Future Pilot - Marvelous Designer experement (Feedback greatly appreciated)

keket

Taking the plunge with learning Marvelous Designer. Here's where I'm at so far with her outfit, basic mats in Marmoset.

At the moment I still need to get the vest a more refined and add a couple of small pouches to it, along with probably going back to the base bodysuit and altering it a bit (Some extra slack here and there, making the elbow pads more visible along with some other stuff)

Then onto learning how to refine the detail in Zbrush and sculpting a helmet! I'm also tempted to see if it's possible to make some boots inside of MD.

Any crit would be greatly appreciated!

Biomag

2 suggestions:

1. As Marvelous main strength are big folds, I would make the green part of the suit more  baggy. This should give you some interesting folds to work with.

2. I would remove the pressure vest from the stomach area. To me it looks odd as I think I would be contraproductive in reality. Normally those are around the legs to prevent the blood from staying there forcing it in the upper body. Applying such pressure on the stomach would probably just cause discomfort. As you can see they tend to end at the upper part of the hips and don't go all the way up to the chest -> http://gpx741k9ffd3p5zv840ulv3j.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/DSC_0587.jpg


Except for that I think you have a good start

Regarding the boots in MD - keep in mind that you will have a hard time with the soles. I am not sure how useful MD is going to be for them , but its worth a shot.

keket

1) That's what I realized tonight, going to go back and add some extra slack in. I read that the best way of getting the folds and stuff looking good is to use the pins to tack them onto the body and cheat a bit, is that right?

2) Middle sections more of just a vest part, but i think adding a bit more slack to the pants might get that effect a bit more (and maybe changing the colour to differentiate). That reference pic is great, thanks for posting it!

For the soles I'm thinking if i make the soles in blender and import them in, I can kinda tack the boot to them using pins? I'll have to panic about that when I get to that stage

Thanks for the constructive feedback duder

Biomag

ad 1) hm... you can do it with pins, but you are doing something contraproductive - you are faking at a simulation. Not saying you shouldn't do it, but just to keep it in mind. John Gotch used pins on those great armors for Metal Gear -> LINK , but he himself says that he did it only back then as he lacked experience with MD and nowadays he aviods them. He pointed out that he isn't sure how well those pins work in case of animations used for wrinkle maps.

ad 2) I think the little 'belly' it produces looks strange. If you can replace it with some pouches or something else or just reduce the pressure within it it should look better - but that's just my opinion


Yes, that was the one solution I was thinking about too. Just keep in mind that the space between 2 avatars causes often problems - you can reduce the offset from the skin of the avatar, but still it is often hard to work with avatar parts that are close. So using a sole and a foot won't be easy. Probably a fake would serve you better. Another issue might be the material used for the simulation. I guess you will have to try some own settings as shoes are harder and thicker than most clothing.

keket

Oh man that vest is awesome, had John gone into any detail about how he managed to do those? Yeah pouches are going to be slapped onto the vest once I re-do that area, I totally agree it needs some smaller/med things to keep your eyes busy there.

Managed to do some quick alterations to the bodysuit, adding some slack into the arms and a couple of pockets/pouches, going to work on this base layer a bit more before going back over the pants and vest.

I'm getting some slowdown at 7 particle distance whilst working on the bodysuit, I assume this is normal for not-great rigs (i5 6400, gtx970)? I'm just using that setting for quick 'how does this look' settings but the pants dont seem to be giving me slowdowns at that res.

keket

Quick little update before I head to bed, stripped the vest back a bit and re-did it, also got my materials allot closer to how i think they 'should' be.

Just a basic pouch on there for the moment to see how well it works, still blocking it out for the most part!  

keket

Stripped the suit back to the base bodysuit again to try giving it some more character.

I'm not too sure how much I like these shoulder pockets over the ones I had.

Biomag

I like what you did to the green suit   The added lenght gives you some nice wringles to work with. I would just reduce the pressure in the black parts and give the pouch on the chest some softer edges.

Regarding the particale distance - don't forget that's the density of the whole patern you select. So a small patch has less verticies than a big one with the same density. A way to deal with those slow downs is to freeze parts that you don't need simulated at that moment. Keep the particle distance higher up to the time when you go to export your objs. Then simply reduce it, start a quick sim to smooth it out and stop the simulation again.

John didn't go into much detail, but he showed the MD file. He approached it like he does it with pouches - giving it a solid back, a strip of cloth each side and then working on the folds, fixing some with pins, if I remember it correctly. And naturally ZBrush to make it awesome.

keket

Biomag said:

Regarding the particale distance - don't forget that's the density of the whole patern you select. So a small patch has less verticies than a big one with the same density. A way to deal with those slow downs is to freeze parts that you don't need simulated at that moment. Keep the particle distance higher up to the time when you go to export your objs. Then simply reduce it, start a quick sim to smooth it out and stop the simulation again.

I think it might of been something up with the file itself, it was only happening with the original undersuit MD file, I remade it from scratch and it seems fine now. And yeah today I found out how awesome it is freezing things and the layers system

I had a quick play around with doing the vest again before passing out along with a few tweaks to the pressure pants (Worked on this for most of the day )

Thanks for the continued feedback Biomag

keket

Been a little under the weather the last couple of days so I haven't been able to do much.

But the thoughts about how gloves work made me crawl out of bed and quickly get the base pattern of the gloves mocked out today, now to go crawl back into bed and feel sorry for myself

Biomag

I think you got a solid result on the glove and I like your approach to see how far you can push MD. Productionwise the question would remain, how much you gain from doing them in MD and why not simply sculpt them from your base mesh, since they have only few folds and the close spaces between the finger can easily cause simulation issues. So if you go with MD make sure to get as much out of the patterns and sewing as you can for things that you find hard to sculpt in ZBrush

keket

Thanks man
I think one of the key things I'm discovering with MD is the ability to build up a catalog of stuff, so having a base glove I can make iterations of is probably going to save me over expanding and messing with the base mesh in zbrush when I want to make gloves. The simulation issues I've managed to work out by messing with the, uh, projection distance I think it was called? Though I agree there are still a few finnicky bits that want to stick so I'm probably going to splay the fingers out before export, it was hard enough getting those fingers on without condomfingers happening! Haha.

keket

Messed around today trying out some details with the gloves and refining their base pattern a bit more.

Biomag

You are getting solid results with that programm

May I suggest taking the gloves to ZBrush? Just so you can test the pipeline with it. You might find some things that come with more questions than you expected. Having just the gloves and not the whole suit should make things easier for you.

keket

Thanks man, and good shout on testing out the pipeline. If I have time tomorrow I'll import them into ZBrush as a test run and see how well I can do, maybe even try doing some texturing if it works well.

keket

Sorry for the weeks of silence, I ended up crashing my motorbike a couple of weeks back and I've been recovering from that, I'm hoping to pick this project back up in the new years sometime!

Biomag

I wish you a quick recovery!