ANIMATED CLOTHES in Marvelous Designer! | Blender to Marvelous Designer Workflow

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] hey guys so this is going to be a quick tutorial on how to give your animated characters some clothes using marvelous designer i only learned this myself when i was working on my recent alternate realities animation challenge so i decided to share it as an exclusive patreon only video before i release the breakdown video on my youtube channel so think of this as a more detailed version of one of the techniques that i'll be sharing in the final video anyway to make it easy for you to follow along i'll be using a character from mixomo with a simple walking animation make sure you choose a character with tight closing if you're getting it online or just no clothes at all which is the best of course this is because you want to minimize the chances of the body mesh intersecting with itself which might happen if you were to use a character with loose clothes from somewhere like miximo and that could give you some glitchy results a character without clothes will be the best because that way the clothes will give you a very realistic result by deforming to the shape of the body which wouldn't be possible if there was a layer of clothes underneath that being said our character here still has a layer of clothing but it's fine for the purpose of this video now what i suggest that you do is download the walk animation and also a t-pose animation if you're using a miximo character i'll explain why in just a minute you can download the character as a fbx file and then import it into blender by going to file import fbx do the same for the t-pose model as well and just keep that model aside for now now you want to go to pose mode with the main characters rig selected then select all the keyframes that you see here in the timeline and drag them to frame 30 or so by pressing g or the right mouse button now head back to object mode select the t pose rig switch to pose mode again and then copy the pose once again go back to object mode select the main character egg and then go to pose mode then make sure you are in frame 1 and then press ctrl v to paste the t pose now this should work directly because the rig is exactly the same for both the characters and a keyframe should be added in frame 1. the reason why we're doing this is so that we have a nice base to prepare our clothes and then let them deform and transition slowly into the animation with around 30 frames or one second in this case this doesn't only make the designing process much easier but also gives the simulation some time to deform properly now later in blender after we're done making the clothes we can drag those keyframes back to frame one and it should work just fine now just hide the t pose character select everything and export it as an alembic file i've researched a bit on what file format to use and also tested out the different ones available here to see which one has the best compatibility and found that alembic works the best using fbx gave me a lot of issues with the animations the root motion was glitchy and sometimes even the character disappeared whenever i tried to play the animation in marvelous designer so yeah just select the model export it as an alembic file turn on this only selected objects check box and also set the frame start and end according to the duration of your animation now let's open up marvelous designer don't worry if you've never used this software before i was using it for the first time as well and found it surprisingly easy to understand with its intuitive ui i'm only using the trial version so it says that it'll expire very soon i might pick up a license when i feel like i'm going to be using it a lot for my projects but yeah since it's a free trial you can just head over to their website and pick it up now let's first import our character and then we'll be looking at each thing and how it works so head over to file import alembic select your character and hit open set the frame rate of your project in blender you want to make sure that you do that to get the best usable results also make sure that you set the scale here to the correct scale of your model if you have a miniature model of some sort the class physics will obviously be different than a 1.8 meter human so make sure you set it accordingly here for maximum models i suggest that you try using centimeters because i tried using meters and it gave me something like this which is of course not fine now hit ok and the character will be imported but it will be rotated so make sure that you have everything selected in blender and apply the rotation before exporting them now after you've got your character in the scene let's head over to settings user settings view controls and set the preference to maya now you'll be able to use alt left click to rotate alt middle mouse button to pan and alt right click drag or just scroll wheel to zoom in and out in the 3d viewport on the left here the 2d viewport on the right is used to create the basic shapes of the clothes the navigation here is the same all the metal palms button to pan and scroll to zoom in and out on the top right corner you'll see this drop down where it says simulation you can change it to animation and you can play it back to see if your animation was imported correctly don't worry if it seems to be playing too quickly just change this from frame stepping to real time and you'll see the animation at the actual speed now we know that our animation is working fine now so let's switch back to simulation over here in the 2d view is where we'll start by creating our basic shapes for this character i'm going to select the polygon tool right here shortcut is h then i'll simply draw one side of the dress i want to make i'll just make something rough for demonstration but you can take your time with it and use references you'll notice that as soon as you finish drawing the shape it'll create a plane in the 3d viewport but before we do anything to that let's complete the other half by using this edit pattern tool or by pressing z on the keyboard and then right clicking on this edge in the middle and choosing unfold and now we can refine the shape to look more like a dress by adding a curved edge near the neck let's get rid of this vertex in the middle by selecting and deleting it and then press c or just go over here to switch to the edit curvature tool now if you click on the edge and drag it down a bit you can curve it like so now press a or click here to switch to the transform pattern