Adding Memory Folds to Clothes with Zbrush and Marvelous Designer

[@harrysanders818]

So rare to see 3d artists teach fundamentals like this. A joy to watch!

[@Azzazel_]

This is high end /pro content and is not usual easy to find it, and you are giving it for free, Laura !!you are a beast!! , i was already subscribed but i unsucribed to be able to suscribe again XD, no for real, thanks a lot for your pearls of knowledge :)

[@Outgang]

My pleasure Azzazel!

[@bryanharrison3889]

Is is wrong that I love your name?

[@claudioceroni8028]

bruh those videos are PROFFFFFFESSIONAL! It's always marvelous to see this kind of tutorials out there on youtube

[@parallaxoldchannel]

What an incredible walkthrough, thank you so much!

[@mylandatruong8069]

Your explanation is very clear and you have such an interesting way of problem solving. After watching two of your videos about 3d garment I immediately joined and became a happy member of outgang. Really looking forward to all the other things I can learn from you.

[@daniloathayde543]

Amazing content! high quality and very well explained!

[@philmehrart]

Your content is invaluable. Thank you

[@sid2662]

Thank you Laura! this was informative. well , i noticed while dragging the memory fold alpha, you were facing the height amplitude deformation. my small suggestion to you is before dragging the alpha keep the brush focal shift to -100 you will definitely find what you were looking for .

[@unreal-forms]

so amazingly useful! thank you

[@bibu244]

Awesome Thanks Laura! Very helpful!

[@Taka-uq5sk]

Hey Laura, Hope you are doing well! Thanks for the tutorial it is really helpful! The reason you get that kind of artifact on your alpha is related to your alpha file format, never use jpg or any other 8bit format for sure 32bit is the best but 16bit should be good to go as well!

[@EduardoRamirez-k9j]

You are a genius!

[@honzanovotny2000]

The problem you were solving at 13:00 was caused by your alpha texture not using the whole spectrum. Could be prevented by using auto level node in SD, or stretching the spectrum inside of PS

[@avtpro]

Man! She is kill'en This!! ❤️💯⭐️👏🔥🎥🎨

[@gabeno_delfino]

07:40 Thanks Laura you completely blow my mind with that tip. It wouldn't have occurred to me. Btw 11:50 a simple way to resolve the problem here without exporting the texture would be to simply make the 3d garment planar along the Z axis (in other words, decreasing the height on the z axis) before grabbing the alpha.

[@atefezare5623]

Very informative!

[@wonderboy75]

Nice techniques Laura! Thank you!

[@dantertart5118]

Damstandaring , I will steal this one!

[@Outgang]

The basic brushes are the best ones :P

[@ZioBlu]

Great video, I really enjoyed! I wonder if an alternative solution without using photoshop could have been >subdivide 3/4 times >freeze subdivision >remesh at lower res >unfreeze >scale along Z at the lower res. But the photoshop filter did a great a job indeed. Nontheless, really informative, incredibly well explained, and a lot of cool tricks I didn't know of. I'm really grateful, thank you!

[@ScoobyDoofus]

I think I may know the answer to the Alpha "noise" issue. This may be a bit-depth/accuracy issue. Alphas usually work best with 16bit depth(or more), which is what grabdoc and likely MRGBZgrabber give you...The furthest and nearest pixols are used as 0 and 100% values. But then you high-pass filter this, which is essentially isolating a portion of that range, say, 30% to 70% now (40% the previous total gamut)...then you increased the contrast, which takes that "cropped" gamut, and stretches it across 0-100%, thereby introducing banding/contouring/stair-stepping or "noise" as you've called it. You can test this fairly simply by reducing the depth of an alpha in Photoshop to 8-bit, thereby discarding that extra fidelity, importing that into Zbrush, drag it out, and you'll see the same stair-stepping effect. I think you may be better off grabbing/generating your memory folds from less large & low-frequency displacements.

[@Outgang]

I understand the relationship between a low-bit depth image and the appearance of banding and how a high pass can make it worse but it's not a satisfying explanation in this case. When I'm running the high pass you can see that the high pass is applied on the 32-bit document/export from Zbrush and it gets converted down to a 16-bit image before importing back in Zbrush. The bit depth should be sufficient to support the manipulations I do to the data. In my previous video on exporting layers from Zbrush to Painter, I bake out 32-bit displacement maps from Zbrush, apply a level in Photoshop to ''expand'' the 0.48/0.52 range all the way to 0/1 and use the displacement map in Painter where the result has no banding whatsoever. My hunch is that the issue originates from how MRGBZGrabber extracts and stores the data to begin with or that the ''noise'' is related somehow to the polygons of the object that was ''grabbed''.

[@ScoobyDoofus]

@@Outgang Well, I think you are correct! I was incorrect here. I reproduced your process, including a number of variations on it, but at no time (except for reducing to 8-bit FIRST) was I able to reproduce the banding/noise that you're experiencing in the video. I love solving little technical problems like this, so now I'm going to be thinking about this unsolved mystery while trying to sleep the next few nights. :)

[@Outgang]

@@ScoobyDoofus For those who wonder, Scooby and I went DEEP down the rabbit hole together to understand what's going on and we found the issue. It originates from the fact that I'm saving out the data from Photoshop to a 16-bit .tiff while the data is in RGB. Zbrush degrades the data from 16-bit to 8-bit upon import (therefore creating banding). We tested taking the exact same data but converted in Photoshop to Grayscale as final step before export to .tiff and Zbrush kept it as 16-bit (therefore without creating banding) after import. Long story short, if you're going to create/tweak alphas with Photoshop, make sure that they're a grayscale texture before exporting them to Zbrush. Thanks Scooby for the help!

