Marvelous Designer Project
Kanisha Dezarn
Downloading free 3d characters is easy, but finding animated and textured quality characters is something different. I remembered seeing some clothed characters available for download on Artstation a while ago. The available downloads are Marvelous Designer projects with a textured and dressed figure, no animation included.
Follow the directions to allow for the rigging algorithm to make an armature. After it finishes, you can select your preferred animation and download the animation as .fbx. with skin.
In this chapter,you need to add the original 45-pose to the animation. You need the 45-pose so you can later on animate the clothing in Marvelous Designer. