Clothing Workflow Best Practice?

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Clothing Workflow Best Practice?

Postby vertigo_running » Mon Aug 02, 2021 6:26 pm

(Initially posted this to another subforum, but realized this was probably better. My initial post here doesn't seem to have worked, so resubmitting.)

Background context: I'm working on doing NPR-style 3d comics in Blender and am using MakeHuman to generate these characters. I am also largely building custom outfits for characters.

Problem: MakeClothes allows me to easily make clothes which will fit MakeHuman models, which is good. However, I will often use outfits with procedural textures and multiple materials in one model which I will want to put on multiple characters (background characters, etc.). I may also make outfits specifically for characters and then change the character's body somewhat later, which also requires a clothing refit.

Currently, I see a few main ways of addressing this:

1. Make the clothes and then bake the textures into them. Export to MakeHuman, put them on my character, reimport.

Pros:
* Clothes are easy to fit to individual models
* Easy to re-import when I put them on characters in MakeHuman.

Cons:
* Clothing has to be made to MakeClothes standards ("Maximum pole count" is the current bane of my existence)
* More labor-intensive to change my mind about coloring later.

2. Same as option 1, except that I don't bake the textures and just re-apply them to the character on import.

Pros:
* Clothes are easy to fit to individual models
* I retain the flexibility of procedural textures.

Cons:
* If I have multiple materials on a mesh, I have to re-select and apply them
* Clothing has to be made to MakeClothes standards
* Clothing looks kind of terrible in MakeHuman (NBD, as I'm mostly using it for modeling)

3. I make the clothes to fit the model directly in Blender and never put them into MakeHuman at all.

Pros:
* I get to keep procedural textures
* No messing about with max poles; generally less model cleanup involved

Cons:
* Have to individually fit the outfit to each model or when changing a model
* No automatic rigging/weighting like MakeClothes takes care of

Is anyone doing something similar to this? What workflow do you find is most effective for you, and are there any strategies I'm missing?

What would be really ideal would be a way to run the logic of MakeClothes in order to fit the clothes to a MakeHuman-exported model straight in Blender, but I'm not aware of any feature which will let me do this.
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Re: Clothing Workflow Best Practice?

Postby joepal » Tue Aug 03, 2021 2:51 pm

Actually, there's another piece in the current puzzle that might make your life somewhat easier. If you also install MakeSkin, you can save a blend file with a blender material alongside the clothes.

On the makeskin tab:

makeskin2.png


On the makeclothes tab:

makeskin1.png


By checking the "use makeskin" and "save blender material" boxes, you can have a second material slot which will survive the roundtrip makeclothes->makehuman->MPFB1.

After import, you can then simply delete the first material, and the blender material will be used.

Sure, it's still a rather cumbersome workaround, and it doesn't solve all your problems, but at least you get the material autoassigned. If the first material can be an approximation or bake of the real blender material, it might even look decent in MH.

However, when making the above screenshots, I realized there was a bug in makeskin with the described procedure. So if you want to try the aboive you'll want either the version from github or the nightly build which will be available tomorrow.

What would be really ideal would be a way to run the logic of MakeClothes in order to fit the clothes to a MakeHuman-exported model straight in Blender, but I'm not aware of any feature which will let me do this.


This is not as far-fetched as it might sound. Most of the underlying logic is already implemented in MPFB2.

In MPFB2, you can do the entire modeling blender side, without involving MH in any step. On the modeling tab, you will find a "refit" button, which will adjust the clothes to the current body shape.

refit.png


This is by no means a suggest workflow, and it's pretty messy, but just to demonstrate the principle:

If you had a second character with a separate rig, you could then duplicate a piece of clothing, make it a child of the second armature, change the armature modifier to point at the the second armature and then click refit. You would then have clothing fitting the second character with retained materials and full weight painting.

Now, this has a few prerequisites. The foremost one being that the character must have been either created from scratch or presets in MPFB2, or that it has been created from an MHM file as template. It will not work with a character imported from MH. Further the clothing must have been loaded from MHCLO at some point, even if you replaced the material afterwards.

Anyway, the next thing on my todo list for MPFB2 is to integrate the MakeClothes functionality. I'm hoping to be able to do this when I get home from vacation in a few weeks. I'll take a look at the refitting workflows then to see if the scenarios you list can be made smoother somehow.
Joel Palmius (LinkedIn)
MakeHuman Infrastructure Manager
http://www.palmius.com/joel
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Re: Clothing Workflow Best Practice?

Postby vertigo_running » Tue Aug 03, 2021 3:05 pm

This is all extremely useful, thank you! I have a lot of characters already made in MakeHuman, so the MPFB2 solution may not work for me, but the additional material slot which will survive the round trip will help with some other things. That functionality you described would also be quite useful, so thank you so much for adding that to the roadmap.
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