Creating tight clothing

[Gian-Reto]

Okay, this is more a general questions about best practices than a real problem...

I am lately trying to create a piece of clothing for my first 3D Coat Character.... after tinkering around a bit I found out that while creating a new object for a no-so-tight-fitting piece of equipment like Armour works well, for a tight fitting piece like a bra its actually pretty hard to make sure that the Faces of the body and the bra don't intersect or show through too much...

I'm now playing with the thought of just creating a single mesh for a combined voxel object containing both the body and the bra, as this would solve all this intersecting problems, and painting (at least for me) takes very little time compared to sculpting and the retopo (which takes a long time because autopo is not doing the trick for me, the produced meshes seem to be unusable for a lower poly count), so I have little problem repainting the visible body parts for all different clothing variants.

But before I go down that route, and maybe make life harder for me than it has to be, maybe some noobish questions:

- Can I create a non closed mesh in the retopo room and have 3D Coat just bake the Voxel Details unto the existing mesh faces? Or can't 3D Coat handle a non closed mesh?

- Is there any easy way to "copy" a part of a mesh unto a new voxel object in the retopo room? Basically all I want to achieve is make sure my piece of tight fitting clothing has the edges at the same location as the body to prevent any errornous intersection because of different edge layouts.

Also, not directly linked to above questions, anyone ever created a chracter with a skirt or something similar, with the intention of animating the skirt (or other loose piece of cloth) with cloth physics? How did you do that? Created the skirt in a different 3D App? How did you fit it to the character?

I'm a little bit lost in this thematic (maybe I should just start to experiment around, but I just wanted to see if someone could give me a direction)

Thanks for any information

[johnnycore]

You could try using this tool to create cloth:

You can also use the cloth tool:

But I personally dont like these tools because it converts cloth to voxels afterwards.. I like keeping my cloth dynamic so I use 3DCoat for the cloth topology and simulate it Houdini..

[Gian-Reto]

Hm, okay, actually I'll handsculpt the wrinkles and stuff (just personal preference, maybe I should give the cloth tool another try, but I prefer control over ease of use (and sculpting wrinkles looks easy enough)...

I was more concerned about how to get a mesh that will fit the character and behave reasonably if animated by physics (e.g. in a game engine)... How to get a mesh that was suitable for cloth physics (like has not depth (which is excessive for cloth anyway), but still some sculpted details on it.

Also I see a big problem there with the rather low poly nature of game models, and the intersection of meshes that can result from this.... So how can I make sure that the diferent meshes "fit each other" (like, the edges match each other at the places where the meshes make contact) in an easy way? Should I just space them enough to make room for some sharp edges created by the low-poly mesh?

Sorry, maybe this is the wrong place to ask this question, and I should continue discussing this in a game engine forum.... if thats the case, ignore just the part which is not appropriate to this forum.

[johnnycore]

I would create a retopo mesh in the shape of any cloth piece.. for example some pants.

In the retopo room you can extude the retopo mesh a little so if fits around the model.

You can either paint some wrinkles in the paint room using per pixel paint or microvertex, or you can use the retopo mesh for cloth sim in 3dcoat --> convert to voxels --> sculpt detail and then --> bake voxel details back onto your retopo pants mesh

A little offset in the retopo mesh works fine for cloth, rigging the model + cloth is the way to get it correctly into animation.

Using the same vertex weight from the character should not result in a problem + you can add some extra bones to shift the cloth a little to fake physics.

[Gian-Reto]

Hi johnnycore

Thanks for the reply... good idea with the bones to fake physics. Something to keep in mind to save some CPU Work later on.

What about my other questions?

- Can I create a non closed mesh in the retopo room and have 3D Coat just bake the Voxel Details unto the existing mesh faces? Or can't 3D Coat handle a non closed mesh?

- Is there any easy way to "copy" a part of a mesh unto a new voxel object in the retopo room? Basically all I want to achieve is make sure my piece of tight fitting clothing has the edges at the same location as the body to prevent any errornous intersection because of different edge layouts.

