I am trying to export my garments from MD as a static mesh into Character Creator 4. I have managed to successfully transfer the garments, but while the mesh looks beautiful, the textures and colors are all messed up.
Here are the garments in MD.
And here they are in cc4.
The cloth textures are almost nonexistent, the sweater is only blue in parts, and there's a sleeve pattern on the coat.
What did I do wrong? Asking here since I'm not finding any good tutorials on what I'm trying to do. At least none that address this problem.
Hi Lamb Daeus,
Thank you for contacting us,
It seems like a UV problem. Have you layout the UV for the garment in the UV Editor before you exported your garment? If so. could you please send me a screen shot of the UVs for the garment mesh?
Best regards,
Marvelous Designer Support Team
Yes, it seems to be a UV issue. I didn't know much about the UV editor and just followed how the instructor did it in the one video I found about exporting garments as obj for Character Creator. I did a little research today, and managed to improve some things. Now, the garments have the right textures, but I am disappointed with the resolution.
Here is my UV map.
Now here is what the garment looks like inside of MD.
And here is what it looks like in CC4.
The resolution is very inferior. Also, the button holes have duplicates to their rights that shouldn't be there, and there's a dotted black line between the piece of fabric with the buttons on it and the main fabric of the coat as if the two are not properly attached.
I am assuming I just have to do something different with the UV editor.
Hi Lamb Daeus,
Marvelous Designer does not have a render engine build inside, but we will export the texture maps need to use for the shaders in any render engine you chose to use. So most of your issues are from your shading and rendering in C4D. Please look up tutorials on this matters.
The double button hole is because your UV is overlapped in this red circled part in the image bellow. UV is the 3D model unwrapped and lay out in 2D space. When the UV shell is overlapped, the texture will overlap.
To avoid this, you should right click on an empty space in the UV editor in Marvelous Designer and click "reset UV to 2D aragement" to make sure all the UV are in the correct size and unfolded, than lay it out in the 0-1 square space. Or you can layout and unfold UV inside C4D.
For texture file resolution, please set it during export in the Image size. By default Marvelous Designer will export the texture in 2K. You can increased it higher if desired. And please also chose the texture files you want to export.
To get raid of the "dotted black line between the piece of fabric", you need to either export as Weld or merge the vertices inside C4D. When you export as Unweld, the pattern pieces' edge points are not weld together.
When rendering in C4D, please attach all other texture maps into the corresponding channel as well, not only the diffuse map. From your render, it is at least missing the normal information. You also need to mess with other parameters inside your shader to get the desired look. For how to build shader inside C4D, please look up shading tutorials in C4D.
There are also a lot of faceting in your mesh, please unlock and smooth normal of your mesh in C4D. And for rendering, you can also turn subdivision and smooth normal on.
Here's our workflow tutorial. It is using Marvelous Designer with Maya but a lot of the knowledges apply in any 3D software: [Link]
Best regards,
Marvelous Designer Support Team
Thank you for your reply.
I'm following your points about the button holes and exporting with "welded" selected. I just recently figured those out by tinkering around.
I am actually not using cinema 4d. This is a program called character creator. https://www.reallusion.com/character-creator/
It sounds like you believe the low-resolution issue may be due to my settings in CC4 and not in how I laid out the UV in MD, correct? I don't know anything I'm doing wrong on that end, so I may have to reach out to CC4 support. Just to make sure, this is what I've been doing.
I export the garments as OBJ. Increasing the pixel count in the image size section doesn't seem to affect anything, though I have tried that. I then upload the obj directly as an "accessory" inside cc4. The obj automatically loads with a diffuse, opacity, bump, metalic, and roughness map. I have tried baking textures inside MD and replacing the ones that loaded automatically when I uploaded the obj, and oddly enough this does seem to make a difference, but it doesn't improve things. It just exchanges the textures from one form of not so great to another.
Anyway, I will see if anyone on the cc4 end can spot what I did wrong. I appreciate your help.
Just in case it sheds any light on the issue, I imported the same obj into unreal engine and it looks completely different. For one, the coat looks great with the exception of the collar where the underside of the cloth is simply rendered as see through. The sweater however looks like a plastic block.
Did you ever get this sorted out?
I'd like to bring MD into CC4, but am getting glitches as well.
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