Blender to Marvelous Designer to Substance Painter & Daz Workflow Tutorial

what's going on guys in today's video we're going to be talking about my complete workflow of how i create renders like this [Music] now some of you may have seen i've uploaded a alpha art cyberpunk jacket time lapse and from that i got quite a few comments asking my workflow how i done it how do i get into blender substance pain a marvelous designer what do i use etc so this video we're gonna go over the whole process from start to finish so without further ado we've got a lot to cover let's get started so the first app i use for this workflow is desk so dash studio is a incredible program in fact but i primarily use it only to create characters and pose them ready for marvelous designer and blender so once you've downloaded that studio if you're going to download it this is the workflow that i like to use by default you will have a single plane i go to the top right corner here and change it to side by side view and this will essentially enable me to see two views of when i have my character in the scene you can use these tools here to rotate you can use this to move and you can use this to zoom generally i just like to use the rotation everything also be the same i typically have a texture or cartoon shade on one side and nvidia ira on the other side but for today's video i'm going to have wireframe on the right side okay so to get your character into das what you need to do is navigate to the left-hand side make sure you're on smart content find where it says figures and bang you have all of the figures that you have downloaded or that are compatible with your dash studio now i have quite a lot of figures because i've purchased some figures i've imported some figures however most of you may only have genesis 3 genesis 8 and genesis 1. so for simplicity's sake i'm just going to go with what is in the default stock daz studio which is genesis so i'm going to start with the genesis 8 female so i'm going to import that bang and as you can see we have our female within daz studio again with this transformation you can see you can rotate you can see what the character looks like if you have texture shaded you can see what the character looks like shaded but we're not going to do that the next thing we're going to need to do is we're going to start animating and posing our characters so in order to do that you need to activate the timeline by default your timeline might be closed so just expand this window at the bottom here and then go from animate 2 to timeline if you still cannot see it don't worry go to window panes scroll down find timeline and click it perfect then what we're going to do is we're going to start and add a keyframe right in frame 0 so go down to frame 0 and press this button here to add a keyframe and this is going to create a keyframe from start the reason why we're going to do that is because we want our mannequin to be in the a post once our mannequin is in the apos it's much easier for us to start designing clothes whether that's going to be in blender or for this case marvelous designer and then blender so the first thing we're going to do make sure it's on frame 0 add the keyframe bang then we're going to go and navigate towards poses now realistically if you really wanted to you could start posing you can select onto parts of the character mesh and start posing the character yourself you can actually click onto the character mesh and start posing and animating the camera yourself but for the sake of time we're just going to use the ready-made built-in poses that are in daz studio and i personally like to use the built-in poses because again saves time and they can do a lot better than i can so i'm going to go to the left-hand side and you'll see it says poses you'll also see it says filter by context so what exactly does that mean essentially what the filter by context does is if it's unchecked you will see all of the poses regardless whether it's a male or female or whether it's specifically for your character to say for example there's a genesis 8 male pose here if i click onto it you will see it says the priest that you're applying contains values that are outside of your limits that's because this pose wasn't created for specifically your character again you can try it to see if it works and you could do that by pressing leave limits on and in this case it seems to work fine but generally speaking it's not the best thing to do because it doesn't map correctly to your mannequin so i typically like to leave filter by context and then we can see all of the poses that are relevant towards our character and it works correctly so i'm just going to scroll down and find poses that i like again i might have some extra poses here but i'll just use the default poses just so you can follow along so for me i kind of like this walking pose so instead of clicking onto it straight away i'm going to move my timeline up to frame 10 and this is so that it creates a new key so once i double click onto this pose you can see it's automatically created a keyframe so if i go to 0 we have the apos if i go to frame 10 we have the walking post that we want again this is absolutely essential because we do not want to start designing clothes on a character like this because it might be quite difficult say if you wanted to give her trousers for example look at that look how difficult it would be you know to create something around that so make sure we have the a pose frame zero whatever pose you want frame ten if you wanna keep adding poses you can actually just go to like another ten frame forwards so for example frame twenty and then you could add like i don't know this pose here if you wanted to i don't know what this is