Learning Mesh Clothes cration need help please.

[BrookeCarter01]

I have some knowledge of 3d mesh objects creation and I wanted to learn to create my own mesh clothes for mesh avis in Sceond Life. I went through some creation tutorials and I got the jist of creating clothes and sewing and some buttons work and even pocket creations. One thing I had issues with trying to learn in Blender 3d mesh creation was texturing. I know you can only add 8 materials per mesh object. And I know how to map out faces for texture applying in Blender. From what I saw in Marvelous is that you can have the normals and uv maps and specular created in it. Here is my question(s):

 

1. Do you export the normals and uv's and Specular maps FROM Marvelous and upload that into SL? Or do you take that to Blender with the mesh OBJ and assign it there after rigging?

2.  Can you re edit the uv map by picking more faces to a mesh clothing item and if so what does it do to the Marvelous designer uv image then?

3. It was my understanding that Marvelous does all the mapping and you jsut take in the mesh obj clothes to rig it to body types in Blender and import that into sl?

4. Are the ao's uv maps, specualars and normal maps that creators import to give out as full perm from Marvelous directly or from Blender?

Any help creators can provide would be so helpful I have looked and looked for this information in youtube can't find proper information.

[Salt Peppermint]

Marvelous is a cloth animation software not a texturing software at all. The most common / industry standard  to texture your mesh is Substance Painter. You bake all your maps in there and can bake the info from your high poly model to your low poly model which you then upload. You do not take the mesh of Marvelous to upload either, because you would need to retopologize is first ( although you can retopo nicely with the MD11 tools now, so that would work). For substance painter it's best to use a fbx mesh file. Generally obj works too but in my experience it often creates issues, so I would always recommend to export your mesh as fbx for substance. 

the normal and spec map you plug in inworld into your mesh, you do not give those to customers. ( unless you want them to modify and redo those, of course you can, but that would require some creating skills from cutomer side). So normally all the maps are already set with your mesh and you can make a hud to change colours and/or materials as well. 

as for the number of materials, the goal is to use a little as possible to achieve the best quality as possible. The more materials you add, the higher your render cost will get. So it's always a bit jugling about how many you really need to have nice quality (also what size!) but also keeping render cost low. Not everything has to be a full 1024 texture either.  On that note, you also would try to bake the info of your high poly model into your low poly model. Not every tiny fold needs to be actually modeled into the ready to upload mesh. All the detailing happens in the high poly. Finding a good balance there is not easy but def comes with experience and practice 

[BrookeCarter01]

2 minutes ago, Salt Peppermint said:

Marvelous is a cloth animation software not a texturing software at all. The most common / industry standard  to texture your mesh is Substance Painter. You bake all your maps in there and can bake the info from your high poly model to your low poly model which you then upload. You do not take the mesh of Marvelous to upload either, because you would need to retopologize is first ( although you can retopo nicely with the MD11 tools now, so that would work). For substance painter it's best to use a fbx mesh file. Generally obj works too but in my experience it often creates issues, so I would always recommend to export your mesh as fbx for substance. 

the normal and spec map you plug in inworld into your mesh, you do not give those to customers. ( unless you want them to modify and redo those, of course you can, but that would require some creating skills from cutomer side). So normally all the maps are already set with your mesh and you can make a hud to change colours and/or materials as well. 

as for the number of materials, the goal is to use a little as possible to achieve the best quality as possible. The more materials you add, the higher your render cost will get. So it's always a bit jugling about how many you really need to have nice quality (also what size!) but also keeping render cost low. Not everything has to be a full 1024 texture either.  On that note, you also would try to bake the info of your high poly model into your low poly model. Not every tiny fold needs to be actually modeled into the ready to upload mesh. All the detailing happens in the high poly. Finding a good balance there is not easy but def comes with experience and practice 

Thank you so so very much for this information it really does clear some stuff up. When I learned 3d mesh object creation like 2 years ago right, re topology was used to reduce poly counts so that you don't lose the main structural details or whatever. Are you telling me you have to retoplogy every single mesh item you create? Weight painting scares the hell out of me now to know that you need to retopo everything hmm not sure it's worth the effort it is a lot of work to create mesh clothes. I have a lot of respect for those who create their own and would love to do it from scratch. Not sure I have the patience lol. Now in Blender with 3d objects you can just reduce polycount by decimating it with one click in edit mode and removing lose faces and vertices with some clicks I know how to do that. Can't we do that instead of all this retopo stuff?

