On creating a basic clothing set RFC

[duststorm]

Concerning your first remark: you don't necessarily need to limit your creations to what works well with makehuman.
Firstly, thanks to the helpers already in place, regular clothes don't have to fit tightly anymore. Take some of my clothes for example, they don't have to stick to the body.
Secondly, well you can always tweak the end result or add details afterwards.

Try it out with a simple cape and post the results here, with a picture or whatever. If it doesn't work well, let us know what didn't work and maybe before you know it it's fixed. The thing with special clothes is not that they are not supported, just that nobody experimented with them yet. By doing some experiments you could be of a lot of help to the MH project. There's a lack of artists

Then, regarding the second: I have recently experimented some more with creating masks, and I used the "project UVs" button in the clothes script. This works pretty well, the only problem is in the areas where the seams are on the human mesh. You get a lot of faces spanning the whole width of the body or suddenly jumping from the body island to the hands or something. You don't want that. So you want to move those faces to just one place, so they're not too big. The problem is that there was no seam between them so the vertices of those faces and their neighbours are shared. Meaning that if you move some vertices, you have the same problem with another face that stretches too far.
To solve this problem: select only one edgeloop at a time in the 3D view. Select an edgeloop that is near the seams of the human mesh and in UV editor move the vertices to the right place. This way you uncouple the shared vertices.
Place a good texture on the uv map, for example the body specular map. In 3D view all faces that have stretched UVs will look weird when theyre textured. This helps you select the right edgeloops.
This is the workflow I have come up with now, I have yet to see whether this is a good one.

[Arcadia]

ok, i got it, thanks .

At the moment i work on this The cape comes later, unfortunately i have not enough time, to try all, what I want to try - Robes and Petticoats, Cloaks and coats etc - we will see, what finally comes out

But in two weeks i have holiday

[duststorm]

Nice.
I think what you made now will work quite well with clothes script, at least if it may behave like fabric.
I would try to fit the hip cloth against the skirt helper, otherwise you will get trouble.

The leg parts can be fit like pants, upper body parts like a shirt.
I only fear a bit for the metal rings, it's possible they become non-rigid and scale when the body moves.

[robertltux]

a crazy idea would be to allow for items to be declared as "props" and then anchored to a region/vertex (so in this case the rings would only use positioning from the mesh.

[duststorm]

Not props but just "rigid". And make it so it can also be applied to items covering whole body like a cuirass or harness or something. (you could for example add everything that has to be rigid to a "Rigid" vertex group)
But maybe this is something to add when regular clothing works well.

[Arcadia]

Modell a summerdress and fit the cloth to the helpers - but when i press "Recover seams" i got this

@duststorm
I wish i had your patience and your skill

[duststorm]

Recover seams just creates an additional object with lines that show the positions of seams on the human model.
It's up to you to create seams on your dress model, using those lines as reference.

You have two options:
- press recover seams, create seams on your clothes that are as close to those as possible. It should not be very exact. Then unwrap your UVs regularly.
- press Project UVs, with clothes and human mesh selected. This uses the matching of clothes to body to assign UV coordinates. It will probably need a lot of tweaking, see my clothes topic for some tips.

Maybe the best approach is a combination of the two (I still need to try this). Since with projecting UVs the biggest problem is in the seam areas, you might save yourself some trouble by first marking the seams.

I advise you to use a separate UV map for texturing the model, as the masking UV map is not ideal for clothes. Use a second UV Map for projecting the masking UV coordinates onto.

[Arcadia]

If i'm honest, the only thing that really confuses me, is that "project uvs" - i can model clothes really quick, make textures, bake maps for what ever, but everytime i see all these misplaced uvs, i get headaches - because im always unsure, wether the vertices i move, must stay on the right place on the map or can i move them anywhere ?

At the moment i first create my own seams, after export i delete them and then I create new seams for "projekt uvs".
And another question: can i paint a mask without use projekt uv? How can i see, wether the mask works?

Sorry, maybe this is easy, and i'm simply to stupid to understand it, but it frustrates me in some way.

[duststorm]

The truth of the matter is that everyone hates the masks
Yes, they are very confusing and it's difficult to understand or see what you're doing with them. I'm not fully confident with them myself either.
We also have no good tool for creating them at the moment, because you really have no visual feedback of what you're doing.

Actually these masks are not even used within MH, they are only setup for rendering using blender (and in the future maybe other renderers). So you can perfectly create clothes for MH without having masks. The only downside to that is that your blender rendering will not mask what's under the clothes. (which doesn't matter if there is no skin poking through anyway)
One of the main reasons masks were born is probably because of experiments that simply used shrinkwrap to create clothes without tweaking them manually. This typically leaves some interecting faces.

How do you see the effect of the masks? You need to setup the proper material settings in Blender and specify your mask texture as alpha mask. See this blog post: http://makehuman.blogspot.com/2011/10/e ... othes.html
That's the only place where it is used.

Do you need mask UV coordinates? Well, yes if you want your clothes to mask potentially other clothes that are under them. For masking the human body you only need a mask texture.

If you make your clothes so the skin never pokes through you might not even need them.

How do you paint masks? You could use blender texture paint, but this didn't work well with me because there is color bleeding along neighbouring faces, which makes messy masks.
I just export the UV mapping I made to an image, open that in the Gimp and paint my masks there. This gives sharp edges. Problem is that it's hard if you don't want to paint everything that is UV mapped (at the moment I just paint everything white that is mapped on the clothes).

My suggestion: concentrate on making art. Try getting your clothes right first, do their regular texturing, try fitting them nicely to the body and try exporting them to MakeHuman using the makeClothes script. Leave the masks for last, or wait until some better documentation or tutorials are ready for them. You can create clothes without them.
To be honest, most of my clothes still don't have masks, and if they have them they're probably not perfect yet.
View your clothes in MH, try the effect on different types of human. If the skin never pokes through you might not even need masks.
Then, export your clothed character to blender again, without helpers, and try posing your character in Blender. If even in different poses your character's skin doesn't poke through clothes there's even less reason to have masks.

[robertltux]

okay i have decided to go ahead and make public my efforts so far


http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5398233/badwolflabs/badwolf.zip

since this is a dropbox thing i will also be keeping it updated as time goes by

i think i have included the template files for each clothing item and a set of basic color swatches


How could we setup different textures for the same item without doing a whole new item?? (btw getting a properties editor builtin would make this easy as Texture > Load MHTX file > list of included MHTX files)