but i don't know what this is but you can add this post if you want to so then we have frames there is this frame 10 that and then from frame 20 is this the reason why i go in 10 increments because if you have it too close for example if i put a pose here you can see it starts to move way too quickly there isn't enough time and we need time for the clothes to simulate women marvelous designer so i think a good reference is having 10 frame increments in between each of your poses that's that we are getting absolutely close again try and think about the right poses that you're going to need for your specific scene like if you're in a scene with i don't know buildings whether you're going to be in the scene of a studio try and find the relevant poses towards that it's very very important for this specific instance we don't necessarily know what scene we're going to be doing we're probably going to be in the studio so it doesn't necessarily matter what poses we pick great the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to click onto my genesis 8 female and i'm just going to delete the eyelashes because we don't need that for now perfect now we need to start thinking about exporting so the process of exporting is as follows click onto your genesis 8 female or whatever character you have go to file export it's going to bring up a window and then pick the file format as d a e this is important we're going to use the colored file format and the reason being is because we have animations and transforms if we were importing this straight into blender i probably would have done an obj but we're going to marvelous designer first before we hit blender so we're going to use d8e so click the ae name it to whatever you want and click save you're gonna get a new winner that pop up make sure you press show individual settings important because here you'll see the animation is off by default which is preposterous if you ask me but enable animation and tick the next two which is include transformation includes morphs click accept it's going to take its sweet time might be quick might be slow depends on your system wait for it to finish and then open up marvel's designer so i'll see you then welcome back we are in marvellous designer as you can see this is what our ui looks like we have the 2d view on the right hand side 3d view on the left hand side if you have any ready-made garments that you've already created and saved they'll be here on the left or even purchased your materials will be on the right-hand side here and a property editor is on this side here but don't worry i'm going to be going through all of my setup and my process step by step so first things first we need to import our character from das into marvelous designer let's get started so i'm going to go to file import open color navigate to wherever you saved your file and pressed open from here we're going to leave these settings open we're going to leave loaders avatar automatically add arrangement points and we're going to change the scale make sure it's auto skill because we want it to be perfect and alliance and easy for us we don't want any hassle at all so once you've done that click ok and bang here we are we have our character which is what we want you can right click to rotate you can use the mouse scroll to zoom in and out but yeah let's get started we're just going to draw a very very very simple dress we're not going to waste time we're not going to go into details we're not going to go into the specifics we're going to pretty much cheat so the first thing i'm going to do is create a polygon so we're going to use a polygon tool and i'm just going to draw and i actually think this will be okay if it's too too short we can fix that in a minute so i'm going to join these together great i'm then going to select this tool here select the last line in the middle right click unfold with symmetric editing and so then we're going to rotate this select onto our mesh or close control c and then control v control c control v we're going to copy and paste it it's going to create a new one we're going to grab the one we just created drag it to behind our dash character right click flip the normal just so we have the correct shading and the correct shadows otherwise it starts to look weird and we don't want that we're just going to move this forward perfect grab the background and just drag it out so it's not covering perfect now we're going to start sewing so the default shortcut is n so you press n and on the left hand side here you're going to see we're going to start to to sew our mesh so this is going to be interesting so press n and link these two together so whether you see a little line you link them ideally you want to make sure it's it's opposite is parallel to each other because if i go down here and i do it this way you can see it crosses and we don't want that because it's going to start to look super disgusting it's going to flip and we don't want it at all so make sure it's literally opposite each other i'm going to sew this bottom one but i'm not going to sew this top one here because i think that's going to look way better it's going to give us a little actually needs to look there you go that's what i was looking for perfect and just like that we have a simple dress now if you want to extend it or reduce the length of it just click onto this item here edit the pattern press this side press the other sides and then you can just hold down control to make sure it snaps and then you can drag it up or drag it down perfect that looks good that looks really good in fact next thing we're going to do is rename this material so we're going to select onto our mesh press this button to assign and then rename it to dress we can actually check