Marvelous Designer PDF – Exporting from Marvelous Designer to ZBrush Workflow Tutorial
Copyright 2016 Camille Kleinman, CGElves.com
How to Export from Marvelous Designer to ZBrush Workflow Tutorial
Camille Kleinman is a Marvelous Designer expert & trainer.
She created the 1st and only available, highly acclaimed
Marvelous Designer online training program for 3D artists &
studios. Find out more at CGElves.com
Marvelous Designer PDF – Exporting from Marvelous Designer to ZBrush Workflow Tutorial
Copyright 2016 Camille Kleinman, CGElves.com
In this short Marvelous Designer 5 to ZBrush workflow tutorial she’ll show you
how to best export Marvelous Designer clothing for use in ZBrush.
The first thing you need to do before exporting your Marvelous Designer clothes,
is to convert the tri mesh into a quad mesh.
Here below you can see the difference between the same dress, once exported
from Marvelous Designer as a tri mesh and once as a quad mesh. As you can see,
the quad mesh is much smoother.
Quad mesh subdivided 4 times in ZBrush:
Marvelous Designer PDF – Exporting from Marvelous Designer to ZBrush Workflow Tutorial
Copyright 2016 Camille Kleinman, CGElves.com
Tri mesh subdivided 4 times in ZBrush:
Marvelous Designer PDF – Exporting from Marvelous Designer to ZBrush Workflow Tutorial
Copyright 2016 Camille Kleinman, CGElves.com
Here’s how to convert your Marvelous Designer clothes from tris into quads:
1. Select all your pattern pieces by doing ctrl A. Your clothes will turn yellow.
Marvelous Designer PDF – Exporting from Marvelous Designer to ZBrush Workflow Tutorial
Copyright 2016 Camille Kleinman, CGElves.com
2. Right click on any part of your clothes in the 3D garment window and select
‘Quadrangulate’ from the popup menu.
Depending on how low your particle distance is, it could take a few seconds to a
few minutes to convert the mesh.
Marvelous Designer PDF – Exporting from Marvelous Designer to ZBrush Workflow Tutorial
Copyright 2016 Camille Kleinman, CGElves.com
After Quadrangulating it your mesh will look like this:
Marvelous Designer PDF – Exporting from Marvelous Designer to ZBrush Workflow Tutorial
Copyright 2016 Camille Kleinman, CGElves.com
Next, to export the 3D clothing from Marvelous Designer, go to the ‘File’ Menu
and click ‘Export – OBJ’.
Marvelous Designer PDF – Exporting from Marvelous Designer to ZBrush Workflow Tutorial
Copyright 2016 Camille Kleinman, CGElves.com
It is very important to set the correct export settings in the export dialog box.
If you want to export your Marvelous Designer garment with the avatar, then
select the avatar, otherwise leave it unchecked.
For using the Marvelous Designer clothes in ZBrush, the most important thing
is to select ‘Weld’.
Unfortunately, when ‘Weld’ is selected, you cannot export your clothes with
thickness.
You’ll have to add any thickness you need in ZBrush.
Marvelous Designer PDF – Exporting from Marvelous Designer to ZBrush Workflow Tutorial
Copyright 2016 Camille Kleinman, CGElves.com
Below is an example of what happens if you export your Marvelous Designer
garments with thickness and ‘Unweld’ turned on.
As you can see, the mesh is
breaking up along all the
seams where the patterns
were sewn together.
Asides from that, a
Marvelous Designer
clothing model exported
with thickness needs to be
subdivided 2x more at
least in order to get it to
look smooth in ZBrush.
This example was
subdivided 6 times and still
does not look as smooth as
the ‘thin’ ‘weld’ mesh
export.
Marvelous Designer PDF – Exporting from Marvelous Designer to ZBrush Workflow Tutorial
Copyright 2016 Camille Kleinman, CGElves.com
What does ‘Unified UV Coordinates‘ option do? On the next page are some
images to help explain it.
I usually leave this option turned off when exporting out clothes to render them.
Unless exporting to texture in Substance painter, I don’t turn on Unified UV
Coordinates, since I like to apply fabric textures onto clothes in Marvelous
Designer and to scale the textures, rotate them etc. Some textures like zipper
textures I need to scale down quite a lot, whereas some other textures I scale up.
When exporting clothes with ‘Unified UV Coordinates’ turned on, all the textures
get rotated in the same direction and scaled to the same exact size. With the
‘Unified UV Coordinates’ unchecked, the textures stay just like you rotated and
scaled them with the Texture Transform tool in Marvelous Designer.
The good thing though with Unified UV Coordinates turned on, is that you get a
nice UV map that you can use if you need to texture the clothes in a program like
Substance Painter.
See below some examples of the effect of ‘Unified UV Coordinates’ checked and
un‐checked when importing Marvelous Designer clothes to render in Keyshot and
applying the same one material (with texture mapping set to UV Coordinates)
onto the entire model.
Marvelous Designer PDF – Exporting from Marvelous Designer to ZBrush Workflow Tutorial
Copyright 2016 Camille Kleinman, CGElves.com
Clothing model in Marvelous Designer 5 before export:
Clothing model in Keyshot (after exporting with Unified UVs checked):
(Notice the texture becomes the same scale and same angle across entire model)
Marvelous Designer PDF – Exporting from Marvelous Designer to ZBrush Workflow Tutorial
Copyright 2016 Camille Kleinman, CGElves.com
Clothing model in Keyshot after exporting with Unified UV Coordinates
unchecked.
(Notice the textures angle and scale remain the same as in Marvelous)
Here’s another example below, when applying a texture to the clothing model in
ZBrush using the NoiseMaker plugin (mapping also set to UV).
Marvelous Designer PDF – Exporting from Marvelous Designer to ZBrush Workflow Tutorial
Copyright 2016 Camille Kleinman, CGElves.com
Noise applied onto the Marvelous model exported with Unified UV Coordinates checked
(notice texture is same scale and same direction)
Below, Noise applied onto the Marvelous model exported with Unified UV Coordinates un‐checked
(notice texture is different scale and direction)
Marvelous Designer PDF – Exporting from Marvelous Designer to ZBrush Workflow Tutorial
Copyright 2016 Camille Kleinman, CGElves.com
The option to ‘Select All Graphics‘ will export your Marvelous Designer clothing
with any 2D graphic textures that you applied, such as stitches, trims, image or
text overlays. If you are just exporting your Marvelous Designer garment to
render in Keyshot/ Octane etc., then you definitely want to ‘Select All Graphics’.
However, when exporting your 3D clothing to ZBrush, you want to uncheck ‘Select
All Graphics’.
See below what happens if you export your Marvelous Designer clothes into
ZBrush with ‘Select All Graphics’ turned on.
= not very nice.
Here is the same sleeve in ZBrush after exporting without the 2D graphics:
Marvelous Designer PDF – Exporting from Marvelous Designer to ZBrush Workflow Tutorial
Copyright 2016 Camille Kleinman, CGElves.com
Here’s how to import the Marvelous Designer clothing model into ZBrush. Simply
click the ‘Import’ button in the Tool menu and load in your exported OBJ.
Marvelous Designer PDF – Exporting from Marvelous Designer to ZBrush Workflow Tutorial
Copyright 2016 Camille Kleinman, CGElves.com
When you import your Marvelous Designer 5 garment it may look rather queer,
sort of broken up like parts are missing.
Marvelous Designer PDF – Exporting from Marvelous Designer to ZBrush Workflow Tutorial
Copyright 2016 Camille Kleinman, CGElves.com
Don’t worry, that is only an appearance!
In the Tool menu, under ‘Display Properties’ turn on ‘Double’ and you will see all
the parts of your clothing.
(Tip: Before exporting a clothing
model from Marvelous Designer 5,
make sure that all the normals are
facing the right way.
If any pattern is turned ‘inside out’,
with the darker side on the outside
instead of the lighter side, simply
right click on that pattern in the 3D
garment window and select ‘Flip
Normals’ from the popup).
Marvelous Designer PDF – Exporting from Marvelous Designer to ZBrush Workflow Tutorial
Copyright 2016 Camille Kleinman, CGElves.com
To easily hide/ show / edit / select individual parts of
this 3D clothing model, we need to polygroup it. As you
can see in the image above in Polyframe mode there
are no poly groups.
Since the Marvelous Designer clothes are made from
pattern pieces it is very easy to turn those patterns into
polygroups.
Simply head over to the ‘Polygroups’ menu and click
‘Auto Groups with UV’.
There we go!
Marvelous Designer PDF – Exporting from Marvelous Designer to ZBrush Workflow Tutorial
Copyright 2016 Camille Kleinman, CGElves.com
If you created your Marvelous Designer clothes (like shirts) with symmetric
patterns, you will have separate polygroups for each side of the shirt.
If you’d rather have one polygroup for the front of the shirt and one for the back,
then you could either group them together in ZBrush or first symmetric merge
the patterns in Marvelous Designer before exporting the clothing mesh to ZBrush.
To symmetric merge two
symmetric patterns, right
click on the middle line
and select ‘symmetric
merge’.
(Note, if you had any
piping on your shirt, it will
vanish once you
symmetric merge the shirt
and you will have to redo
the piping).
Symmetric merged bodice.
Marvelous Designer PDF – Exporting from Marvelous Designer to ZBrush Workflow Tutorial
Copyright 2016 Camille Kleinman, CGElves.com
Back in ZBrush, now doing an ‘Auto Groups with UV’ has this effect:
Marvelous Designer PDF – Exporting from Marvelous Designer to ZBrush Workflow Tutorial
Copyright 2016 Camille Kleinman, CGElves.com
Last of all, in order to create a smooth mesh from the
Marvelous Designer clothing mesh, you need to subdivide
the geometry several times.
After that, you can do what you want with the 3D clothing
model, Zremesh it, retropologize the mesh, paint on it,
texture it, add deco, 3D parts etc.,
Marvelous Designer PDF – Exporting from Marvelous Designer to ZBrush Workflow Tutorial
Copyright 2016 Camille Kleinman, CGElves.com
We hope this Marvelous Designer 5 to ZBrush workflow tutorial helps you! Find more free Marvelous Designer tutorials and Marvelous Designer PDFs here.
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Marvelous Designer PDF – Exporting from Marvelous Designer to ZBrush Workflow Tutorial
Copyright 2016 Camille Kleinman, CGElves.com