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

5 minutes ago, BrookeCarter01 said:

Now in Blender with 3d objects you can just reduce polycount by decimating it with one click in edit mode and removing lose faces and vertices with some clicks I know how to do that. Can't we do that instead of all this retopo stuff?

Technically you can but there are some very good reasons why you shouldn't.  Having the right topology can make a lot of difference to how well your mesh deforms when animated.  There are some good examples of body/limb topology on the polycount wiki and plenty of tutorials available on various sites.

[Salt Peppermint]

Quote

4 hours ago, BrookeCarter01 said:

Thank you so so very much for this information it really does clear some stuff up. When I learned 3d mesh object creation like 2 years ago right, re topology was used to reduce poly counts so that you don't lose the main structural details or whatever. Are you telling me you have to retoplogy every single mesh item you create? Weight painting scares the hell out of me now to know that you need to retopo everything hmm not sure it's worth the effort it is a lot of work to create mesh clothes. I have a lot of respect for those who create their own and would love to do it from scratch. Not sure I have the patience lol. Now in Blender with 3d objects you can just reduce polycount by decimating it with one click in edit mode and removing lose faces and vertices with some clicks I know how to do that. Can't we do that instead of all this retopo stuff?

 

yes, I retopologize every mesh I make. you do need the retopo to reduce polycount but no auto-retopo will give you a proper useful result because as Fluffy mentioned above, you need a good edge loop flow for animation. so you need to pay attention where joints are, those areas need a specific loop flow and also a few more edge loops than the rest , so they animate nicely. I did make a few tutorials for substance on my youtube channel, geared to SL use specifically. maybe those can help you a little . older ones cover rigging as well but I work in Maya, so those are probably not so useful for Blender

 

 

[BrookeCarter01]

1 minute ago, Salt Peppermint said:

yes, I retopologize every mesh I make. you do need the retopo to reduce polycount but no auto-retopo will give you a proper useful result because as Fluffy mentioned above, you need a good edge loop flow for animation. so you need to pay attention where joints are, those areas need a specific loop flow and also a few more edge loops than the rest , so they animate nicely. I did make a few tutorials for substance on my youtube channel, geared to SL use specifically. maybe those can help you a little . older ones cover rigging as well but I work in Maya, so those are probably not so useful for Blender

 

 

I want to ask you couldn't we just use Photoshop for texturing rather then substance painter? And ty for links I will watch them been looking around for videos that guide you from creating mesh with all the steps all the way to upload in SL. My goal is to make great quality low poly mesh but with as little steps as possible.

[Salt Peppermint]

19 minutes ago, BrookeCarter01 said:

I want to ask you couldn't we just use Photoshop for texturing rather then substance painter? And ty for links I will watch them been looking around for videos that guide you from creating mesh with all the steps all the way to upload in SL. My goal is to make great quality low poly mesh but with as little steps as possible.

you can absolutely use Photoshop too. but just know that Photoshop is removing its 3d functions, so eventually those will not work anymore. atm you still can open a dae file and texture . but you can not bake high poly to low poly in photoshop. I often use a combo of both. but nothing beats Substance in bakes imho. you have all the control over your maps and you can get very very realistic results. 

 

[Salt Peppermint]

also, there is really no "one right way " to do it. there are many options. in the end it will depend on personal preference and workflow and that will vary a lot from creator to creator

[BrookeCarter01]

Just now, Salt Peppermint said:

also, there is really no "one right way " to do it. there are many options. in the end it will depend on personal preference and workflow and that will vary a lot from creator to creator

What has really been throwing me off and I guess it gets confusing when you have made 3d mesh stuff and try to relate that to clothing. in Blender we would map faces out and assign material to it even blank ones so you can just throw textures onto it in SL in world. SO creating a blank mapped off faces. When you are in Marvelous Designer and you save your obj file off with it's maps let's say right, how does the uv map know you want say 4 faces on the same top or something how do you map it out in Marvelous please? Or do you do that in blender to the uv map before rigging the mesh? Baking is for uploading so the textures cannot be edited after upload right so what I wanna do is just save the mesh off mapped faces to pass to my husband to do the texturing part he is better at that. My role is mostly going to be fixing his meshes and then rigging it he will either help create or just do the texturing. We both use our best skills when we work together  But I figure it is good for both of us to know all the steps first then we can figure out who's gonna do what.

