Forum: Marvelous Designer


Subject: The Flattening Tool. Going from ZBrush to MD instead of the other way aroun

vintorix opened this issue on Dec 19, 2017 ยท 2 posts


vintorix posted Tue, 19 December 2017 at 6:16 PM

Memory folds is one of the most desirable things you want to have on your cloth as it unbeatable to give that realistic look. We get nice folds in MD but it is always real-time wrinkles. So what if you have sculpted a nice piece of cloth in ZBrush and want to have it in MD format? Normally we go the other way, from MD to ZBrush but it is also possible to change tack. (pun indented). For that we can use the flattening tool, one of the most fantastic things ever to come out from the MD Team laboratory. Here is the real example workflow,

  1. Start with the ZBrush sculpt. The example pants: 2.6 million polygons.
  2. Retop with ZRemesher, about 20K is a nice size.
  3. Remove the inner layer if you have used double-sided mesh. Adjust it to right avatar-size.
  4. Create temporary UV. A simple atlas island will suffice but must be proper(as no distortion).
  5. Then project from high-res to low-res using xNormal or whatever. Make Normal and AO (ambient occlusion) maps.
  6. Import to MD as avatar. Goto the scene tab, select ALL the mesh by shift-click, load Normal and AO map.
  7. When the details can be seen, use the Flattening Tool to create pattern. Afterwards you should have something like this,

flattening.jpg

  1. Open another instance of MD. As you create pattern, copy over to the other MD and sew the patterns.
  2. When you are confident over how to sew the cloth, sew the real version.
  3. Clean up the patterns (Convert to Curve Points, Delete All Curvepoints)

And here is the result!

flattening2.jpg

The idea is to have a non-wrinkled version as default, and use the wrinkles as a morph target...


vintorix posted Tue, 19 December 2017 at 10:48 PM

Here in 10 particle distance, then comes texturing and Substance Painter.. Pants_10_pd.jpg