VaM 1.x Need help from clothing experts: Persistent bumps/spikes with morphs (My first clothing asset)

Bplus · Thursday at 11:58 AM

I really need some expert advice here. I'm currently trying my hand at my very first clothing item (a nipple overlay) and I'm slowly losing my mind.

The Issue:As soon as I load the overlay into VaM and dial up the morphs (specifically breast/nipple morphs), the mesh gets distorted, creating these ugly bumps and spikes. It looks like some vertices are getting completely wrong weights and shooting out in random directions.

What I've tried so far (with no success):

I built the mesh strictly on an absolute Zero-Morph Genesis 2 Female Base in Blender.
I did the binding in DAZ Studio using the Transfer Utility (also onto a flat, zero-morph base, Resolution Level: Base).
I tried keeping the exact original triangle topology from DAZ.
I completely retopologized it manually into a clean quad mesh and shrinkwrapped it.
In VaM, Surface Offset and Thickness are set to 0.0.

No matter which workflow I use, these damn spikes remain in the exact same spots on the mesh.

Is this a known limitation of the DAZ Transfer Utility when dealing with skintight overlays? Is there a weight painting trick in Blender or DAZ that I'm missing as a clothing beginner?

I would appreciate any advice you guys can give me. I've attached some screenshots of the issue!

Sally Whitemane · Friday at 6:56 PM

I have no doubts you used the base mesh properly since you mentioned it very clearly.

I completely retopologized it manually into a clean quad mesh and shrinkwrapped it.

The funny thing is you may be putting to much effort into it with this step. For typical much larger clothing items covering a larger body part (with more vertices to fit to) it makes sense.
In general the mesh detail seems overkills to much to me.

You are trying to put a very tiny "clothing" high polygon areola + nipple "clothing" item over low poly Genesis 2 body mesh.
Because this is a clothing item, you fit it on to the body when you import it in VaM. Which I cannot explain in detail, but as far as I understand it, it loosly ties the verticies of your clothing mesh to the body mesh.
It has to be done this way to have lose fabric that can be physically simulated. But your part is not fabric and should not behave like that. It must follow the body very precise.

The bumps, I'd assume, are a result of 2 things:
1. The high polygon mesh sticking to the underlying low poly vertex locations. It follows the low poly contoures.
2. VaM's clothing smoothing, not accesible via UI, can be disabled in one of the clothing text files. Don't bother with this. The smoothing is a good thing.

Try cloning the nipple mesh part 1 to 1:
1. Get G2 base mesh into blender *doh*
2. Select the areola + nipple parts in edit mode
3. Copy them into a new object
4. Only thing I'd touch on that new object -> move it slightly out of the body (it may not even be needed if you'd use a surface offset in VAM later, I'd probably skip it on the first try)
5. get it back into DAZ / VAM and test-fit it

What *should* happen now is that the clothing item perfectly follows the body because each vertex in your mesh has a nearby body vertex when fitting.
Now if if that works and you want extra physical mesh details, subdivide, edit and morph it with *resonable* subdivision settings - I'd do 2 subdivisions max and I'd expect a "to high poly" mesh to get back that bump effect otherwise.

Another similar morph issue I had with DAZ was that it assumed a wrong range for a morph. Like in DAZ it was -1 to 1 and in VaM 0 to 1.
But DAZ knowledge from mainly 2018/2019 is to rusty to remember how I solved that. Maybe I'm talking complete bulls*it with my grey braincells...

Weight painting = for physics, should not even be needed here. Every sticks to the body. Lose fabric like a skirt would need that.