T-Shirt Factory and other clothing customizations

[blindsaypatten]

A few ideas for discussion:

I think it would be great if there were ways to customize clothing as easily as one can customize bodies. In particular, I think it would be a great feature if there were a base t-shirt and you could select or set a color and choose an image graphic file and get a t-shirt in that color cloth and with the graphic incorporated. T-shirts are very common clothing worldwide and one could quickly produce a wide variety of different T-shirts for scenes with several characters with minimal effort and without requiring the skills that are necessary to produce clothing with MakeClothes. This would greatly increase the amount of customization that a beginner user could quickly and easily accomplish. If one wanted to go all out one could produce a few versions of the t-shirt suitable for different types of poses and/or with different wrinkle patterns or that hang differently (e.g. very tight or over-sized) to add variety and avoid having multiple characters with identical winkles in their shirts.

Right now there is a huge gulf between ease of producing a customized body and producing customized clothing, I think this would narrow that gap somewhat. Perhaps that's a plugin, perhaps it's a standalone MakeTShirt program.

Along similar lines, a while back Joel posted a thread about some textures that Pixar has made available that included one of the female outfits with several alternative textures. I think it would great to have a newbie-friendly way for people to customize clothing with different textures. By newbie-friendly I specifically mean without having to use Blender. If one could easily pick a different color for a suit, select pinstripes, make it a tweed jacket, change the pattern on the dress shirt under the jacket, change the pattern on the tie. etc. I think it would have a lot of flexibility and appeal. I'm guessing that some or even all of this can be done using the material editor, but even if it can it would be nice to have a more newbie-friendly interface.

Lastly, and I am least sure of how useful/how much of an improvement this would be, would be a MakeTarget for clothing where I could load a character with a pair of pants and a shirt and tweak the shirt to work with the pants. Maybe this is already possible with MakeClothes and I just haven't seen it. Right now most of the available clothing comes in fixed ensembles rather than individual items that can be mixed and matched. I presume this is at least partly because of the difficulty of making separately, for example, pants and shirts that interact nicely with one another.

Like I said, these are just brainstorming ideas for discussion.

[jujube]

For customizing colors and decals, Sims 3 lets you customizing clothing colors, with each clothing item having its own color palette. The Sims is closed source, but it still might be worth asking its modding community how it might have been implemented.

As for the clothing folds, the best way to do that as far as I know is Marvelous Designer. But it's expensive, in processing power and in money. But I'd like to make clothing items with generic folds, that look good whichever way you bend the torso.

[blindsaypatten]

For customizing colors and decals, Sims 3 lets you customizing clothing colors, with each clothing item having its own color palette. The Sims is closed source, but it still might be worth asking its modding community how it might have been implemented.

As for the clothing folds, the best way to do that as far as I know is Marvelous Designer. But it's expensive, in processing power and in money. But I'd like to make clothing items with generic folds, that look good whichever way you bend the torso.

Implementation of colors is straight-forward, even trivial. You either have a mask or a separate image for each separate fabric in the clothing, and you can use the same color chooser as you get with the Pick buttons in the materials editor. If you have real wrinkles then graphics are just another image to be composited.

If you have fake wrinkles, like with a normals map, it is a little more complicated but essentially you need a way to morph the graphic to follow the wrinkles, or avoid having wrinkles and graphics in the same place.

For the male_casualsuit06 the mask is trivial:

Just select male_casualsuit06 and go to the material editor and set the shader to normalmap and then use the Pick button under Diffuse to see most of the interface, you just need to be able to color the fabrics separately.

[lloyd_llama]

i'm not sure if this is helpful, but i've had reasonable success recoloring/editing assets using gimp.

example using malecasualsuit06:

[blindsaypatten]

Nice! I've been meaning to learn GIMP for at least a decade. I've been experimenting with using Blender's cloth simulator for generating wrinkles and have the graphics follow them:
https://www.youtube.com/edit?o=U&video_id=-Q8-Qik2dKo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHOPNTTzsic

I haven't got around to generating MH clothing out of the results yet. Having too much fun staying in Blender.

[lloyd_llama]

so far, i haven't been able to actually create any clothing of my own as i seem to be having a great deal of difficulty understanding blender.

[loki1950]

so far, i haven't been able to actually create any clothing of my own as i seem to be having a great deal of difficulty understanding blender.

Try looking at some of the starting blender videos it takes a while to get comfortable with blender's user interface but once you do you wish other software used it.

Enjoy the Choice

[lloyd_llama]

I've watched a couple of videos, i guess i just need to find one that explains stuff in a way i can understand it. i think maybe my brain works a bit differently or something. lol.

[loki1950]

Just keep plugging away at it took me a few years to get comfortable with it myself then I had a stroke that affected my left side so I love the dynamic context menu add-on makes one handed usage simpler though my left hand is not 100% still able to hit those modifier keys.

Enjoy the Choice