to see if it's correctly assigned we press on to the material then go down to color you can see we can change the color not updating real time we can see right now that yeah perfect dresses as we want now if you really wanted to get crazy you could add like a jacket and stuff but for now we're just going to leave it like this for the sake of time the next thing we're going to do is animations so we need to get the animations that we created in dash studio into marvelous designer so how do we do that well thankfully since we exported as a collada file if we go to the top right corner here where it says simulation we can change the tab to animation and as you can see we have a little red line here and this shows us the animation file is directly embedded within our dae so if we press this button here this will start simulating and recording the animations and the close at the same time it's going to be using the cpu complete simulation so this might be a little bit taxing on your system but it will give you the best simulation possible so we're just going to press the record button and see what happens and just like that you can see our character is posed with our outfit now here what you could do is you can scroll to zoom in and you can just move the playhead to the post that you want so for me i like this walking pose so we're going to leave at the walking pose and we're going to go back from animation to simulation perfect now we can see we have the mesh in the walking pose we can press spacebar here to resimulate so if we wanted to like move some things around we could make sure it's nice and neat there's no crazy weird folds or anything and if there is like you can see here it's kind of like a little weird fold we can fix that in blender by adding some modifiers but we'll get into that later on in the video so try and fix it as much as possible before you get there for me that looks it looks okay perfect so the next thing we need to do is retopology so by default imagine you have a huge scene and you have lots of different clothes lots of different clothings you have a dress you've got a coat you've got a jacket you've got all of these crazy things it's going to be quite taxing on your system and it's going to have a crazy amount of polygons so what we need to do is remesh it by default marvelous designer now has an inbuilt remission tool which is good so what you need to do is select onto all of your clothes go to the left hand side the 3d view right click and then type in remeshing essentially what this is going to do is going to re-topologize our mesh for us and gives it just a little bit of better topology for us once that's done we are now ready to go to the next step which is going into blender if you wanted to save this for example this dress or this whatever style you've created for another project all you need to do is file save as garment and then you'll be able to save it like i've saved some of these previous ones here okay next exporting what we need to do to export is select our whole mesh so we're going to select everything here we're going to go to file export and we're going to export as obj selected i've got quite a few comments asking me what file do you export to what do you use it's not getting into blender it's not working help me this is what you need to do export obj selected and we're going to do this twice and i'll show you exactly why go to the folder to which you want to export and we're going to export this twice once for the clothes and once for the character that i like to call mine again so i'm going to export to clothes first i'm going to see close d8 save the export settings all of a sudden pop up and it's going to ask you this so you're going to select select all patterns make sure select all avatars are off this is important because you want to separate them into two different objects next single object that's fine unwilled then leave the scale as default and then we're going to press okay bang we've got one down we're going to deselect everything reselect everything and then do the exact same thing again file export obj selected but this time we're going to type in mannequin or whatever you decide to call your character because we're going to deselect patterns and we're going to select select all avatars the rest of these settings can be the exact same but this here is important deselect patterns and make sure you reselect avatars click ok now we can finally get into blender so let's get started okay so here we are in blender first and foremost welcome if your blender doesn't look like this this is important go to the link in my description download my startup file and you'll get my startup file with my scene which looks like this basically and it's important because our next step i'll show you exactly why but for now get a start file i'll wait okay i waited long enough welcome back first thing we're going to do is delete the default cube goodbye select it press x delete next we're going to start and import our characters so to do that we're going to go to file import wavefront obj navigate to wherever you've saved your characters and the first thing i'm going to up the first thing i'm going to and the first thing i'm going to import is my character so i'm going to click mannequin you can see that the scale is huge don't worry it's not actually that big it's actually true to size to how tall she should be but we're going to reduce the scale just so it's not as taxing on our system once you've imported your character import your clothes so file import wavefront obj import the clothes and as you can see we have the clothes on the mesh then we're going to select both press s to scale and we're going to scale it down just scale it down i'm going to make sure