Marvelous Designer. Some noob questions...

Kligan

Hi!
I recently started learning marvelous designer, and I'm already got stuck on basic controls.
I can't for the life of me figure out how to drag and select multiple objects in 3d view!
It says right here in the manual:

But no matter what I try, it doesn't work. Selection rectangle doesn't appear. I can only click on individual objects, and then control+click to add more objects to my selection. Or I can drag and select multiple patterns in 2d view.
But it doesn't work in 3d view!
It's especially annoying when I need, for example, deactivate an object, and it has a bunch of piping on it. So I have to click each piping individually.
What am I doing wrong? How do I get selection rectangle working?

Celosia

As far as I know there's no way to drag and select in the 3D view, and the manual doesn't seem to imply there is. You hold and click.

Kligan

Celosia said:

As far as I know there's no way to drag and select in the 3D view, and the manual doesn't seem to imply there is. You hold and click.

Hold what? Q? Holding Q doesn't do anything. Holding control and clicking selects multiple objects. That's not what it says in the manual though.
If there's really no way to use selection rectangle to select multiple objects in 3d view - that's just stupid. Why not?

Celosia

You have to ask the devs. I'm not responsible for their choices nor the docs, which I agree aren't good.

Where is it written in the manual MD supports click and drag to select in the 3D viewport though? Because there's nothing in the screenshot you posted.

Kligan

Celosia said:

You have to ask the devs. I'm not responsible for their choices nor the docs, which I agree aren't good.

Where is it written in the manual MD supports click and drag to select in the 3D viewport though? Because there's nothing in the screenshot you posted.

I'm sorry for this misunderstanding, I'm not accusing you of anything
I just naturally assumed that "hold to select multiple objects" means a selection rectangle... like... in literally every other piece of software on planet earth. 

Celosia

They meant hold the key then click on the objects. It's quite possible the docs are outdated or they just failed to review it and omitted "shift" from the "Hold to..." sentence. Q doesn't work here either, but I'm using MD on Linux through wine so things can be a bit different. You can use shift instead, that's the default for multi-selection in most programs.

You'd be surprised by how terrible is the UIX and remapping of most pieces of software on planet Earth, with specialized software in particular being the worst offenders. 😂

And I'm not a fan of MD controls and the limitations of their remapping. You have my sympathies!

Kligan

I have another question.
Can I somehow create a low-poly mesh for piping?
I want to make sofa pillows with thick piping along the seams. The problem is, however, is that I can easily make a low-poly version of the pillows themselves inside MD, but I can't seem to find a way to reduce the topology for piping.
And doing re-topology by hand in maya would be super time consuming, because it's all bendy and wrinkly:


The only thing that comes to mind is removing piping and re-doing it as additional patterns, sewn onto the edges of my pillows, to create tubes. But that also gonna take additional time, although not nearly as much as manual re-topology, and I'll have to re-do all my simulations.

There's gotta be a way to make low-poly out of MD's pipings! Is there?

Celosia

I never had to make pillow pipings but when I need do to similar small seam-adjacent details I leave them as seams (or even use proxy piping if I need their volume to affect something in the simulation) and when the garment is ready:

1. I export it to my 3D software of preference without any proxy pipings if I used them.
2. Select those seams and turn them into curves.
3. Use curve to mesh to turn them into the target geometry.

I believe if you really wanted to use the MD mesh as highpoly this approach should still be feasible with some adjustments.

MD meshes can be quad instead of tris meshes, but using that option won't guarantee they can be unsubdivided into a lowpoly. MD also has a retopo area but I'm not a big fan of it due the UI and I don't think it'd be worth the trouble for this kind of detail.

An alternative you could experiment with is to set a duplicate of the piping to quads and lower resolution to try and get a continuous stripe from it, but I don't think it will work. Often when you change the resolution of a pattern it gets a bit glitchy and you have to simulate for a moment for it to fall back into place, and you can't simulate the piping if you want to have a high and low poly version because then they would no longer match.

Kligan

Thanks for the advice!
I guess making the piping in maya along the curve of the seam would've been easier, yeah.

I already made them in MD the way I mentioned before - by creating tubes from separate rectangles and then stitching them to the edges of pillows.
I then switched them to quads, exported as highpoly; reduced "particle density" and exported as lowpoly.

Had to do some cleaning up on lowpoly manually in maya, but the end result after baking is pretty nice: