Hi,
I have created three garments in a MD project, animated them, and exported as alembic over to unreal engine.
Everything works well except that the three garments have exported as one material. I am trying to upload a substance material asset just to the sweater, but it is applying the material to the whole outfit.
How do I export the outfit as three separate materials?
Hi Lamb,
Here are couple of options:
1.you can use UDIM workflow, assign different fabric to different pattern and bake them into texture maps on different UV tiles.
2. Layout all UVs in 0-1 square space, texture using substance function inside Marvelous Designer and at export bake out texture maps and use that in Unreal Engine
3. Group different garment by assigning different fabrics, Export as FBX and import the fbx file into Unreal Engine. Unreal Engine will create different shaders base on the fabric assigned
4. separate it into different file in a 3D software package
Best regards,
Marvelous Designer Support Team
Hello,
Thank you. I have tried several of those options and haven't quite found a solution, but perhaps I did something wrong.
The most successful route was exporting the outfit as an fbx. However, when I imported it into UE, it imported each piece of fabric separately. Instead of three garments, I got dozens of individual pieces of the garments. I might be able to get this to work for now, but it really slows my workflow and I don't think it will work for future projects. I may have to figure out some small bugs first. In future projects, I want to work with the alembic cloth animations. Also, I want to work substance painter into my pipeline. I don't need it for this project, but in future projects I will want to make improvements in substance painter before exporting into UE.
Option 2 was "Layout all UVs in 0-1 square space, texture using substance function inside Marvelous Designer and at export bake out texture maps and use that in Unreal Engine." Any sort of textures coming from MD simply don't look good in UE. I have to reassign each garment the correct texture from Substance 3d in order to maintain a high quality image.
I looked up tutorials on using a UDIM workflow for MD. All the ones I saw related to editing a MD garment inside Substance painter. If there is a UDIM workflow for editing a MD garment in UE, I would love to know, but I couldn't find anything like that. I'm really not familiar with UDIM and what it is. Anyway, I followed the MD to Substance tutorials. I simply laid out each part of the outfit I wanted to texture separately in its own UV box, then exported the outfit into Substance Painter. From there I was able to assign each garment its own textures. It looks pretty fantastic. I only have two problems. First, at random tiny points, the sweater shows through the outer coat. I didn't have this problem inside MD.
Second, I've fiddled around with exporting the garment from Substance to UE and haven't been able to figure it out or find any good explanations. I only see info on exporting textures. Anyway, that's not your problem. But if you do have any documentation on working with MD garments in Substance painter, that would be helpful.
Hi Lamb,
You can simulate the garment with more collision thickness to add more gaps between the garments. However, if the mesh is not intersecting with each other, it is a shading issue.
I would recommend that you look up how to use shader and create shading network in Unreal engine.
Substance designer file will generate procedural textures. However, if you want to use substance painter or Textures exported from Marvelous Designer, it all uses UV of the model and bake the shading information into texture image for you to plug into the shader in your render engine (in your case the render engine is Unreal Engine).
If you want to you import your model to Substance Painter, you can simply export your model as static mesh in .OBJ format. Import your mesh into substance painter and create texture. The texture exported from Substance Painter will also be texture images. You just need to make sure your UV layout for your animation cache (in your case, in the alembic cache format), and the static mesh imported to substances painter to texture on have the same UV layout.
I would also like to point you to this tutorial video again for workflow of Marvelous Designer to Substance Painter to Unreal Engine. [Link] You can simply ignore the Maya part since you are not retopologizing the mesh before importing to Unreal Engine.
And once again, learning shading techniques in Unreal Engine will solve your problem.
Best regards,
Marvelous Designer Support Team
Hello I too am facing a similar issue, I want export my cloth simulation with its multiple materials. I am able to do this with FBX and obj but not alembic. I tried to do you can use UDIM workflow, by assign different fabric to different pattern and bake them into texture maps on different UV tiles but I cant get unreal import recognize the alembic uv tiles. (please break down the steps for this) Do you have any other solutions that may fit me ??
Yes. i finally figured it out.
I don't know if I ran into the problem of unreal not reading alembic uv tiles, but I definitely remember that unreal did handle the texture files from MD well.
I ended up texturing my garments in Substance Painter. It costs money, but it's worth it for me because I can get an excellent level of detail. From substance painter, I export the texture files. I then import them into UE using virtual textures. The trick was that substance painter exported the texture files with different files names for each seperate garment. Example:
T-shirtBasecolor.1001.
PantsBasecolor.1002.
Etc, etc.
THIS DOES NOT IMPORT PROPERLY INTO UNREAL. The file names all have to be the same, except for the texture types and numbers (i.e. normal, roughness, etc and 1001, 1002, 1003...) When I had the names of the garments in the file type, it messed up the uvs. For example, if I had multiple uvs for the t-shirt, they would all work fine, but the t-shirt textures would also be applied to the pants. By removing the garment names from the file structure, unreal recognized that all the uvs belonged to the same outfit/alembic mesh.
Please sign in to leave a comment.