From Retopo to Paint then to cloth

[wolfiboy]

Hello!

I'm new to 3D-Coat and I love it! I'm really impressed by Andrew's story and Pilgway's 'voice'. Praise the Lord!

At the moment I'm using it mostly for adding some details for objects I created in Lightwave and creating cloth. And therefore my question is following: I'm creating a dress for a female medieval figure. The dress should be quite wide and fall in several foldings. The cloth has an ornamentation if form of a vertical golden line. This line should follow properly with the foldings. So I thought following: I create the dress in Retopo, bring it to the paint-room where I paint the line, bring it to Voxels for the cloth-simulation and then bring it back to Retopo from where I will export it as a mesh to work with it in Lightwave.

Now my questions:

1) Are all this steps possible in 3D-Coat without export/import? I haven't found a way to bring the Retopo-mesh to paint and then to voxel again in order to do a cloth simulation, because in the paint-room the mesh is converted into a voxel-object and therefore can't be used for the cloth-simulation. A way could be to export it after painting as a .lwo-object and import it in the voxel-room as an external cloth-mesh?

2) I did the retopo in symmetry mode. When I send it to the paint-room with 'Retopo - Merge for per-pixel painting with normalmap' it shows only one half of the model. How must this be done to get both sides of the model?

I attached a screenshot of the retopo-room.

Any ideas are welcome! Thank you!

Wolfgang alias wolfiboy

[Psmith]

Wolfgang:

It looks like this kind of thick medieval dress would not have many more than a few large folds, (well, 5 or 6), emanating from the waist. To get a successful cloth simulation, the bottom part of the dress would have to be a separate entity, (a single, circular patch), suspended above a model of the bottom half of the torso and legs - and then "dropped".

At any rate, you would have to do this before any topology was applied to the patch - and after creating topology, then you would do your painting. I don't believe you could successfully use voxel baking in this situation.

So, a better solution might be to use the Sculpt Room tools to deform the already textured "cloth" - even though this would be a painful exercise.

The best solution would be to export the textured dress and figure to an application that includes cloth simulation, and run the simulation and rendering there.

To get proper symmetry transferred to the Paint Room from the Retopo Room, choose "Apply symmetry to current layer" from the Retopo menu and then press "S" and set the symmetry to "None" - then do your "Merging" to the Paint Room.

Greg Smith

[wolfiboy]

Hi Greg,

thank you for the quick answer.

Hm, I see. So I will export it from Retopo to Lightwave or directly to the paint-room, then work on it in the UV-section and then export it to LW. The problem with the cloth-simulation in Lightwave is, that it doesn't look so 'romantic', it is just straight technical correct.(image attached)

By the way, to merge only the mesh to the paint-room I used 'Retopo - Merge patch (per-pixel)'. Otherwise the result is a kind of boolean subtraction of the mesh and the body, i.e. the figure is to detailed and doesn't really represent the mesh.

Anyway, thank you very much for the very fast reply and the info about symmetrie.

I will go on with testing.

Cheers,

Wolfgang

[Dreamcube017]

Hm from the looks of the result from Lightwave, you want the bottom part to spread out I guess?

If you just want a few wrinkles, I would paint them in manually or just simulate part of the dress.

I'm not sure, but 3D Coat may give you somewhat the same thing if you just simulate the entire dress at once.