file and it will make more sense.  There are plenty of tutorials for doing this sort of thing in blender but it's a steep learning curve too - it is what it is, there is no short cut i'm afraid.)

[Spinell]

Hi there, Teanna. I use MD for clothesmaking for SL, so maybe I can give you a little hand.

I actually do not use MD for texturing and I discourage against it, but I have seen creations in SL that did the direct transition from MD to SL. Again, this is really a choice of preferences. You CAN texture everything with Md, although I do not know the details of uploading the texture directly.

Now, onto yours 2 questions:

Question 1: Next to the seams bars there are 3 buttons for pattern adjustments. To add an image on top of a pattern texture, click the button with a red P on it (should be the second button). A window will pop up for you to select the image you want to add (will probably need to have a transparent background) and then just click ok. The image acts like a normal pattern, so if you want to move it or scale it, just click the Transform Pattern tool.

Here is an example:

 

Question 2 is more complicated. As it has been mentioned before, you need an additional program to makethe connection between MD and SL. There is no other way. I use Blender (it's free) and a lot of people here in forums use it too, so you can get plenty of help. You need to export your creation from MD as obj. and then import that obj. into blender. From there, you can finally export it to .collada, which is the file system SL uses for meshes.

 

However, a word of warning. I will assume for a minute that since you're using MD, you're modeling clothing (although MD can be used to model many other things). If you ARE modeling clothing, you will need to learn about rigging. Rigging is the process of making mesh clothes move with the avatar. If you just upload, ofr example, a shirt from Md directly into SL, and then try to wear it on your avatar, it will be a stiff block. It won't bend.

If you need more info on rigging, just ask.

[Sassy Romano]

Just to add that you don't have to learn rigging if instead you can find someone that will do it for you (probably for a fee ).

 

That will let you concentrate on design and style and not mechanics but I've also seen some MD generated stuff that isn't worth rigging or would be immensely difficult yet was easy for MD to spit out.

 

As such, if you go this route, it would also be worth discussing with the rigger, what sort of things to avoid and how to make things in MD that will rig ok without reducing someone to tears.

 

Just remember that we all started with the first step, welcome to the long path of discovery.