she fits within my camera now i'm going to enter rendered view to see what we're working with bang here she is wearing the dress but as you can see you might notice absolutely straight away look at that she looks like storm at the moment because her eyes aren't there so to fix this go to the shading workspace select onto the character remember not to close the character and then you need to find find the corneal material and select onto it then where it says alpha reduces to zero and bang straight away we can see the natural eyes are back again if you wanted to you can reduce that eye moisture down a little bit what else is there the eye socket you can reduce the alpha a little bit not too much and we have a little bit more natural looking eyes for now okay now that that's fixed what we need to do is start working on a studio so what i'm going to do straight away in fact is i'm going to change it from the instagram aspect ratio to a widescreen aspect ratio so we're going to go to here i'm going to change the output properties click this tab here and you'll see the preset of ultra wide i'm going to click that then i'm going to select the camera and i'm just going to move it back and move it back perfect i'm going to change this tab from ig to widescreen there we go now i'm going to enable the studio so the reason why i asked you to download my startup file is because included in my startup file is a inbuilt studio so it's just hidden as a collection so if we select it and we press d to icons here you can see that we have our studio by default it's going to be really bright because it's not meant for this specific scene so what we're going to do is we're going to delete one of the lights which is closest to our scene our model then we're just going to reduce all of these lights by at least at least 50 just to see what it looks like so i'm going to do that now again adjust it to taste and do it to however well you think best suits your scene so for me i'm going to reduce this you can reduce the background so it's not too bright and for me i think that looks okay i think that starts to look pretty good okay now that we're in blender we've set up our studio we've imported our model and we've imported our clothes the next step is okay great how do we get this into a software like substance painter so to get this into substance painter what we're going to do is the following we're going to navigate to the uv editing tab which is at the top select onto our clothes then hit tab and you'll see that the uvs are huge it's not what we want we want it to fit onto this little grid here so to do that go to uv smart uv project click ok and look look at that it's automatically unwrapped our uv and it's pretty decent it's done a pretty pretty good job so now we need to get our clothes into substance painter and i'm going to show you the export settings for that because a lot of people had problems with that also so i'm going to go back to widescreen i'm going to select onto our mesh our clothes by the way our clothes click file export fbx yes we're going to export an fpx a lot of people have trouble and i think i know why i'm going to show you the correct export settings so select it export fbx then on the right hand side click selected objects and then press mesh i think a lot of people forgot to do this and it wasn't selecting the right object to export so make sure you press selected objects perfection then i'm going to press export fbx and now we're going to open substance painter so open substance painter and i'll see you there okay welcome back we're not a substance painter and i'm going to show you my general workflow we're not going to be super detailed we're just going to go through it really quickly so we're going to go to file new we're going to click this file here and select where we saved our fbx file once we've done that we're going to press ok and you can see we have our dress or whatever clothes that you've imported which is perfect absolutely perfect the next thing we need to do is bake the mesh maps because if we draw or we add materials nothing's going to happen because we need to bake the mesh map so find where it says bake mesh maps your substance painter might look a little bit different to mine but find where it says big mesh maps click onto it change the output size to something like 2k and then press bake selected textures and just wait for it to go hopefully this shouldn't take too long depending on your system and just like that we've got our meshes baked now if we wanted to we could drag a material so say for example if i type in i don't know fabric rough i drag this here so i'm actually going to do two i'm going to do one which is kind of like a warm material like this one and i'm going to do another linen so for this fabric one i'm just going to change the color i'm going to select it go to color i'm going to change it to i'm going to change it to white and i'll tell you why i'm going to do that in blender i want to have the ability to add any color that i want so if i wanted to make this blue red green i can so to do that i'm going to leave it as white for now and i also want to add a custom logo at the back of this so to do that i'm going to import my logo as an alpha channel texture if you want me to go in depth about how to do this then let me know in the comments below i'll give you a better tutorial i want the back to be leather i wanted the material to be leather in fact let's make it gold because why not gold pure correct now we're going to add a black mask and this is so that no matter where i paint it will only affect what i'm coloring so i'm going to add my logo that i imported put it to the back here bye and just like that we've got we've got a logo right at the back here we