My MetaHuman Virtual Clothing Workflow

what is up uh my name is matt workman in this video i want to take uh the time to talk about the last two weeks and the work i've been doing specifically with meta humans of course the vicon mocap system and virtual fashion or custom clothing and uh just kind of document and walk through my process of what i've been doing and a little bit of what i've learned and questions i have for the future so step one when creating virtual clothing for meta humans specifically is to create the overall pattern or the base mesh of the garments or piece of clothing that you're trying to create and to do that i use a very specialized program called marvelous designer this is what pretty much the industry uses at this point to design soft clothing armor and stuff like that there's lots of other ways to approach it but for for clothing simulation this is like kind of a fashion program more than it is a 3d program and there are hundreds if not thousands of free and medium and probably high-end courses on how to actually design nice looking clothing with this program so there's a lot of documentation it's pretty affordable on the indie side or student side and pretty pretty easy to learn after that this is the harder part i brought it into maya which is where i do my skinning and again i've done a little bit of this i'm not like an expert at it watched a couple more tutorials on rigging and skinning in maya or blender these are the things that you want to search if you want to learn how to do it and i did something that's called copy skin weights from the meta human body to the clothing that gives you like depending on the garment maybe like eighty percent of of the work done there roughly you know really roughly and then from there you're just doing skin weight painting where you select the bone you're like you know the shoulder bone you're like what what part of that mesh that you just created do you want to be affected by it and how much that's a very long laborious process and that is where most people will end their journey um who are not full of 3d like full 3d artists who like make a living or want to make a living at it the rigging part and the skinning part rather is is really the hardest part and after skinning the garment in maya i bring it back to unreal engine and the fun part in unreal engine that i was experimenting with is that you can simulate clothing and cloth in unreal engine so what you basically do is you select the mesh you brought in you switch to mesh painting and then you can just paint on the mesh and it's it's not hard it's way easier than skinning you're just like this part you paint it and it turns white and you're like simulate the cloth and that's pretty much it so the question is how do you stop the cloth simulation from like going through the body and whatnot and for that each piece of each garment each skeletal mesh will have its own collision asset or physics asset which is a bunch bunch of basically like simplified shapes that you would put onto like the skeleton of that piece of clothing and those will determine where the cloth goes and where it doesn't go if you want to watch videos on how to set that up it's pretty easy and just search like unreal engine cloth simulation and so i did that a couple times this week and i want to just kind of like talk about each project so the first project i did was a naruto character from the akatsuki clan or group and it's basically just a long robe really easy to make just take a t-shirt drag out the arms drag out the bottom and that's all i literally did and uh the first thing that happened when i was using this garment was that the uh sleeves the sleeves were like completely like ripping right so like you'd see like the metahuman's hand and then it would like rip out of it and then come back in and rip out right and i did some more research and instead of basically making the entire sleeve purple or on white rather and simulated i actually took the top of it and i re kind of like stabilize the top of the hand like all the way through here that part would just permanently stick there it's like putting glue on your shirt and just letting this part go and that ended up stabilizing it quite a bit uh the next thing i wanted to add to the naruto character um that i knew would work really well was a hat with some like cloth paper streamers and this is like the outfit that some of the characters wear in a riddle and so that one i didn't even go to marvel's designer i just took a bunch of rectangles from maya and i just stuck them on this hat the hat i didn't make i think it's decagon unrealistic marketplace there's lots of clothing on the marketplace i'll kind of talk about how how you integrate that in after at this point i learned how to do the physics acid a little bit better so i had a collision for my head for my neck for my chest i think even for my yeah definitely from my arms and so when you get the collisions right i was able to actually like touch the streamers like this and that's how i started off my demo clip was like hey look i can i can hit these streamers and then from there i just started spinning around in circles and flipping around and it was a good time so my second demo was to make something that was more like armor like hard armor and i've been playing a lot of halo infinite and i was like what better model to do with armor and a helmet than the master chief i just basically took what i believe is the master chief model from fortnite i didn't rip it i just downloaded it from an epic games website technically sketch fab um and i thought what i was gonna do was say okay it comes with its own skeleton which is kind of like a kind of like a fortnite skeleton which is kind of like a mannequin skeleton and i was like hey i'm gonna just use this in shogun right and not use the meta human skeleton well that skeleton has been ripped from a game brought into blender and then brought back out and and people have been messing with it and just overall i'll link to the mesh because the mesh is good and the textures are good the skeleton is garbage and pretty much unusable i would have to re-rig it myself or basically delete half and regenerate