Solved Clothing Importing as Black?

[3rdStoryline]

So I've ran into this issue in the past, and it sometimes had to do with how daz was handling a shader, and literally the work around that worked for me, was just to turn the Clothing piece inside-out, export as OBJ, and then re-import and fit it to character again.

Although, this time I've made "liquid" that is inside the Persons mouth, and comes out a bit. Made it with a quick Liquid sim in blender, and saved it as an OBJ. It successfully fits the G2F model without issue. But no matter what I do, when I import it into VaM, it's just pitch black, like it's having a shader issue. I've completely removed, and re-added the shader, changed it from MDL to RSL, and it's still only importing as pitch black.

Does anyone know the actual reason this is occurring? Maybe I've just been accidentally resolving the issue by a fluke in past events?

EDIT: It might also be worth mentioning, that I made 3 variants from the same simulation. And one of them imported just fine into VaM, but the other 2 import black. They are all using the same shader. They are just slightly further along in the Liquid sim.

EDIT 2: I've also tried what TToby recommended in another Q&A about V4 clothing. Exporting as OBJ, and re-importing, and fitting to G2F again. Also did that process without it saving materials, so I could freshly add a shader and material to it after the fact. Also recreated the surfaces, and tried various other shaders I had in my Library. Nothing has worked, everytime it's imported, it imported as black. I'm almost pulling my hair out at this point in frustration over such a trivial matter.

 

[Origin69]

Have you checked the normals face orientation?

In the viewport overlays in blender, click the box under geometry to show the face orientation. If it is showing as red, go into edit mode, select all and click; Mesh>Normals>Flip and it should all turn blue.

Other than that, you may want to check that everything is unwrapped in the uv editor for the obj you are using.

The standard principled BSDF shader in blender should work fine. You won't need to change it in daz as vam only uses the material channel when importing anyway.

 

[3rdStoryline]

Have you checked the normals face orientation?

In the viewport overlays in blender, click the box under geometry to show the face orientation. If it is showing as red, go into edit mode, select all and click; Mesh>Normals>Flip and it should all turn blue.

Other than that, you may want to check that everything is unwrapped in the uv editor for the obj you are using.

The standard principled BSDF shader in blender should work fine. You won't need to change it in daz as vam only uses the material channel when importing anyway.

Thanks for the response!
I went in and checked the face orientation and it was blue.
I double checked that it was unwrapped.
And I reapplied a Principled BSDF shader.

I then Re-exported the OBJ, as new file, in a new folder (just to be 1000%sure) Went back to daz, Imported, fitted to g2f via transfer utility. Unparented it, deleted G2f. Saved the duf. Opened, Vam, imported it, and still black T_T.

I'm at such a loss right now. I've imported so much content into VaM it's not even funny. I'm completely baffled as to whats going on here.

I even put it Unity, to make sure that was at least seeing it correctly. Then made it an Assetbundle just for kicks. It looks fine in VaM through all that crap. Moment I use Clothing Creator though. ?

 

[Origin69]

Thanks for the response!
I went in and checked the face orientation and it was blue.
I double checked that it was unwrapped.
And I reapplied a Principled BSDF shader.

I then Re-exported the OBJ, as new file, in a new folder (just to be 1000%sure) Went back to daz, Imported, fitted to g2f via transfer utility. Unparented it, deleted G2f. Saved the duf. Opened, Vam, imported it, and still black T_T.

I'm at such a loss right now. I've imported so much content into VaM it's not even funny. I'm completely baffled as to whats going on here.

I even put it Unity, to make sure that was at least seeing it correctly. Then made it an Assetbundle just for kicks. It looks fine in VaM through all that crap. Moment I use Clothing Creator though. ?

That's really weird. I don't know why it would be doing that. I've seen the clothing creator turn things black when there is no material assigned. Maybe add a new material slot and assign everything to it.

Is it only a single layer of mesh? Is the vertex count similar to the objs that did work?

You may have two meshes stacked on top of each other from the frame you are using. Delete some faces to see whats underneath, or merge vertices by distance to see if the vertex count halves.

You could also try exporting the obj once it's fitted in daz and reimporting it.

 

[3rdStoryline]

That's really weird. I don't know why it would be doing that. I've seen the clothing creator turn things black when there is no material assigned. Maybe add a new material slot and assign everything to it.

