Clothing pipeline in Games

GSpa96

Hi everybody. I am starting to try out marvelous designer for a character I am making. I get the advantages of using the simulator instead of manually creating clothing, since it makes a lot faster making creases, folds and should also be more accurate, but... I am not really sure on the complete pipeline... is it something like: Marvelous - Zbrush for detailing - Retopology in any program - baking and texturing.... and then?

For both portfolio renders and game engine use, I am not sure what's the next step: say that I need to pose my character and it has a cloak, how do i pose it making it seem in motion? Or how do I tell the engine that this part here is clothing or chainmail and when my character walks or runs, it needs to move based on its weight? Thanks in advance

Yerus

I have a limited knowledge in this but I see very few games that actually simulates their cloth in-game. Most often bake the simulations on bones so they do their part in the animation loops. There are a few game engines, you will have to study one of them, they have a lot of functionalities of all kind. 

GSpa96

Bake the simulations on bones? Is it basically rigging the clothes?

So the only reason to learn marvelous, for an aspiring 3d character artist, is just for having a basemesh to work with in zbrush?

Ghogiel

If you've gone the route of MD> ZB> retopo> texturing....Basically rigging the clothes would be the next thing yeah.

It's often then set up with controllers or rigid bodies and physics simmed so it's interacting with the characters animations that are going to be used in game and then it's all baked down to key frames and exported to engine. With the physics set up you'd sort out the weightiness of say chainmail on one part and more flowy cloth for a cape on a different part of the rig.
More rarely the rigid bodies are set up and instead of simmed in say maya, it's exported and set up in the game so it sims there live.

I think you are slighly down playing the results you get with MD compared to just ZB sculpting cloth, but essensitailly yeah, it's just a really high quality base mesh.