and it's just it was such a mess i was like okay so how am i gonna get this you know spartan armor onto the metahuman skeleton which was probably the better approach anyway so i opened up the the spartan armor and maya and what i basically did was started to isolate the different parts so i took just the helmet off just the shoulder pad just the arm pads just the the waist part right and that's what you can do with um like hard mesh armor pieces uh and i basically then once all the parts were separated i just manually placed each piece uh on the metahuman that's like standing in a pose and then i reskinned it pretty much for the upper body all hard bound so basically like saying oh the head bone it controls 100 of the helmet was fine and then like the shoulder pad guess what a hundred percent of the of the shoulder pad is controlled by the upper arm so i did that for the entire upper body i tried that for the lower body and that doesn't work so well um there's a big difference between how a live action movie would look like and that's kind of what i was trying to do with the upper body versus what a video game would look like so the lower body really was taking almost the entire lower body of master chief and then doing the traditional skinning route on that and the trade-off is that if you look really closely at like the knees or the ankles of the spartan armor is that they kind of bend they kind of squish a little bit because that's typically what you have to do to make video game skinning you know performance and look good so when i'm all in motion it's not a big deal but if i was to like just sit there and move just my leg or something like that you would kind of see that the binding is a little bit a little bit squishy it's not like a realistic vfx rig where like you know hard armor shouldn't shouldn't deform too much uh the next part was to again get the uh props to look really good and let me go get something so i'm using the actual like in-game rifle from fortnite not from halo but they're similar and then a prop gun that's very very similar to it so the mapping was really close if you look really closely uh this is i i probably can't show it i don't talk about marker placement because like you really have to have a vicod before that like is relevant but anyway it's a different type of market placement than i was doing before and it worked out perfectly like really nicely so the uh third and like f final project of the last week anyway was to make a meta-human jedi i wanted a character that was you know from a fandom but had like their face more prominently shown and then allowed me to do my second take on how to do clothing again back into marvelous designer start with a t-shirt i take the t-shirt and i turned it into kind of like a kimono that would like wrap over each other added a belt and then i added some longer sleeves i have a new way of doing that and then i added the two kind of like shoulder streamers or whatever they turned into like shoulder pads up here and then they kind of dangle in the front and then they tuck into the belt in the back after that brought it into maya again really straightforward rigging uh the hard part is that when you have really long pieces of clothing like this that go far away from the body and the big shoulder pads and or whatever shoulder areas of cloth and the big back parts that happen is that the the looser fitting the clothing is the less the copy weights technique is going to work you get like 60 of it now and a lot of it's wrong and there's no way to help you with this there's no automated like easy workflow you click each bone you try to figure out what the patterns are and uh with the weight distribution and you just like start trying to fix it that's all i can say like so what happens is if you pick up your arms that like this part of the mesh will like come with it or something like that so you got to figure out what bone's doing that and you're going to set it to zero and then you're gonna smooth it back out and that's what skin painting looks like so that one took like a full hour to clean that one up and it's not perfect uh in unreal engine for the cloth sim again i did like the long sleeve sim with the stabilized tops for the for the sleeves and then the front um the front like wine cloth kind of cloth that's moving around that was just completely uh simulated and it looked okay but i have some thoughts on that as well which i'll talk about after i had that in my lightsaber from the demo i had done earlier nothing much different there i would say that the main difference with this demo compared to that is that i'd properly mapped the hands much better and the hand placements so when i grab the lightsaber with both hands it really lined up really well and then doing like the spins and all the different things it uh it works out pretty nicely um something that i overlooked and because this is my first hour testing it live is that when i like spread my legs is that like the jedi robe has like you know kind of a skirt that's there and um the simulated cloth would just clip right through that so i would have to put either a special collision there or just rethink the rigging um so that wouldn't happen the sleeves weren't tearing in this case it was just i made the collision for the wrist too small so you would see like the real meta human skin uh pop out everyone but overall all of these demos went really well so that wraps it up for this video really long i don't know it's not poppy and catchy it's just like i i just want to document in kind of a longer form as well uh format the work i'm doing with the metahumans with vicon and just share that for the people that are following along now or will eventually follow along i just want to know a little bit more about the metahuman demos that they might be seeing on the different social media platforms so that wraps it for this week i'll see you in the next video peace

Channel: Cinematography Database

Views: 3,230

Keywords: cine tracer, cinetracer, unreal engine, ue4, previz, previs, virtual production, virtual cinematography

Id: df8r2_caLLo

Length: 12min 15sec (735 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 16 2021