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MakeClothes Universal Fit -- or at least close.

PostPosted: Tue Dec 12, 2017 3:27 pm
by MargaretToigo
I have been making clothes with MakeClothes for quite some time now, and I have read all the documentation available, plus many forum posts here and elsewhere.

But I have yet to discover the mysterious method for making an article of clothing fit a wide range of body shapes, especially older humans.

I have done it accidentally a few times, but more often than not the clothes I make fit well to whichever form -- male, female, base, child, baby -- was used to make the clothes, but get distorted if the human is modified too far beyond that form.

The distortions always appear in places where vertices are close together, such as the armpits and crotch areas, but necklines, waistbands, and sleeves can also get warped (mostly with humans in the senior citizen age range).

In some cases, changing the human even slightly makes the clothes get all bumpy, like a Shrinkwrap modifier was applied with a large offset but no weight paining.

At first, I thought it was just a matter of polys, with low poly meshes fitting better than medium to high poly meshes, but although that does seem to be a general rule, it does not apply in all cases.

I realize that some parts of the human are gonna slightly stick out through the clothes (breasts and buttocks mostly), and that's what the Mask modifier is for, but masking doesn't cover distortions.

I have studied several of the user contributed assets from here, and some of them fit more humans than others, too.

It's not too much trouble to use Blender's proportional editing to fit an article of clothing originally designed for one gender/body type to another, and then just run MakeClothes again using the appropriate human form, but I don't want to do that unless there's no other way to go.

I created male and female senior and plus-size human forms using that synch mesh thingie (pretty cool feature, BTW), ran MakeClothes using those forms and the clothes fit those forms but only tolerate slight changes to the human before they get all distorted.

Now, it's one thing to have male and female versions of an outfit, but to have male, female, senior male, and senior female -- as well as plus-sized versions of each for a total of eight -- is a bit much.

I have tried lots of stuff like:
using humans with helpers
using humans without helpers
doing that "controlling the results with vertex groups" thing
creating vertex groups automatically (usually works better for me than the above method, BTW)
moving/relaxing vertices to be farther apart/straighter in armpits and crotches
adding edge loops for more flexibility
dissolving edge loops to reduce density
subdividing
un-subdividing

...all with mixed results.

So, is there a trick to it, or is this just the limitations of the software I'm running into here?

Re: MakeClothes Universal Fit -- or at least close.

PostPosted: Tue Dec 12, 2017 3:50 pm
by MargaretToigo
Here are some examples...

Note how the jacket looks good on the average male, but the collar distorts on the older male.

Re: MakeClothes Universal Fit -- or at least close.

PostPosted: Tue Dec 12, 2017 3:54 pm
by MargaretToigo
Somehow, I got this one right without even trying. I used the baby form to make this outfit, but it fits almost all other humans with only slight breakage...

Re: MakeClothes Universal Fit -- or at least close.

PostPosted: Tue Dec 12, 2017 4:08 pm
by Antiqua_Sphinge
punkduck has a way of making clothes that fit a wide range in size, age, etc.

He might be able to give you pointers on how he does that.

Re: MakeClothes Universal Fit -- or at least close.

PostPosted: Tue Dec 12, 2017 5:04 pm
by MargaretToigo
Yes, punkduck has some of the best stuff on here. I have studied his meshes and read many of his posts.

I'd like someone to tell me what I did right without even trying, as well as where I might be going wrong.

Thinking about the jacket versus the baby jumper it occurs to me that symmetry, or the lack thereof, may be a factor.

The baby outfit is symmetrical and fits many but the jacket is asymmetrical and only fits average males.

Re: MakeClothes Universal Fit -- or at least close.

PostPosted: Tue Dec 12, 2017 9:22 pm
by joepal
Me, I generally make different models for the typical use cases. At least one female and one male version.

Re: MakeClothes Universal Fit -- or at least close.

PostPosted: Tue Dec 12, 2017 10:28 pm
by punkduck
MargaretToigo wrote:Yes, punkduck has some of the best stuff on here. I have studied his meshes and read many of his posts.

I'd like someone to tell me what I did right without even trying, as well as where I might be going wrong.

Thinking about the jacket versus the baby jumper it occurs to me that symmetry, or the lack thereof, may be a factor.

The baby outfit is symmetrical and fits many but the jacket is asymmetrical and only fits average males.


Thanx Margaret, but I'm one of these guys who have no idea about clothes for males (even when I go shopping for myself ;) ), so most of my MH clothes are created for females.

We had a discussion about different topologies with blindsaypatten, so first thing is to see what is happening with your character when you change e.g. gender in MakeHuman from male to female. Use wireframe-mode in MakeHuman, it is the easiest way to make it visible.

