Creating a clothes library: some technical aspects

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Re: Creating a clothes library: some technical aspects

Postby robertltux » Mon Mar 05, 2012 3:15 pm

a wild idea that may solve the "million helpers" problem is to have a mode in the MakeClothes script where it only uses the "bounding box" for fitting and does not attempt to match vertex to vertex. Also this could be a failsafe in the script where if it can't match more than 10% of the vertxes it falls back to Bounding box mode.

Example a pancake tutu (Like from the BlackSwan Movie) it could be made with a ring of vertexes at the waist but those are the only vertexes that are even close to the Human Mesh. In this case those vertexes would be used to define size and location for the tutu but no other fitting would be done.


Its either that or have some way of doing "props" since we will end up with needing a LOT of helpers.
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Re: Creating a clothes library: some technical aspects

Postby duststorm » Mon Mar 05, 2012 7:41 pm

I didn't have much time last week to do any work, but I did try out creating a clothed character using some of my clothes and exporting to blender to create a full rigged character.

While doing this I made some observations:
- there are some texturing issues on the rorkimaru mesh: due to misaligned UV coordinates there are some black parts or visible seams. Especially teeth need work.
- at the moment I still needed to do some manual tweaking on the clothes
- the rigging of the arms of the shirt could be better: There is a problem at the shoulder joints. I used the simple (game) rig, I should test what it does with the mhx or rigify rig

Didn't have enough time yet to document it in detail, though.
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Re: Creating a clothes library: some technical aspects

Postby duststorm » Mon Mar 12, 2012 11:13 pm

I'm happy to see that support for normal and bump maps has been added!
They can now be stored as <clothesname>_normal.tif and <clothesname>_bump.tif in the clothes package.
Note that .tif will probably dissappear in the future and all textures will become png. (if the Aqsis support gets sorted out)

Just a little request, would it be possible to also allow a displacement map to be added? I see that as the best solution for getting sculpted folds at reasonable polygon counts.
Who knows whether we can make use of those maps one day using realtime OpenGL shaders too ;)

As for my progress, I've been a little busy lately so things are progressing slower. I have however been experimenting a bit with exporting a clothed character. I'm now doing some experiments with animating it using mhx mocap tools. I'll post my findings soon.
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Re: Creating a clothes library: some technical aspects

Postby ThomasL » Tue Mar 13, 2012 8:50 am

duststorm wrote:I'm happy to see that support for normal and bump maps has been added!

They can now be stored as <clothesname>_normal.tif and <clothesname>_bump.tif in the clothes package.
Note that .tif will probably dissappear in the future and all textures will become png. (if the Aqsis support gets sorted out)


You can actually call the textures whatever you want by editing the mhclo file in a text editor. The maps are only supported in mhx export to Blender, which was very easy to fix. Perhaps one also wants to control the normal and bump strength?

duststorm wrote:Just a little request, would it be possible to also allow a displacement map to be added?

No problem for Blender export. Could I have some of your low-poly clothes with normal or displacement maps for testing?
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Re: Creating a clothes library: some technical aspects

Postby dmbasso » Tue Mar 13, 2012 1:21 pm

It would also be nice to have the exporter generate a separate alpha map, as a temporary solution while Cycles ignores RGBA. I tried to do the image manipulation in a Blender script, but pixel access is ridiculously slow.

Anyway, I was intending to make a patch to the MHX Importer for creating Cycles materials, but the alpha map must be created somewhere. I made a Blender script to dump the node structure as code that could be used in the importer, which I attach to this message. It doesn't dump the actual material properties yet. I was going to use the materials that s0ndeb0k kindly provided me. But for the next weeks I'll not have much time, so feel free to improve on this idea.