[BrookeCarter01]

oh and I have been following your tutorial in substance painter that dress looks like something I had bought in SL I have a chain dress like that I picked up somehwere in SL so I guess you made that 😮 that's neat n stuff

[Salt Peppermint]

46 minutes ago, BrookeCarter01 said:

What has really been throwing me off and I guess it gets confusing when you have made 3d mesh stuff and try to relate that to clothing. in Blender we would map faces out and assign material to it even blank ones so you can just throw textures onto it in SL in world. SO creating a blank mapped off faces. When you are in Marvelous Designer and you save your obj file off with it's maps let's say right, how does the uv map know you want say 4 faces on the same top or something how do you map it out in Marvelous please? Or do you do that in blender to the uv map before rigging the mesh? Baking is for uploading so the textures cannot be edited after upload right so what I wanna do is just save the mesh off mapped faces to pass to my husband to do the texturing part he is better at that. My role is mostly going to be fixing his meshes and then rigging it he will either help create or just do the texturing. We both use our best skills when we work together  But I figure it is good for both of us to know all the steps first then we can figure out who's gonna do what.

I'll try to explain one by one

even if you assign blank faces in blender, you do not want to throw just a diffuse texture on it in SL. At least not if you want it in nice quality. You would want shadows in there , which you need a Ambient occlusion map for as a minimum base. You do not want to export a mesh from Marvelous to use directly in SL at all. you can export textures of a set material there and place your UV's too but that is really not the strength of Marvelous. You would do that in belnder before rigging it. and then either export it to photoshop to texture there or to Substance.

Baking maps doesn't have anything to do with the mesh not being modifiable or not. it's for preparing the actual texture. baking doesn't mean you bake it into the mesh itself. it's the term to create your various maps that you need for your mesh. like baking information from high poly to low poly. This doesn't bake into the actual mesh but only gives you various maps. In substance you can bake height maps for example and have them show in the diffuse maps , so your texture becomes very "alive" so to speak, and gives the illusion of 3d information like fabric surfaces, wrinkles etc. The normal map will enhace that . In SL you can plug in 3 maps: diffuse, ( your coloured actual texture), Normal map and Specular map. 

[BrookeCarter01]

3 hours ago, Salt Peppermint said:

I'll try to explain one by one

even if you assign blank faces in blender, you do not want to throw just a diffuse texture on it in SL. At least not if you want it in nice quality. You would want shadows in there , which you need a Ambient occlusion map for as a minimum base. You do not want to export a mesh from Marvelous to use directly in SL at all. you can export textures of a set material there and place your UV's too but that is really not the strength of Marvelous. You would do that in belnder before rigging it. and then either export it to photoshop to texture there or to Substance.

Baking maps doesn't have anything to do with the mesh not being modifiable or not. it's for preparing the actual texture. baking doesn't mean you bake it into the mesh itself. it's the term to create your various maps that you need for your mesh. like baking information from high poly to low poly. This doesn't bake into the actual mesh but only gives you various maps. In substance you can bake height maps for example and have them show in the diffuse maps , so your texture becomes very "alive" so to speak, and gives the illusion of 3d information like fabric surfaces, wrinkles etc. The normal map will enhace that . In SL you can plug in 3 maps: diffuse, ( your coloured actual texture), Normal map and Specular map. 

Salt this might be a lot to ask you but if you could do a personal tutorial video from step 1 to upload in sl of something very basic that has at least 2 or 3 faces colored on it like texturing sleeves differently then front and back of a basic t shirt. Then after you created it what do you do with each file what do you export it as in each area and your settings for each etc. Something very simple a to z then you upload in SL and the last steps you take there which I am aware of like applying texture spec and norms. Or if it is easier for you perhaps a notecard with the instructions on it. I can easily follow that along since I am aware of terminology n stuff. I would pay you for it of course video or notecard  Please