The train driver uniform was something I created on the base mesh. I used it for a male and female character. These pants will deform heavily near the waistline when you change it to female or male. Luckily the jacket will hide this. Or try the tight jeans for a male character, it does not work.

Now take a Caucasian female character with the evening gown (created on the female with helpers human) and change it to Asian. The neck region is deforming heavily and skin is visible outside. The evening gown must be reworked for Asians, I had done this with the motorcycle jacket in between. Since I created Xiao, I'm aware of the problem. I'm not sure if an African female character will result in another problem ...

Mindfront had done biker boots and shoes for males and females. He's doing it more exact than I've done it even for the feet.

In the picture with Xiao and Nayka I used your baby jumper (see: http://www.makehumancommunity.org/forum/download/file.php?id=5700&mode=view).

When I compared your baby jumper and my baby romper, there are not big differences. The structure is similar. One difference is that you do not use delete groups. You should use it, when your character is posed, otherwise skin might be visible outside. I used the baby + helper human and created two additional vertex-groups for the arms, because in T-Pose vertices of the sleeves try to stay near the body. I first thought of reworking your asset because I had exactly the same problem, but in the end I fixed this problem only in Blender (Nayka's left arm is in T-Pose, when you look at the picture).

Especially the romper/jumper ends on loops forming legs, arms and neck. And only the neck is deforming a bit, when you change gender etc. the other loops will stay in form. So this will work in most cases, only the texture might look funny. That's the reason for the positive result and it will work with nearly all overall-type clothes.

Sometimes I try to use rigid groups, like for spike collar or for some buttons and buckles and the cosplay assets of Wonder Woman etc. but also these have their limits, because you scale in x, y and z direction. The shield of Wonder Woman becomes oval and a button between the breasts of a female character is doing the same, when you enlarge the breasts and there is no space left in between.

I've a rule of thumb:
  • jacket, t-shirt, sweater, pullover, coat: use helper
  • tight t-shirt: use body and tell the friends of big bust sizes to use blender to fix it unless you want a latex suit ;)
  • pants: use body (or helper, but then delete right/left vertex groups from the skirt, or create own groups leaving out the skirt!)
  • skirt: helper, delete right/left groups from the red tights.
  • hat, helmet, glasses: body, take rigid groups
  • lingerie, underwear, swimwear: body

And always feel free to ask. It is not a disclosure of a secret for me when I share my information.

Re: MakeClothes Universal Fit -- or at least close.

PostPosted: Wed Dec 13, 2017 1:02 am
by Elvaerwyn
In my experience with blender, there are factors multiple involved in the cure of this problem. The buzzword in opensim/sl is fitted mesh versus unfitted. The relation seems to revolve around whether a piece of clothing is fitted to an armature or floating on a body. When properly fitted and uploaded to these worlds, a piece of clothing can be changed to fit the form with the body in the slider panel of edit avatar. The addons I work with do have auto weight and skinning options that easily facilitate this. However if there is an addon it can be done manually in most cases. I would probably try to play with shape keys and the custom properties sliders. Values can be set to be under or above whatever is standard allowing for more flexibilty in meshes. Ive not tried to backwards work this theory into makehuman yet however. Look into Gaia Clary's series of video and written tutorials she always seems to have information on these lil annoyances, in both free and paid options.

Re: MakeClothes Universal Fit -- or at least close.

PostPosted: Wed Dec 13, 2017 1:05 pm
by MargaretToigo
joepal wrote:Me, I generally make different models for the typical use cases. At least one female and one male version.


Well, in reality men's and women's clothing are different from one another because men and women are shaped differently -- as I tried to tell my daughter while she attempted to stuff herself into her brother's jeans.

Also, there are big and tall and plus size stores/departments, as well as those for babies and children, so it would make sense that different virtual humans would need their own virtual clothes for a good fit.

Re: MakeClothes Universal Fit -- or at least close.

PostPosted: Wed Dec 13, 2017 1:15 pm
by MargaretToigo
punkduck brought up topology and I took a look at the differences between younger and older caucasian males...

Screen Shot 2017-12-13 at 7.36.58 AM.png
Settings for younger male

Screen Shot 2017-12-13 at 7.37.08 AM.png
younger male topology


Notice how the edge loops around the neck change quite a lot as the human ages...

Screen Shot 2017-12-13 at 7.37.26 AM.png
settings for older male

Screen Shot 2017-12-13 at 7.37.34 AM.png
older male topology



This is the likely reason why my jacket deforms the way it does when put on older humans... So perhaps there needs to be a seniors' department in my little virtual fashion house...