[why can't I attach a file with .py extension?]
Attachments
material.zip
(655 Bytes) Downloaded 417 times
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Re: Creating a clothes library: some technical aspects

Postby duststorm » Mon Mar 26, 2012 3:38 pm

Here's a small update to show you what I did as an experiment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQX0bKsyO9A

The arms on the shirt are a bit off, but as you can see the base mesh has the same issue. I think it's due to the simple game rig being imperfect. I will try to make a comparison with the default mhx rig soon. I don't believe it's due to the bvh data because when simply posing the rig I have similar issues.
Still, I'm quite impressed with what I can get out of the box.

EDIT: I was on my way to export a character with MHX rig to compare, but I think I hit a bug. It's reported in the bug tracker.
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Re: Creating a clothes library: some technical aspects

Postby duststorm » Wed Mar 28, 2012 1:24 pm

In order to have everything in one place I will refer to useful clothes related documentation and tutorials that can help everyone who's interested.
Even if documentation is still a work in progress, this will get you started. Lots of thanks goes out to Thomas both for creating these features and writing excellent documentation about them.
At the moment, all these new features are not yet in the latest stable release. You will have to download the latest nightly to use them.

New documentation:
MHX import in Blender 2.5
Making clothes tutorial (note: it's hard to see but you can click on links for each step, it's a really detailed guide)
MHX import in Blender 2.4 (note that Blender 2.4, while still supported, doesn't support all the latest MHX features and scripts. I highly recommend switching to Blender 2.5 or 2.6)


Old documentation pages (note that these are just for reference but are largely outdated, refer to the new documentation as much as possible):
Old Making clothes tutorial (tailor's guide)
Clothes in Blender 2.4
Clothes in Blender 2.5 and masking


Blog posts:
The emperor's new clothes
Helper geometry for clothes
Clothes with multiple UV layers
Making a skirt with MakeClothes


Interesting forum threads:
Questions about the tailor's guide
About the quality aimed for in MH clothes
Arcadia's clothing work
Contains a useful technical discussion about clothes making


External resources and tutorials:
CGBoomer's tutorials about clothes in Blender
Sculpting a jeans in Blender video tutorial (It's in German but if you don't understand it you'll get the important parts it just by looking at it)
From the same series, a more general and basic blender sculpting tutorial
Blender Cookie: very good jeans modeling tutorial (explains modeling and texturing)
Blender cookie: Working with multires modifier, retopoing a high resolution sculpted mesh, creating normal map
Blender Cookie: texturing using projection painting (I used this for example when texturing the shoes)


Sources of Inspiration:
Workflow of creating a lowpoly character with sculpted clothes
The sort of level of detail and types of clothes I'm aiming for
Lots of interesting info on character creation in Uncharted 3
The character pipeline in Uncharted 2
ZBrush character sculpting tutorials
Interesting character models
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Re: Creating a clothes library: some technical aspects

Postby robertltux » Wed Mar 28, 2012 2:12 pm

duststorm wrote:In order to have everything in one place I will refer to useful clothes related documentation and tutorials that can help everyone who's interested.
Even if documentation is still a work in progress, this will get you started. Lots of thanks goes out to Thomas both for creating these features and writing excellent documentation about them.
At the moment, all these new features are not yet in the latest stable release. You will have to download the latest nightly to use them.


good idea i would suggest having a "sticky" topic in the newbies forum with this info.

as far as doing the Nightly its not all that bad IF you download python 2.7.2 32BIT in fact if you can handle Visual Studio (on Windows) its not all that hard to do an SVN compile
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Re: Creating a clothes library: some technical aspects

Postby duststorm » Wed Mar 28, 2012 3:17 pm

robertltux wrote:as far as doing the Nightly its not all that bad ...

On linux it's three commands:
Code: Select all
svn update (or checkout at first)
mv Makefile.Linux Makefile
make

A lot easier ;)
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Re: Creating a clothes library: some technical aspects

Postby robertltux » Wed Mar 28, 2012 3:32 pm

duststorm wrote:
robertltux wrote:as far as doing the Nightly its not all that bad ...

On linux it's three commands:
Code: Select all
svn update (or checkout at first)
mv Makefile.Linux Makefile
make

A lot easier ;)


my point is that its almost easy to do even on a brain damaged OS.
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