Marvelous Designer / CLO to SL workflow outline?

[TimoAlero]

Howdy folks! I've been searching this forum (and others) for, simply put, a tutorial or description of the workflow for someone beginning in Marvelous, best export settings used, tools programs used, etc. I realize - or the sense I get, anyway - that MD gets a bad rap for lazy creators dumping rigged DAEs straight from it into SL, and it's the retopologizing/optimization process I'm struggling with the most. I have experience in rigging simple shapes, photoshop-and-local-textures based texturing and know enough to be dangerous, but I cop to having a lack of foundation (along with a measurable artistic disability that's alleviated by using tools like MD rather than being able to sculpt a hoodie from scratch.)

I'm not even looking to start a big successful fashion label, but I would like to dress my Jake + 3rd party devkit combo, and I'd like to learn as many best practices as I'm able. Even after my best attempts at re-meshing and optimization I see this:

 

(I realize textures do most of the magic in this process, and the shirt has none - it's the rough edges around the arms and the breaks in the seams down the edge I don't see in 'professional' work.)

But I digress into details. My eternal gratitude in advance for being pointed in the right direction. And maybe a free pair of trackies if I do get good ;E

[Extrude Ragu]

36 minutes ago, TimoAlero said:

retopologizing/optimization process I'm struggling with the most.

As I see it there are two things to optimise, the UV and the Mesh itself

Mesh

By default, MD Produces mesh that looks like this (Turn on wireframe in MD)

The (lack of) edge flow will produce the ugly shading everyone complains about in SL. Ideally you want quads that flow roughly with the body.

In newer versions of MD, all you have to do is turn on Remesh in the Property Editor

This will then produce quads mostly, although in my experience not perfect it can mess up in places

UV Map

Ideally, you want the islands in the UV map you are going to use to texture, to be the exact same shape as the original pattern you designed in the pattern window - As that's what your fabric would look like when it is laid out flat and will give you textures that map onto the fabric realistically

It's best to avoid unwrapping in external software, as it will be impossible to get this perfect pattern UV the way you can in MD. You can actually edit the UV map in MD, the UV editor is found up the top right:-

You want to arrange the fabric pieces to take up as much of the square as possible as you will get crisper final baked textures that way.

51 minutes ago, TimoAlero said:

I have experience in rigging simple shapes, photoshop-and-local-textures based texturing and know enough to be dangerous

I recommend using a materials based texture workflow and avoiding image editors entirely, so you can do procedural materials with fine control over the normal map, glossiness/metallic etc. Personally I use Ravage for Blender - Here's that same top textured in Ravage, previewing in Blender so you get an idea of the sort of graphical fidelity you can achieve with materials:-

The top is using many procedural elements, and also making use of PBR textures (with normal maps, metallic, roughness, bump) - You can see how this will make the texture 'pop'

Another software I know people use for creating materials is Substance Painter.

A key part of getting good materials into SecondLife is also knowing how to correctly pack materials for SecondLife so you don't lose the glossiness data (most people don't know how to do this, which is why glossiness in SL usually looks bad)

I keep a tutorial on how to channel pack baked materials on my personal website

Rigging

As for rigging, if you are using Blender I recommend making good use of the smooth weights of selected vertices option, gradient paint (radial), learning how to edit an individual verts weights in the N panel, creating test animations in blender so you can see how it deforms before you upload and of course using the test grid aditi so you don't waste all your L$ on test uploads

 

 

Hope it helps

[StarlanderGoods]

8 hours ago, TimoAlero said:

Howdy folks! I've been searching this forum (and others) for, simply put, a tutorial or description of the workflow for someone beginning in Marvelous, best export settings used, tools programs used, etc. I realize - or the sense I get, anyway - that MD gets a bad rap for lazy creators dumping rigged DAEs straight from it into SL, and it's the retopologizing/optimization process I'm struggling with the most. I have experience in rigging simple shapes, photoshop-and-local-textures based texturing and know enough to be dangerous, but I cop to having a lack of foundation (along with a measurable artistic disability that's alleviated by using tools like MD rather than being able to sculpt a hoodie from scratch.)

I'm not even looking to start a big successful fashion label, but I would like to dress my Jake + 3rd party devkit combo, and I'd like to learn as many best practices as I'm able. Even after my best attempts at re-meshing and optimization I see this:

 

(I realize textures do most of the magic in this process, and the shirt has none - it's the rough edges around the arms and the breaks in the seams down the edge I don't see in 'professional' work.)