Would it be possible / a good idea to do the following for a tight fitting skirt:

Copy the area of the legs the skirt should fit to > sculpt the basic shape of the skirt with that (filling in the are between the legs and where the skirt wont be so close fitting (buttcrack e.g.)) > retopo a mesh over that, leaving the bottom open, and giving it a slight extrusion factor > export to a 3D Program (for example Blender), copy the faces of the outside, flip the normals to create the inside faces (at least of the lower part of the skirt, if the cam will be prevented from doing upskirts in the game engine later on ) > reimport into the 3D Coat retopo room, create a nice uv layout > merge into the paint room, sculpt directly unto the mesh .

Good idea? Possible? Too complicated? Rubbish? ... hit me with your feedback

[johnnycore]

- Can I create a non closed mesh in the retopo room and have 3D Coat just bake the Voxel Details unto the existing mesh faces? Or can't 3D Coat handle a non closed mesh?

- Is there any easy way to "copy" a part of a mesh unto a new voxel object in the retopo room? Basically all I want to achieve is make sure my piece of tight fitting clothing has the edges at the same location as the body to prevent any errornous intersection because of different edge layouts.

Im not sure if I understand these questions correctly.. but if you look at the t-shirt cloth sim video for example you can see the tshirt is a non-closed mesh (it has not thickness) after the simulation it will get converted to voxels with a thickness.

But to awnser your question: it should be able to bake onto a non closed mesh (in theory)

With " Copying from existing mesh and paste in new voxel object" im not sure what you mean with this, do you mean part of a polygon mesh or voxel object?

A workaround for using non closed mesh as reference is import --> reference mesh it will not voxelize the object so you can use it purely as reference.

About your idea: it is possible to do so but you can also use double sided materials in some game engines.. Im not sure which one you're using?

Double sided materials save's a lot on poly count..

[Gian-Reto]

Okay, then I'll have to give non-closed meshes a try before I start doing other stuff. This would be really cool for Clothing and Stuff.

You are right, I'm 100% sure that I could just switch culling off on the Material... I had to use this before to let far away terrain block the sunlight in a large world.

I'm not so sure if this will really save me lots of processing power, but it should at least save some space on the Texture, and for something simple as a skirt, the fact that the front texture is just mirrored on the back should not be noticable....

I am using the Esenthel Engine by the way...

The question about copiyng the mesh was meant: I have my body mesh, I copy the part the clothing is hiding, put that over the clothing, and end up with a very similar polyflow for the body and the clothing. I hope that makes more sense

[johnnycore]

The question about copiyng the mesh was meant: I have my body mesh, I copy the part the clothing is hiding, put that over the clothing, and end up with a very similar polyflow for the body and the clothing. I hope that makes more sense

Ah yes! You can totally do that, you can do this in your 3d application of choice or in the retopo room, whatever works for you best..

This should also make rigging easier by transfering weigths..

[Gian-Reto]

Thanks johnnycore for the fast replies!

Okay, soo, If I copy the mesh in the retopo room and insert it on a different Retopogroup in a different UV Set, I see a new grey mesh, but its not usable as a retopo mesh...

But I'd like to copy the polyflow, and use it as retopo mesh on a different voxel object, in a different retopo group, for a different UV Set.... how do I do that? Would be immensly helpful for my clothing projects, to save me headaches later on.......

[johnnycore]

I've prepared a short videofor you to demonstrate how I usually create multiple cloth pieces.

I also showed a feature how you can define the baking range from your retopo to sculpt, this feature is mostly forgotten in the baking process.

For actual baking ontop of a model you need to switch the other retopo models off, you have to bake them seperately..

Another handy thing to know: you cannot import/export models when you are in select mode thats why I switched it on/off

I hope this helps you.

retopo.rar

[Gian-Reto]

johnny,

Thats exactly what I needed! Thank you very much for your well done video. I think I learned at least three new tricks that I need to try now from that video alone!

Should speed up my work considerably. Having a reference mesh at hand that I can import over similar voxel sculpts haven't even occured to me as a possibility before watching your video

Now back to the drawing board (wacom tablet) and planning world domination (getting my 3D Coat Model finished)

Gian-Reto

[johnnycore]

Hi GIan-Reto,

Good to hear I could help out!