Hi guys it’s Stephy and today we are going to be talking about converting OBJ textures to Alembic and this is utilizing the Clo3d or Marvelous Designer to Cinema 4D workflow. So let me show you guys how to do it. Okay. We are in Clo3D and we already have our outfit created. We already have everything done actually, the texture’s done... the outfit’s done. So we are at the point where we want to export as an OBJ. Before you do that. Of course, if you guys have already done your texture, you would have done this section already. But I just want to remind you guys. Go to the UV editor. Make sure your UV maps and nice and tidy. Whether you guys are using UDIMs or just one UV square. It doesn’t really matter at this point. So I’ve decided to keep mine in one UV square. And while this is already all organized and make sure you guys keep it all organized. I already exported this out and textured it in Substance Painter but you guys could also...when you export it in OBJ which we will in a second… You guys could texture or re-texture in Photoshop or in Substance. Painter So I’ll show you guys how we do that. So before we export the OBJ. I just want to explain why we are even using OBJs and Alembics. So OBJs are going to store the texture data. So for any texturing, this is what you probably want to use and that is what I suggest. And for Alembic, they hold the animation data. So any movement that you simulate in Clo3D... that Alembic is going to hold all that data. But they don't seem to hold the texture data, which is why we need to convert OBJ texture data and bring it over to the Alembic to make sure that the animation has the texture or the correct textures on it. So now if we go to File > Export > Press OBJ and you want to save this in a location of your choice. All right, here is the box that you will get after pressing save. You don't want to select Avatar unless you guys are actually going to work with the Avatar there. I just usually work with the digital fashion clothing, make sure you have the unified UVcoordinates ticked because that is going to store the texture data for your OBJ. Okay. So once it has exported, you should get 3 files, MTL file, the OBJ and the actual texture files, the UV maps. So you guys could actually take this UV map and re-texture it in Photoshop or you guys could take the OBJ, import that into Substance Painter and you can texture in there and re-export the UV maps. So that's the OBJ done and now we need to export the Alembic. Now, the animation that I have for this...is just a walk cycle, If I scrub through this you guys can see that, right? So this is the animation. So I want to export this and I'm going to go to file export and I usually choose Alembic Ogawa. I feel that works best for me. I'm going to press save and you should get this pop up box where it's got all of these options here. So what we have here is unweld, thin, the unified UV coordinates ticked, 30 frames per second. It's up to you if you want to do play a region only or entire region, that is totally up to you depending on what your animation needs are. Then you're going to press. Okay. Once that has exported, you would get one file as an alembic and now we can bring the OBJ and alembic into Cinema4D. All right, welcome to Cinema4D. So we go to file up here, we're going to press merge objects. You are going to import your OBJ and your alembic, so... it doesn't matter which order you do it. We just got to bring them in. Okay, so I'm importing my OBJ first, and with OBJ you're going to get a settings box like this. Just press, OK. Okay. So that's OBJ. I'm going to rename that. So I know which one is. And now let's import the alembic. Okay, so this is the alembic. And now what I usually do is I press the cube here to compare the size of the actual assets and they are massive. So we want to scale them down. So I am going to scale them down to...0.1 each. Okay. That's a better size, get rid of the cube and well we have the alembic and the OBJ. Well with the OBJ we can move it to the side. And what you can see here is one has the texture data and one doesn't. So OBJ always has a texture data, you will know, because it has all of these texture sets... up here. The ABC (alembic), on the other hand, has the motion data, as you guys can see here, right? Okay. So we want to get the textures from the OBJ onto the alembic, which has the motion data. So what I usually do is press left, click here, press shift, highlight all the textures here and I'm going to press Ctrl... left click and drag it to the alembic... right. As you can see that has copied it over pretty well. I'm pretty happy with that and even if you were to check, you can see the textures have been transferred and it's as easy as that, it really is. And I think I learned this technique from Travis Davids. So shout out to Travis Davids for teaching me... that you guys can definitely check out his YouTube channel, I’ll probably link the video here as well if you want to see it that. But that will hold all the data for you there. See the alembic. So now that that is done, you don't need the OBJ. Or you could turn this one off and I just want to check in Redshift. So I'm going to turn on Redshift here and we can add... let's add a light first like a dome light just because we don't have any lighting right now. I’m going to turn the background off here untick that. We are going to add an HDRI of your choice and now we're going to turn this on. There we go. Oh, it's probably too strong. Let’s turn the light down a bit. Even if we were to move it. Yeah. So that is it pretty much. And of course if you guys, I mean if we double check this if I turn Redshift off for a sec. If you guys are planning to work in redshift, you guys can always change these. I think these are PBR textures at the moment. You can change the standard textures into redshift textures quite easily. If you select, left click and hold shift and highlight all the textures, go to redshift materials, tools and convert and replace materials. Or you can do all materials and that should convert all of these textures to redshift textures, which then you guys can utilize within here and turn on the displacements and whatnot. And yeah, I'm a sucker for redshift, so I use it quite a lot. So of course if we double click into this, you see the texture now is not a standard one, but instead it is a redshift texture as it brought up the redshift shader graph. But that is our quick tutorial for today. I hope that it’s useful. I feel like a lot of you guys have been asking how I usually convert my textures from OBJ to Alembic and of course from Marvelous Designer or Clo3D to Cinema4D. So this is how you do it. This is how I do it every single time. And the beautiful thing is, is that with these textures in front of us here, you guys can actually change the texture in Photoshop and in Substance Painter any time, you don't have to do it right at the beginning, you could keep tweaking them and all you have to do is replace, Well, if we go into here, all you are going to do is replace the actual file here and you can keep updating it and tweaking it. So it's quite a lot of fun, but I feel like the technique of moving it from OBJ to alembic... once you guys learn, this technique is going to be a lot easier for you guys to texture your alembics. Thank you so much for watching guys. I hope this video was helpful. Let's keep up to date with each other on Patreon, Twitch and on my Discord. I also recently launched a newsletter, so if you guys want to join that too, it's going to be in the link below. Also, if this video has helped you guys out in any shape or form, then please give it a like it will help me out, especially with the YouTube algorithm, but I will catch you guys in the next video.
