Advice for fitting clothes on different mesh bodies?

[zhephs]

Hey, I make some clothes for the Maitreya body, and I want to make it fit to other bodies (Freya, Kemono FT, etc) do you guys have any advice for refitting clothes to the new body shape? Thanks!

[MIstahMoose]

Best way is to detach the clothing,  adjust shape and rerig. Theres alternative sloppy ways to do the same without detaching clothes from rig, but best to do it the right way

[Kyrah Abattoir]

Kemono is probably going to be the more involved port given that kemono has a very different skeleton.

The "even better" way would involve to do a retopo so you can match the new body's edge flow in a more optimal way but that really depends on how "far apart" the different bodies are.

[Fionalein]

3 hours ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

Kemono is probably going to be the more involved port given that kemono has a very different skeleton.

The "even better" way would involve to do a retopo so you can match the new body's edge flow in a more optimal way but that really depends on how "far apart" the different bodies are.

there are some (not many) anime shops that offer maitreya + kemono of the same dresses, so I guess it can be done -  I didn't look into the triangle layout and rigging though (stuff didn't interest me so far)

Edited May 19, 2018 by Fionalein

[Kyrah Abattoir]

It can absolutely be done but the shoulders are gonna require a significant amount of "massaging" into shape.

[imacrabpinch]

As a newer creator I'm a bit interested in this question as well. I know if your workflow only uses blender and MD, and you have the body dev kit, it would simply be a matter of importing that body into MD, draping it on the body (may take some tweaking), and then going back into blender or maya to rig it. You can use the demo bodies to test it in beta grid if you don't have them all. 

However, I'm a bit confused of what to do when you use zbrush or other sculpting in the workflow, if you wanted the in-game model to have the z brushed shape/detail. If I were to drape the z brushed model onto a body, it would lose its shape. Not sure how one would do this easily, short of sculpting each model and just trying to make them identical. I realize some of the finer details would just be a high poly baked on texture, but I'm not sure how to keep that overall wrinkle shape except for re-sculpting each one. Can anyone help provide insight on that?

Are people just kinda grabbing and reshaping to the other body?

Hopefully that made some sense.

Edited May 29, 2018 by imacrabpinch

[Kyrah Abattoir]

You should be remodeling, MD, Zbrush (or even Autocad hell)  are your design phase, not modeling phase. Once you're done with your lowpoly model you can then massage it to (somewhat) fit other bodies.

[OptimoMaximo]

There are deformers in all 3D tools. In my opinion, using the Lattice deformer in a few steps doesn't destroy the detail and texture. Never use models straight out of MD or sculpting tools for game type of assets, do a retopology on it, extract the maps for your texturing work and reshape the thing on each body using the lattice deformer. As i said, don't do it all in one shot, do it in a few passes with differently and increasingly higher resolution Lattice boxes and you're good to go. The weighting is best to be redone from scratch by copying the weights from each single body.

[imacrabpinch]

I wanted to bump this due to conflicting information. When I ask around, I see many other non-experienced people having the same questions. I've been doing my homework (because I rarely ask lazy questions), but I really want to be able to make clothes for all bodies as efficiently and accurately as possible. Note, I have all the official dev kits I need.

First of all, fitting to multiple mesh bodies seems to be a very common practice. I realize every workflow is different and there should be more than one way to do things, but I am still not crystal clear on the best practices of creating clothes for multiple mesh bodies.

Here is what I know will work, but is not optimal: Simply create the garmet in MD and drape on each body as a first step - ensuring you are satisfied with your UV map. - then you can use the same UV throughout. The problem I have with this, is that it limits your UV map. I've seen at least a couple creators use this approach - but I like to use zbrush and remap into polygroups, etc so I can play with it later on more.

What I thought I could do (but can't seem to) : Use the OBJ to garmet import feature in MD as a last step - drape it on the body I need, and export. - The problem I have with this is that the OBJ file seems to lose its UV map (no matter what settings I've tried). Also turns it to triangles initially, which can't seem to be quaded once back in MD - I can quad this back in blender, but it doesn't end up matching 100% (therefore can't transfer/link the UV!) - I could technically work this way and re-uv and rebake each one, but that seems very un-necessary and time consuming.

The last resort - I find this an imperfect method - would be to simply grab (using sculpt tools) to fit the body kit in blender/maya. People have also said to use the lattice modifier, but I also have found this to be somewhat imperfect results - or maybe I need practice.

I just really want to know how EVERYONE else is doing this, seemingly common practice thing. I know a couple years ago before mesh bodies, there was a mayastar plug-in that changed the size of the mesh garmet to fit xsmall, small, large, etc. - Is there a trick having to do with using the sliders?

What am I missing?! Please help. Thank you!

 

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

@imacrabpinch As Optimo points out above, using the Lattice Deformer tool is probably the easiest way to refit your meshes to different bodies. 

One of the benefits of the Lattice Deformer (in Maya at least) is that you can detach and reattach different lattices to your model.  So once you create a set of lattice deformers that adjust the overall shape of a model to fit the bodies you're working with you can export them and then reload and apply them to other models. 

In the majority of cases you'll still need to make additional adjustments afterwards since each model will have different dimensions and topology so its very rare that the same lattice will work perfectly for two different models, but it does cut down on the amount of time you need to spend adjusting each model compared to having to creating a new lattice for each article of clothing you make.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

I basically don't.

