Marvelous Designer Beginner Course - Part 3 - Animation & Rendering in Blender

hey everyone very vague here and welcome back to this third and final part of the marvelous designer intro course well we'll be running a cloth animation sim on our skater outfit we've created and then export this into blender so we can add some more realistic materials and lighting to it before rendering and just a reminder all the assets and resources we'll be using throughout this course will be available to download on my gumroad or art station here which i'll link in the description below so this will contain all the finished project files as well as template files i use across all my projects so i'd highly recommend downloading it if you want to follow along so now that we have our finished outfit ready for simulation what we want to do is change our simulation mode from the normal static simulation mode to animated simulation so to do this what we want to do is go up here to the top right hand corner where it says simulation and then on the drop down menu select animation and now we should see this big chunk of red here showing the animation data of our mesh if you don't see this it's because for some reason marvelous designer seems to delete this after a few saves if we haven't used it so if you just re-import the skateboarding alembic file we imported in the first video this should then show up so now we want to make sure our simulation quality is set to complete here if you're looking to get the best quality simulation your computer is able to produce and then all we have to do is hit the big red record button here and then watch it do its magic so again this might take a long time depending on how good your computer is but just to give you an idea mine took about an hour to run so it could be wiser to do this overnight if you're finding it's taking too long then once this is completed i'm going to hit shift a to hide our avatar as i already have this set up in our blender file so i don't want to include it in our export and then we'll go up here under our main toolbar file drop down and select export and then mdd cache standard and then it'll ask us to save the name of our file output so i'm just going to name mine skateboarding sim and just to note these mdd files generally come out pretty massive so don't be surprised if it's around the two to three gigabyte mark you'll just want to make sure you're saving it somewhere with enough storage we'll then be presented with this dialog box for our settings so you can just make sure yours are the same as mine here and the key ones we want to make sure we have selected is that the scale is set to meters and that our axis conversion is set in this order x z for up and then y and then we'll press ok and that will probably now take a few minutes to save out so that's it for the marvelous designer side of things guys let's now move into blender by opening up the very vague template file here in the resources folder this template file is the one i use on all of my projects and has my preferred ui setup for blender which is the 3d viewport here on the right with the shader editor and camera view here on the left and the camera rig is pretty simple it's just a camera parented to a circle with the target as this empty object here so feel free to adjust the positioning of these to your liking and also the speed at which the camera orbits by moving this second keyframe here in the timeline so the first thing i'm going to do is create a new collection named outfit for our clothing sim to import into i'm then going to come up here under the import rollout and select obj which is the format that mdd will have created for our base mesh we'll then select our file and set our forward axis to negative y and our up axis to z as well as selecting the option keep vert order before pressing import and now we'll see our mesh has imported in the correct orientation but it's not actually fitting on our avatar because it's at a static frame in the animation so to fix this and add in the rest of the frames for the animation we'll come over here to our modifiers tab and then add in a mesh cache modifier we'll then set the file path to our mdd file before coming down here under the axis mapping drop-down and again setting the up axis to negative zed then lastly we'll open up the time remapping drop-down and set the frame start to one and now we should see our clothing mesh in sync with our avatar so now that we've got that set up we can move on to the materials but you'll notice that when we switch into rendered mode that most of our clothing mesh is showing up as black and this is because by default blender auto smooths the normals of our mesh we can fix this by coming down here into the object data properties tab and simply unchecking this auto smooth option like so and now we can see everything is showing up a bit better except for these areas which are meant to be transparent and that's just because the png image they're reading from hasn't been plugged into the alpha of our blender material yet so we can fix this by first pressing tab with our clothing mesh selected which will take us into edit mode and then simply select a face which has the material we wish to edit and as you can see this will now automatically bring up the corresponding material in our shader editor from here we can just go ahead and plug the image alpha into the alpha node of the principled bsdf like so i'm then going to rename my material to something more simple like hoodie sleeve logo as the default ones that come in from marvel's designer seem to be based on the fabric number which doesn't translate very well to using in blender and making things easy to read then i'm just going to come across to my other sleeve and assign it the same material and the reason this didn't automatically update when i change the other one is because the marvelous designer export will also basically treat each graphic as a duplicate material so unfortunately the only way to fix this is to go back in manually and select on each of our materials and assign them this new updated material so to give you an example of this i'll again simply click on the face with the material i wish to adjust and then from there we can then change the current material assigned to it to our updated one by pulling down this drop down and then searching for the name so in this case hoodie sleeve logo and then now it comes up and we can just select it here now we can continue on and repeat this same process for all the patches and logos to make them transparent ensuring to rename them as you go so we can remember which ones we've updated and then we can also further customize the look of the material by changing the sliders on our principled bsdf shader so in this case i want this graphic to be a glossy print finish so i'm just going to increase the specular value all the way up to 1 and then bring the roughness down to about 0.1 so it's nice and shiny likewise i'm then going to do the same thing for our sleeve graphics and we can also experiment with things like color and patterns so feel free to play around till you're happy with how it's looking next we'll move on to setting up our shoes so the first thing we want to do is put our avatar back in the t-pose by setting our timeline to the first frame of the animation this will make it much easier to position the shoes on him than if he was crouched down with each foot in a different action then we'll go ahead and select the import obj option again this time selecting the blue vans shoe object in our resources folder now using the move gizmo here on the viewport toolbar i'm just going to position it roughly into place over our right foot before further adjusting it using the scale and rotate shortcuts s and r then once we've got it covering our foot nicely we'll go ahead and create a duplicate of the shoe using