have a nice little texture in fact we can do one really small one at the front here ah that looks kind of weird need to be bigger yeah that works so we'll do one there we'll do one on the back perfect okay now that we've done that what do we need to do we need to export that's what so our process is as followed we go to file export textures go down to output textures and we're going to pick the unreal engine triple s packs and this is what i found to be one of the best ones for blender go back to settings change the size of the texture to 4k because you want it to be the highest quality and then pick the folder of your output directory then press export and just wait for it to export now if you wanted to change for example change this mesh so before i said i had the fabric linen i can just drag this down and have the same sort of effects then again you can go back file export textures you can do this as many times depending on how many different textures that you have really okay great now we're gonna go back into blender so i'll see you there okay great so now we're back in blender we're gonna add the texture so go to the shading workspace click onto the dress find the dress material and then if you have node wrangler enabled select onto your shader then press ctrl shift t then navigate to wherever you saved your materials select onto all of your textures and then click principle texture setup and as you can see it's automatically going to map the textures for us now if i zoom into our character you can see straight away look our logo is there if i spin if i spin her around you can see bang we've got a logo directly on our character so from here how i like to set up my scene is as follows i would grab the camera i'd move it in a lot more like so and move it up and then what i'd probably do is select onto the mannequin select onto the clouds and i'll duplicate it and i'll drag one to the left and one to the right then the one i've duplicated i will rotate or turn around so you can see a different alternative angle then we're going to select the other one move it towards the middle voila we've got our mesh and our clothes inside of blender and it's looking pretty good let's get a closer look shall we great now something i spoke about earlier was changing the colors so if we go back to the shade editor the way i like to do this is if you select onto your texture you can create a color wrap notes place in between your base color and your principal shader and you can change the first value to any color you want and as you can see we are changing the color this looks kind of cool alternatively if you had already created say for example you'd already created a color within substance painter no problem you can still do the same thing by adding a color wrap or you can add a hue node a hue saturation node in between and then from here you can just adjust the hue that way again since this is why there is no hue so i can't really change any values except for the gold which is on the back i can make that a different color the next thing i personally like to do is you have the option to remove the mannequins completely or your daz character mesh so when i remove them it looks like it almost looks like the clothes are floating which is a cool kind of look you can rotate it even more you can get even more duplicates have them in finding different positions you can do all kinds of things which i like there is one thing however that i'd like to show you and that's using modifiers so say for example you were in marvellous designer and once your marvellous designer for whatever reason your mesh has holes in it the clothes that you created has a hole somewhere in here or it's ripped in some sort of way and you can't seem to fix it by dragging it out what you could do is add a modifier in blender so the two modifiers which i like to use the metal one is as follows number one subdivision surface and this will smooth out the mesh will smooth out the clothes and make it look pretty good make it look smooth sensational i don't like to go anything more than two or three levels the second thing that i use is typically a solidifier so say for example like i spoke about earlier you have a holes in your mesh all you need to do is add a solidify modifier increase the thickness a little bit and it just increases the thickness of your mesh and it deletes any of the holes or any of the little imperfections it may have and it's as simple as that you can go through you can add as many mannequins or as close as you want get rid of them change the color of the studio don't actually even need to go into substance painter a lot of the changes and the materials you can actually do within blender with textures from texture haven polygon or even quicksort anyway guys if you like this video please share subscribe comment like i hope this was useful for you hope you learned a few things if not i apologize if you end up using this workflow to let me know in the comments below i'd love to see your renders tag me on instagram if you want me to make an even more detailed tutorial also let me know or if you want me to make a tutorial about just using blender and dash studio to create clothes and no other third-party page plugins then let me know also i'll see you on the next one guys [Music] you

Channel: Branden Arc

Views: 244,371

Keywords: Branden Arc, marvelous designer, blender marvelous designer, blender to marvelous designer, blender to daz studio, daz studio to blender, daz to blender to marvelous designer, blender to substance painter, workflow, blender to marvelous designer to substance painter, subtance painter, tutorial, full workflow

Id: 5CVmIZn_gmg

Length: 30min 44sec (1844 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020