But I digress into details. My eternal gratitude in advance for being pointed in the right direction. And maybe a free pair of trackies if I do get good ;E

Everything Extrude Ragu said is right, so I will just add.

Marvelous designer is AWFUL on the seams, even with the retopology option on, it will have a bunch of unnecesary vertices and edges that while they wont really look bad in the mesh, they can be a PITA for rigging.

The issue you show under the arm is a rigging issue, smooth the weights and remove unnecesary weights, like from the arms or shoulders that could be affecting that area.

Try to keep the borders of the clothes as simple an even (in weights) as possible to prevent that zig-zagging.  Also, having a clean topology that resembles the body doesnt hurt.

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The clipping issue, it could be a number of things, maybe your devkit is not exactly like the in-world body. Maybe it has stronger or lighter weights, so when you rig it in a neutral state, it looks fine, but in-world when you move the sliders to make the avatar thicker or lighter, the clothes will either get thicker than the body (if the weight is stronger) or wont get thick enough (if the weight is not strong enough).

The easy solution is, after rigging, edit the model and separate it a little bit from the body, to give you some margin of error, then export that.   You will notice a TON of male clothing that relies on hiding most of the mesh body, so you are not alone in the struggle.

 

[TimoAlero]

Thank you both for your responses, there's a lot of info I know I need and didn't even ask for - in particular, @Extrude Ragu's info on materials - specular is something I struggle with in particular, not because I don't understand what it's for; it just seems the TGAs used to make them look far more complicated than say, a simple PNG, so I was hoping down the line I'd figure out how blender could just bake one for me.

I gotta confess, though, just looking at those 'shader nodes' gives me a migraine right in the frontal lobes.

I may have been unclear in OP, but the example tanktop was indeed retopo'd into quads using the trial Exoside plugin in blender (and it still had a really high poly count, but I was just testing around in aditi). Ironically, I used CLO to make it because I wanted to try out some features it used that MD didn't; in doing so I lost MD's built-in retopo. I planned on doing that using blender and baking the texture from the hi-P model.

1 hour ago, StarlanderGoods said:

Everything Extrude Ragu said is right, so I will just add.

Marvelous designer is AWFUL on the seams, even with the retopology option on, it will have a bunch of unnecesary vertices and edges that while they wont really look bad in the mesh, they can be a PITA for rigging.

The issue you show under the arm is a rigging issue, smooth the weights and remove unnecesary weights, like from the arms or shoulders that could be affecting that area.

Try to keep the borders of the clothes as simple an even (in weights) as possible to prevent that zig-zagging.  Also, having a clean topology that resembles the body doesnt hurt.

I confess to just hitting 'skin; copy weights from [x] meshes' in Avastar and crossing my fingers. A couple of questions if I can:

1) When you use the word 'seams,' do you mean literal MD stitching seams, or a more technical, 3d-modeling definition like 'edge seams?' I worry this is again where my 'too big for my britches' attitude comes in without, at the very least, a game-design trade-school education.

2) is this weight smoothing process something you have to organically paint with those rainbow maps by hand? With a mouse or, Malacath help and orc, a wacom? I might be able to handle some minor touching up work but anything that draws upon the same brain energy that hand-drawn illustration does is simply beyond my grasp. It's why I started playing with 3D art like this to begin with; perhaps my expectations for scripted actions are indeed too high.

The belly clipping at the bottom I also chalk up to having not exported the MD garment as 'thick,' but that jacks up poly count and introduces a bunch of texture problems upon importing into blender. Enlarging the garment itself make the straps hover off my shoulders (even more than they already do). Unfortunately Frisky's belly doesn't have alpha 'slices' like a full body; I was thinking of using BOM and alpha layers if it came to it down the line. My immediate focus is the rough jagged polygons not 'moving' along the body and the clipping felt like an easier problem for Future Timo to deal with.

regarding retopology, I came across this on Reddit and it sounds like an interesting method:

Quote

Export high poly mesh, unwelded from Marvelous designer.

Flatten to 2D arrangement in Marvelous

Export high poly flat mesh, unwelded

Use the retopology tool in Marvelous to create a low poly version of the flattened pattern.

Export the low poly unwelded.

