Marvelous Designer PDF: Marvelous Designer to ZBrush Workflow Tutorial by CGElves

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



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:



Tri mesh subdivided 4 times in ZBrush:



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.



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.



After Quadrangulating it your mesh will look like this:



Next, to export the 3D clothing from Marvelous Designer, go to the ‘File’ Menu

and click ‘Export – OBJ’.



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.



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.



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.



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)



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).



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)



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:



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.



When you import your Marvelous Designer 5 garment it may look rather queer,

sort of broken up like parts are missing.



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).



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!



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.



Back in ZBrush, now doing an ‘Auto Groups with UV’ has this effect:



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.,



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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Do you want to quickly create beautiful, realistic, dynamic 3D clothing for your 3D models, games, films and animations?

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Marvelous Designer PDF: Marvelous Designer to ZBrush Workflow Tutorial by CGElves

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