Each mesh body has a pretty much unique topology & polygon density and to get the best possible fit your mesh has to match the source body properly or have a gross excess of polygons. And since I remove pretty much any polygon that isn't strictly necessary, the outfit is pretty much made for single body in the end, two sometimes, by chance.

[imacrabpinch]

34 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

@imacrabpinch As Optimo points out above, using the Lattice Deformer tool is probably the easiest way to refit your meshes to different bodies. 

One of the benefits of the Lattice Deformer (in Maya at least) is that you can detach and reattach different lattices to your model.  So once you create a set of lattice deformers that adjust the overall shape of a model to fit the bodies you're working with you can export them and then reload and apply them to other models. 

In the majority of cases you'll still need to make additional adjustments afterwards since each model will have different dimensions and topology so its very rare that the same lattice will work perfectly for two different models, but it does cut down on the amount of time you need to spend adjusting each model compared to having to creating a new lattice for each article of clothing you make.

Thanks. I believe each lattice could be exported/imported in blender as well. I suppose I'll just need to work on using that tool more efficiently.

What frustrates me is I think there is another way that is easier, but I haven't yet worked it out - probably because I'm a noob. I figured out I can triangulate a garmet - save and Import it into MD - shape it exactly how it should be ,100% accurate within 30 seconds or less- save and import back into blender - and then data transfer the UV map from one to the other (and because it was triangulated, they match). The new problem I have is the UV map, although looks like it should, is still not translating in the correct vertex order - and I feel like there is something else I could do to fix this but my knowledge limits me- frustrating. I should probably be on the blender forums to ask about these.

For now, I'll continue to work on my lattice shaping skills.

Also curious : Do you know if anyone on MP sell the "starter" lattice for each body?

Thanks all for the help - just trying to learn as much as possible.

[OptimoMaximo]

7 minutes ago, imacrabpinch said:

Also curious : Do you know if anyone on MP sell the "starter" lattice for each body?

Although what Fluffy says is true and you can attach/detach Lattices after import (using node editor wiring and piping as there's no menu call for attach/detach, at least in version 2017), the problem sits in the specific mesh you're trying to fit, so a previously working Lattice won't necessarily work as expected on any other model you may want to refit.

As i was saying in my previous post, it's just a matter of doing it in steps, using a low res Lattice at first for rough reshaping, applying the deformation, again with another Lattice with higher resolution and keep reshaping this way until you get a close-to-perfect match, and finally fixing the smaller discrepancies using SoftSelection (Maya)/Proportional Editing (Blender).

There is another system though, when two devkits bodies are very similar, using the shape sliders, but this method usually ends up with stretched geometry/textures and, therefore, it is not always optimal. The wrap deformer (Maya) provides a similar and better solution to use the shape sliders approach, although it also provides pretty headaches to avoid name clashing that Maya is so picky about when setting up the resizing scene, requiring imports of static versions of the target mesh body before rigging, resulting in some time being wasted in comparison to the Lattice method, which is anyway more accurate in the end.

[imacrabpinch]

23 hours ago, OptimoMaximo said:

Although what Fluffy says is true and you can attach/detach Lattices after import (using node editor wiring and piping as there's no menu call for attach/detach, at least in version 2017), the problem sits in the specific mesh you're trying to fit, so a previously working Lattice won't necessarily work as expected on any other model you may want to refit.

As i was saying in my previous post, it's just a matter of doing it in steps, using a low res Lattice at first for rough reshaping, applying the deformation, again with another Lattice with higher resolution and keep reshaping this way until you get a close-to-perfect match, and finally fixing the smaller discrepancies using SoftSelection (Maya)/Proportional Editing (Blender).

There is another system though, when two devkits bodies are very similar, using the shape sliders, but this method usually ends up with stretched geometry/textures and, therefore, it is not always optimal. The wrap deformer (Maya) provides a similar and better solution to use the shape sliders approach, although it also provides pretty headaches to avoid name clashing that Maya is so picky about when setting up the resizing scene, requiring imports of static versions of the target mesh body before rigging, resulting in some time being wasted in comparison to the Lattice method, which is anyway more accurate in the end.

Thank you for your advice. I've been following it, but use of the lattice modifier seems to take a long time to perfect, especially since the dev kits are T pose and A pose, leaving any sleeves to be rotated. Its been hard to tweak perfectly. I'm not completely satisfied with the results or method.

I'm still a bit unsettled to this solution, because it may actually be faster to re-UV and rebake for every body at this point. - just wish I knew for sure exactly what the other 50+ creators who use an MD to Zbrush to 3D program workflow are doing.

[OptimoMaximo]

2 hours ago, imacrabpinch said:

especially since the dev kits are T pose and A pose

That is an issue due to the 3D software you're using. In Maya or 3DSMax you can pose the avatar to fit the clothing pose, bind it and it still works as expected.

On the other hand, pivoting from a different location to rotate sleeves or pants legs should be possible ie: set your pivot point to the shoulder location while rotating the sleeve geometry with proportional editing. Then the use of a Lattice should be greatly easier

2 hours ago, imacrabpinch said:

I'm still a bit unsettled to this solution, because it may actually be faster to re-UV and rebake for every body at this point. - just wish I knew for sure exactly what the other 50+ creators who use an MD to Zbrush to 3D program workflow are doing.

Not really the best workflow solution. Although making the UV again might be a matter of few minutes, re-baking is quite time consuming.