Is it only a single layer of mesh? Is the vertex count similar to the objs that did work?

You may have two meshes stacked on top of each other from the frame you are using. Delete some faces to see whats underneath, or merge vertices by distance to see if the vertex count halves.

You could also try exporting the obj once it's fitted in daz and re-importing it.

Yea, I had tried applying textures to every material slot, and that didn't end up doing anything.

Yea, the vertex count is between 700 and 8000, depending how far the sim is along. I also tried a decimated varient bringing all their counts down to 1200 or under. That also didn't resolve the issue.

It is a single layer, at one point I realized one of them was split into to sections, cuz I guess during the simulation the teeth separated them, but resolving that, or even splitting them into two separate clothing items, didn't resolve the issue.

Ya, unfortunately I've gone through the process of exporting the obj, once it's been fitted, and then re-importing, several, several times. Attempting to do it with numerous different options, and telling one at a time, to not include various maps, just in case one of them were causing the issue. I then removed all of them, exported, imported, added a fresh shader to it, fitted it again, then exported it, and re-imported, and refitted it.. again, and still the issue was occurring.

The only abnormal thing I'm noticing about the obj's, is that when I make it transparent, to any degree at all (what-so-ever) it looks like a optical illusion in Daz when I move the camera around.

 

[Origin69]

Can you send me the .obj?

 

[Origin69]

You are going to hate me that it is this simple. The .obj you sent isn't UV unwrapped.

Adding a texture to the base colour shows no change. You can still see material changes in blender, but without a UV layout Vam doesn't see any material so it shows up as black.

I cut the mesh with the knife tool and selected that new loop, marked a seam and selecting all faces UV unwrapped it. The UV editor now shows the unwrapped UV Layout.

Adding a texture now shows on the model.

 

[3rdStoryline]

You are going to hate me that it is this simple. The .obj you sent isn't UV unwrapped.View attachment 274264View attachment 274267

Adding a texture to the base colour shows no change. You can still see material changes in blender, but without a UV layout Vam doesn't see any material so it shows up as black.

I cut the mesh with the knife tool and selected that new loop, marked a seam and selecting all faces UV unwrapped it. The UV editor now shows the unwrapped UV Layout.
View attachment 274265

Adding a texture now shows on the model.
View attachment 274266

T_T Thank you for taking a look at it, and figuring out the error of my way!
Not gonna lie, I'm fairly new to doing liquid sims, and I was following various posts from different sites to stumble through it. Also attempted to recall my knowledge of doing it like 5 years ago too. xD So I've no doubt frigged up on the process here.
I didn't realize it needed to be cut for the UV to unwrap properly. I'm self-taught with all this stuff, and normally just learn things as I need them, and haven't particularly tried to learn from the ground up. That probably would have saved me several hours if I had just learned this stuff correctly from the beginning lol.

Thanks again! Will start doing this to all of them and see how it goes! Still can't wrap my head around how one of them worked though, considering I more or less did the same thing for all of them. Then again I appear to be fleunt in fluke's.

 

[Origin69]

If the mesh was not a closed geometry the other obj probably unwrapped fine. This one was closed so it didn't have a seam to work from.

You don't actually need a whole cut through. You may want to fit it and re-unwrap it marking the edges close to where it makes contact with the model so you can make an alpha texture to blend out the edge in vam.
In my test the clothing creator gave it a frilly edge, so an alpha texture will hide this and blend it in more.

 

[3rdStoryline]

If the mesh was not a closed geometry the other obj probably unwrapped fine. This one was closed so it didn't have a seam to work from.

You don't actually need a whole cut through. You may want to fit it and re-unwrap it marking the edges close to where it makes contact with the model so you can make an alpha texture to blend out the edge in vam.
In my test the clothing creator gave it a frilly edge, so an alpha texture will hide this and blend it in more.

View attachment 274280

I'll either end up doing that, or seeing how well Stoppers ReWrapper works with them. The one and only one that worked originally had edges like that too, but when I re-wrapped it with Stoppers plugin(https://hub.virtamate.com/resources/clothing-rewrapper.35728/), it rounded out perfectly. Needing less textures will hopefully make it as lightweight as possible too.

But ya know, here I go trying to take shortcuts, and I'll probably waste the better half of my day again lol.