Creating clothing (DAZ/Blender/Marvelous Designer/Unity)

[kshpr0n]

Hi!
Somehow I started looking into creating some clothing for VAM, but although parts of the process are documented and I found various bits of information in different place, I am still not at a point where I would consider myself happy with the results...

My basic understanding so far is, that clothing is created with the internal clothing designer. It has to load a scene created by Daz3d for this. The scene should contain the clothing. So if you create something from scratch (for instance in Marvelous Deisgner) one would need to import it to DAZ first, save it as a scene and then import it into VAM. So far, so good.

However, I ran into a whole bunch of issues over the last couple of days:

* To design any kind of clothing with Marvelous Designer, you need to import an Avatar. Documentation mostly suggests to export the standard Genesis 2 female from DAZ and import it into MD. The model has a major problem, though: It is impossible to create a tight fitting garnet around the genital area with the Genesis 2 model in MD. The material is always drawn into the buttcrack and starts clipping out because it is too close to the skin on both sides... It is completely impossible to design anything decent this way. I had some success with exporting a model with some morphs already applied, but it still isn't a perfect solution. Is there really no other way that just works?
* When exporting, textures tend to get lost. This is because VAM expects the textures to be in a specific location, but the clothing creator doesn't copy them there from the absolute location in the duf. While it isn't a problem to copy the files over and they do get loaded correctly, after I figured out I had to edit the UV map manually in MD, I still end up with "Diffuse, Metalness, Normal, Opacity and Roughness from DM, while VAM wants "_MainTex, _SpecTex, _GlossTex, _AlphaTex, _BumpMap und _DecalTex". This is not only one more than I have - the only one I can assign with confidence is Alpha=Opacity - what would be the correct equivalent of the others?
* One of my first designs was a bikini which only consists of two plastic triangles (which are glued on). I was able to create something in MD by using the leather material, which gives it about the right stiffness when pinning it on the model. However - according to another forum posts VAM will _always_ wrap clothing. There is no option in the clothing creator to define a material is stiff/not wrappable.
I read that I would have to create an unity asset for "hard" objects. So I learned about importing stuff to unity and exporting it as an asset. Which somewhat worked, but only to create the next problem: The object cannot be grabbed and adjusted to the model in VR. If I have no mesh colloder in unity the hand goes right through it - no chance to grab. If I do add a mash collider my hand (and the model) do collide, but I still cannot grab and move the object. Just like it was pinned in the air (it isn't marked as static in unity). When I position on the model with the buttons/gimbal and pin it to nipple control everything basically works - except that the model is moving very strangly when animated, since it collides with the bra like a wall...
I also did notice that there are some Glasses from MeshedVR available as clothing, which behave exactly like I would my bra to behave - Unfortunately I couldn't find any hint/tutorial how these were made...

Also, compared with other clothing that is available my own stuff looks really bad Especially the edges are just a complete mess - in MD/DAZ/Blender everything seems fine, though. Please see the comparison:

This is btw. the clipping in MD:

I would really appreciate it if someone could help me with all this questions...

 

[TToby]

Those glasses you mentioned are one of the very early clothes MeshedVr added before we had the custom clothes importer. Unfortunately it is not possible to create something similar with the import functions we now have.
The VaM clothes system is and was never perfect. Everything you wrote is sadly true. The real art of cloth-creation is to somehow create something that looks good anyways. Nevertheless, its great that we have the option to create and import clothes at all. This is something that the early VaM users don't take for granted.

What were the other questions?
The way of importing clothes you have described is right... first DAZ then VaM. Therefore you can find many good tipps and tutorials if you google for "create clothes for DAZ".
As you said: If you have issues with the textures, make sure to have them licated somewhere nside the DAZ "my library" folder.
The crotch area is and was always complicated. Not only for VaM, but also for DAZ. You can somewhat "repair" the look by using physics and the other clothes options in VaM. Though, this will not always help.

Unfortunately I never used Marvelous Designer, so I can't help with those questions. Sorry.

 

[kshpr0n]

Thank you for your reply! Is Marvelous Designer perhaps not the best choice for creating clothing from scratch? Should I use something else?

Are we "stuck" with the new clothing import method, or would the old one, which allow for static objects, still be available? Is there an howto for that?

 

[DJ]

Are we "stuck" with the new clothing import method, or would the old one, which allow for static objects, still be available? Is there an howto for that?

There was no "old" clothing import method. The glasses and a few other clothing items were built in when Meshed wrote the program. With full access to the code and working in unity, he could do things differently than the more limited clothing import system he eventually wrote to allow users to add clothing.

 

[TToby]

Hi,
as for what I know, Marvelous Designer is a great tool. Though, as I don't know it, I don't know how good the created meshes are for importing into DAZ. As you are familiar with it, it might be the best tool for you personally. You maybe want to Google search for "creating clothes for DAZ with Marvelous Designer". The DAZ community is much bigger and older than the VaM community. So, the chance for finding a tutorial is much bigger. Just keep the weak spot of VaM clothes in mind, for instance don't add a lining in clothes, or buttons and pockets in an area where physics should be active...

I wouldn't call it "stuck", but yes. The old methode is not available to users. I don't know the technical details how MeshedVR has added them, but for us is only the clothing importer, or static CUAs (which are not very popular for clothes).

 

[kshpr0n]

The problem is, that the export from MD looks like it should in DAZ, while in VAM it tends to look _completely_ different.
Here is an example where VAM completely messed up the stitching parts:

The frustrating part is, that I have no idea what causes this - the mesh looks fine in my eyes...