tool select this whole shape and then press ctrl c to copy and ctrl v to paste it somewhere right here if we now take a look in the 3d viewport we will see that a new shape has appeared since the 2d and 3d views aren't connected in any way let's just use the transform controls to bring it to the back side by the way if the gizmo is looking weird to you then you can go to preferences gizmo and set it to world coordinate this will resemble the type of gizmo that we have by default in blender okay cool now we have both sides of the dress if you try to run the simulation as it is right now it will simply fall down and we don't want that so let's try to stitch these two parts together so that it behaves like a realistic dress now we can do exactly that by using this segment sealing tool right here i know i'm going over a lot of tools for this tutorial but this is all that you'll ever need for some simple clothing so if you select this tool and then click on two edges it'll look something like this this means that when you actually run the simulation those parts will get stitched together so that they don't fall apart as separate pieces now let's do this for all of these areas now for the sides of the dress we are going to use this tool right next to the one we just used called the free sewing tool if you use this to stitch both of the sides of the dress it will not make a hard seam at this vertex and give us a better result than the segment viewing tool once you're done stitching these together we're basically ready to start simulating you obviously don't want to stitch places like the neck the bottom and the ends of the arms it needs to be disconnected there so hit space bar or click on this button to start simulating it should look pretty nice if you have done everything correctly and you may often get some intersecting parts like this for example but that's very easy to fix just by dragging it out like so when the simulation is still running now once you're happy with how it looks you can stop the simulation by hitting the spacebar again you can even make some adjustments to the shape of the closing after you've done the simulation let's say i want to reduce the curvature of the back side of the neck cut out then i can simply do it in the 2d view run the simulation again and it will work just as you expect it to after playing around with the shape a bit this is what i'm happy with so i'll switch to the animation tab now if you try to play the animation you'll see that the clothes don't deform with the mesh you need to first record the deformations by clicking on this button it'll then go over each frame and the form to close accordingly now if you play again you'll see just how much of a glorious result we've got from basically some kindergarten drawings you might get some places where the clothes are intersecting and you can increase the resolution of the simulation by selecting your clothes meshes and then going over here to particle distance and just decreasing it a bit just play around and see what works you don't have to go too low to get some good looking simulations now as a bonus trick if you want to add some wind to your animation you can simply go here to the environment display icon and select show wind controller you can then select the wind controller place and rotate it however you want to start making it affect the clouds you can go here and click on this check box now if you try to simulate your clothes will be affected by the wind you can play with the settings till you get something that you like now record it again and there will be some sweet looking wind deformations in your clothes by the way if you're wondering about the back side being black here it's because the normals of the mesh are flipped so we can just simply fix that by right clicking on it and choosing flip normal you can also change the nature of the clothes how it reacts to deformations and stuff by giving it different fabrics there will always be this default fabric applied to it and i usually like to just select it go down to where it says physical property and choose a preset that looks good to me another thing that you might want to do is select both of these class meshes and choose remesh in the property editor this will make everything quads and clean it up for you automatically now this should be all that you need to do for most cases but if you want to do some custom texture painting on your clothes after this then you might want to switch to the uv editor view and properly place your uv islands according to your needs it'll be the exact shape you drew in the 2d view so it's very easy to pack properly now once everything is nice and dandy you can select the clothes go to file export alembic ogawa whatever that means you can keep the default settings they work just fine and after that you can simply open blender up again import the alembic file and you should have it there working very nicely now if you want to get rid of this initial section where the character is in t pose you can either shift the keyframes to the left to start directly from the pose that you want or you can change the start frame in your timeline but i'd recommend the former because you might have some other animated objects in your scene so the way you do that is you select the rig move all the keyframes back 29 frames just the way it was before then to sync the clothes as well just select the clothes and go to the modifiers change the frame offset on this modifier to minus 29 which is the same as shifting everything back 29 frames i also like to turn on this vertex interpolation checkbox i don't know exactly what it does but it did fix some intersection issues that i was having instantly so yeah that's how you make clothes using marvelous designer it's a really powerful tool and i was barely scratching the surface here but i hope this video gave you a good idea on how to use it thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: RenderRides

Views: 140,779

Keywords: blender, marvelous designer tutorial, marvelous designer 10, marvelous designer to blender, marvelous designer animation, marvelous designer 10 tutorial, blender to marvelous, blender to marvelous designer, blender to marvelous designer scale, blender animation to marvelous designer, marvelous designer to blender workflow, marvelous designer export to blender, how to make clothes in blender, how to make clothes in marvelous designer, create clothes in blender, clothes in marvelous

Id: ZhhTD7LfDRY

Length: 10min 29sec (629 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 20 2021