Import all three into Blender.

Give high poly flat mesh a shapekey.

Select high poly mesh and high poly flat mesh and 'join as shapekey' so when you move the shapekey slider from 0 to 1, your high poly flat mesh transforms to the high poly mesh shape. Keep your high poly flat as flat for now.

On the low poly flat mesh, select the sharp edges and mark them as seams. This is important if you want to keep each part of the pattern selectable separately after you merge vertices.

Add 'surface deform' modifier to low poly mesh and select your high poly flat mesh as the source.

Now go to your high poly flat mesh and slide the shapekey from 0 to 1. This will transform both the low poly and high poly flat meshes to the same shape as the high poly mesh.

Select your low poly mesh, select by seams, then merge by distance. Inspect vertices to see if any didn't merge and manually merge those vertices.

My sincere thanks again to you both.

[StarlanderGoods]

45 minutes ago, TimoAlero said:

Thank you both for your responses, there's a lot of info I know I need and didn't even ask for - in particular, @Extrude Ragu's info on materials - specular is something I struggle with in particular, not because I don't understand what it's for; it just seems the TGAs used to make them look far more complicated than say, a simple PNG, so I was hoping down the line I'd figure out how blender could just bake one for me.

I gotta confess, though, just looking at those 'shader nodes' gives me a migraine right in the frontal lobes.

I may have been unclear in OP, but the example tanktop was indeed retopo'd into quads using the trial Exoside plugin in blender (and it still had a really high poly count, but I was just testing around in aditi). Ironically, I used CLO to make it because I wanted to try out some features it used that MD didn't; in doing so I lost MD's built-in retopo. I planned on doing that using blender and baking the texture from the hi-P model.

I confess to just hitting 'skin; copy weights from [x] meshes' in Avastar and crossing my fingers. A couple of questions if I can:

1) When you use the word 'seams,' do you mean literal MD stitching seams, or a more technical, 3d-modeling definition like 'edge seams?' I worry this is again where my 'too big for my britches' attitude comes in without, at the very least, a game-design trade-school education.

2) is this weight smoothing process something you have to organically paint with those rainbow maps by hand? With a mouse or, Malacath help and orc, a wacom? I might be able to handle some minor touching up work but anything that draws upon the same brain energy that hand-drawn illustration does is simply beyond my grasp. It's why I started playing with 3D art like this to begin with; perhaps my expectations for scripted actions are indeed too high.

The belly clipping at the bottom I also chalk up to having not exported the MD garment as 'thick,' but that jacks up poly count and introduces a bunch of texture problems upon importing into blender. Enlarging the garment itself make the straps hover off my shoulders (even more than they already do). Unfortunately Frisky's belly doesn't have alpha 'slices' like a full body; I was thinking of using BOM and alpha layers if it came to it down the line. My immediate focus is the rough jagged polygons not 'moving' along the body and the clipping felt like an easier problem for Future Timo to deal with.

regarding retopology, I came across this on Reddit and it sounds like an interesting method:

My sincere thanks again to you both.

That method never worked right with me, but lets go in order.

1- I mean the literal seams, where the MD stitches are, but if you retopod the thing then it shouldnt matter. MD always makes a mess of those seams. Retopoing usually kills the MD UV map, and you would need the original MD UV map for the redding method, there is no definite "right" way of doing, you will find what suits you as you keep making stuff.

2- The weight smoothing, yes, its a manual process, you can do it easily with a mouse, there is a smoothing tool and it requires no artistic knowledge, think of it as sanding the rough edges.    https://gyazo.com/68852516326cf6f034bee256a62a79ea

3- Always export flat, unwleded, you can weld it in Blender later on, and if you want it thick you can put a solidify modifier in Blender. (always apply modifiers before exporting)

4- Regarding the clipping in the belly, you dont need to enlarge the whole garment, just select that part that clips, go to edit mode, click the proportional editing button, and just separate that clipping part a bit from the body
https://gyazo.com/276a62e6ee3fad50f0f02bed2e662cef

Edited September 21, 2022 by StarlanderGoods
added video links

[TimoAlero]

Brilliant. It's facts like point 3 and visuals like 2 and 4 I wish I had a big simple cliffnotes vault of, but for now it's clear I got plenty of work to get to in the direction you've pointed. I hope to pay the same help forward someday. Can't thank you enough!