[@nirmitgarg1]

Damn. Thanks a lot. Its always a great learning!!

[@NFeelone]

for better quality of your Alphas from photoshop - use 16 or 32 bit formats. 8 bit can create such artifacts

[@Krankin]

Thanks loved the demo!

[@thenamelessone123]

Please please please tell me your 4K UI settings!!! What button size? Any layout tricks? Windows DPI tricks?

[@liuning6421]

Nice Work 👍🏻

[@Alexander_S_K]

Hey cool video! Btw, except from turning on "surface" you can also grab the alpha with XtractorRec brush which gives better results and/or the grab alpha from document (but i prefer the xtractor method nowadays).

[@Outgang]

Thanks for the tip!

[@JJ-oe6hw]

WOW! thank you

[@3dbznessdesignz855]

any future live episodes Laura my second question or a request rather from my side

[@3dbznessdesignz855]

Laura I learnd so much here altready at 6:56

[@MayankKumar-nc1rq]

render lady is the best....I do the same thing for folds everytime, didn't knew about rgbz thing but if you render the plane in zbrush and then save the alpha screenshot instead of using rgbz thing the noise problem won't be there! I haven't faced such noise issue yet though!

[@Outgang]

Cheers Mayank! The problem comes after the Photoshop pass so it's either coming from Photoshop directly or coming from the import of the alpha back in Zbrush.

[@MayankKumar-nc1rq]

@@Outgang Oh OK! I got very curious so I just checked but I don't seems to face the issue though after photoshop. I increased my resolution in Zbrush click the alpha and saved it, then proceeded to photoshop and then proceeded to make it seamless, imported it back to zbrush as alpha from alpha menu on top, turns out real smooth as alpha and as a stitch brush but sometimes high passing it to higher level make it noisy I guess it's because of the resolution of alpha exported out of the Zbrush, I generally take the resolution to 4K in Zbrush for alphas so, when I high passed an alpha too much in spite of having less resolution it got noisy! I think rgbz pass consider the resolution of your cropped section and expand it to the resolution of the Zbrush file so....I mean it is because of resolution...I'm pretty sure about it and I hope to God I said something useful!!!!

[@ayakuun]

Hi Laura, awesome video and great tips! Regarding the banding noise at 12:48 I believe that it's happening because of compression. I don't remember who tested it (either Michael Pavlovich or Paul Gaboury), but on the export-import from photoshop to zbrush one of the available formats has less compression than others. Can't find the source (sorry!) but IIRC the best format option is either TGA or PSD (and possibly 16 bit). Or maybe I'm completely misremembering this, in that case, oh well, at least you got yourself a new subscriber =D

[@Outgang]

Yeah it's an 8-bit/16-bit thing for sure. I wish I remembered which format I used upon import in this case but one of them will definitely import it in smoother than this. Cheers!

[@AnnaPopova-q3u]

Hi Laura! Just discovered your channel and it's so good! I'm a fashion designer and work primarily in Clo3d (pretty much the same thing as Marvelous). Recently I started learning Blender and Substance Painter. I was in search of some advanced techniques for apparel creation and found your channel. Definitely signing up for Outgang a bit later. I love the concept of painting folds, creases and wrinkles outside of Clo. I already experimented with this a bit in Blender, but I came across avatar's and garment's mesh clipping. Is there any way to prevent that and set some threashold or turn on collision? I did some reserch but did not manage to find the answer. Solidify modifier is unfortunatelly no good answer as I need to keep low poly.

[@Outgang]

Hey User! Welcome to the community! Do you mean that the garment sometimes winds up inside the avatar when sculpting? If you check for that once in a while when sculpting in Blender you can just use the Grab brush and pull the garment out. Have you tried that?

[@3dbznessdesignz855]

salutation legend Laura Namsate from India my question is regarding the cloth for games is 1. what would be your approach on the indan dhoti keeping game mesh in mind with a rigging friendly approach should i keep it double faced or single sided

[@MayankKumar-nc1rq]

single sided buddy! double sided mesh will be a pain in the ass, I did this long time ago...took me a week to wrap my head around it!

[@Outgang]

@@MayankKumar-nc1rq I would also lean towards single-sided, especially if the cloth winds up being very thin since it would be hard to appreciate the thickness the extra geo would give. It's common for thin cloth where both sides can be seen to be flagged as double-sided in a game engine. For a rigging-friendly approach, anything that's overly foldy there isn't much more you can do than keep clean edgeloops flowing in a grid-like fashion that follow the biggest folds and have a uniform vertex density, all complete with a prayer to the skinning gods.

[@3dbznessdesignz855]

@@MayankKumar-nc1rq happy to hear from you

[@3dbznessdesignz855]

@@Outgang laura just great info

[@neoviva]

Laura Do you use X-pen to design?

[@Outgang]

Is that a tablet? I have a Cintiq. It's overpriced but drawing on a screen feels awesome.

[@neoviva]

@@Outgang yes,let me sent your link

[@Outgang]

@@neoviva Uh sure. I'm not on the market for a new tablet though.

[@neoviva]

@@Outgang sent to your email already

[@shyamsagars]

👍

[@LovePrj]

headphones are back

[@Outgang]

They'll be optional from now on :)

[@LovePrj]

@@Outgang do as you feel comfortable. we love you in every way...😊😊♥

[@fly928]

8:31