the shortcut shift plus d and then press enter now we can come up here to our object rollout and select mirror x global before then positioning this into place using the same process as before then i'm just going to rename these with an l or r at the end so it's easier for us to identify each shoe and now that we've done that we're ready to parent these to our armature so they'll deform alongside our avatar's feet so to do this all we need to do is first select on our right shoe here before holding shift and then selecting on our armature object now we'll open up the parent options by using the shortcut ctrl p and then under the armature deform option select with automatic weights and now if we scrub through our timeline we should see our shoe deforming nicely with our avatar and then we can simply repeat this process for the left shoe so now that we've got both our shoes set up we can bring in our skateboard once again we'll select the import obj option and then select our skateboard and then what i'm going to do is adjust our timeline so it starts at frame 60 which is the frame our avatar starts skateboarding at and the reason i've done this is because what we're going to do is add in some keyframes for our skateboard so that it roughly animates with our skater so to do this all we need to do is position our skateboard into place for our desired keyframe and then hit the insert keyframe shortcut which is i and press the option named location rotation and scale then i just proceeded to make my way through the timeline in about 10 to 20 frame intervals readjusting the position of the skateboard and then inserting the keyframe once i had the first general kick push motion of the skateboard animated i then just went ahead and copied this group of keyframes using ctrl d for the rest of the pushes and now when we're happy with how that's looking we can come into the shade editor here for our skateboard material and then add in the texture for it by pressing shift a and then searching for the image texture node before then opening our skateboard texture and then plugging this node into the base color node of our principled bsdf shader and then i'm just going to drop the specular value down to zero so it doesn't have any reflections on it next we can add in a ground plane by coming up here to the add mesh rollout and selecting plane let's then scale this up using the shortcut s and then drop it down slightly so it's sitting just under the skateboard wheels now we can give it a new material and then assign an image node like we did earlier but this time selecting our asphalt texture instead then what we'll want to do is give it some mapping so the scale of the texture is more realistic to how asphalt would look in real life so to do this let's first add in a mapping node followed by a texture coordinate node and plug these in like so then i'm going to set the scale values on the mapping node all to about 30. and now if we go into our camera view here by pressing 0 we can see that's giving us a better result then lastly i'm going to add in a bump node and then plug this from our image texture into the normal node of our principled bsdf and then if we just set the distance to about 10 this should give us a nice bumpy uneven surface to our ground so that when it's rendered the lighting will be a bit more realistic and then what we can do if we wanted to take it a step further is animate our ground to make it look like it's moving too with our skater so to do this we'll first go into edit mode and then pressing 2 to go into edge mode let's then select each of our outer edges and move them out a bit more so we have more of a long rectangle shape then jump back into object mode using tab and now similarly to how we animated our skateboard i'm just going to add in some location keyframes at the start and end of the timeline here then with both keyframes selected i'm going to just jump into the graph editor here for a second and set the keyframe mode to linear which will mean the motion between the keyframes will be constant and not smoothed so it will look more natural and now we can see when we scrub through the timeline our asphalt is moving how we would expect but we'll get a better look at this once we start putting out some renders of the full animation and before i start the final render i'm just going to make a few more tweaks so the first thing i'm going to adjust is the depth of field or focus on our camera here to do this we just need to select the camera and then come down to our depth of field drop down in the camera tab here and now the only settings we really need to worry about here is the f-stop and the focus object so the f-stop will control the overall blurriness of the areas outside the focus area so the higher we increase this value the more clear it will be so i'm just going to adjust mine to about 0.7 and i'm happy with that and then the focus object is pretty self-explanatory it's just the object our camera will focus to so using the eyedropper here we can just set this to our main avatar mesh so that becomes the focal point of our camera the next thing i'm going to adjust is our background environment as i think the render will look better with a sort of chill sunset vibe so to do this i'm going to go over to our shade editor and change from object mode into world mode and change the hdri image currently linked to our environment node to this kiara dawn one in the resources folder and i'm going to pull the strength down to about 0.6 before bumping up the contrast of our camera by going down into the color management tab in the render settings and changing the view transform from filmic to standard so this will just really make the colors pop a bit more and now as you can see we're getting a really nice result with some beautiful evening colors lastly i'm just going to give some materiality to our avatar here by creating a new material for him in the shade editor so i'm thinking a kind of glass finish might be nice so i'll go down to the transmission slider and bring this all the way up to one before dragging our roughness down a bit to about 0.3 so we get a semi-glossy finish and it's up to you here whether you want to render the avatar or not but in my opinion it looks good either way but if you don't want to just make sure to uncheck this camera icon next to the avatar so it won't show up in the final render so once we're ready to render we can come across to the output properties tab and set the folder location to wherever we wish to output our final render to and for me i want the video to be an mp4 format so i'm going to open this drop down here and select ffmpeg video and then set the container to mpeg-4 with the quality set to perceptually lossless i'm then going to come back into the render settings tab and up the samples on the render to 128 just to ensure the quality is high and as you can see i've already enabled optics denoising on both my viewport and render just to speed things up a bit so feel free to do the same if you have an nvidia graphics card that's capable of this then all we have to do is come up here to our main toolbar and under the render drop down select render animation and so that's it guys once that's finished rendering you should end up with something hopefully resembling this animation here and also hopefully feeling like you've gained enough skill in both of these programs now to go on and create something beautiful of your own so thanks again for watching and feel free to drop a like or leave a comment if you enjoyed this tutorial series and if you want to see more content like this in the future cheers you

Channel: veryveig

Views: 89,310

Keywords: clo3d, cloth simulation, blender, digital fashion, 3d fashion, shoes, chrometype, nft, concept art

Id: rcECvlMaBm8

Length: 17min 44sec (1064 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 22 2021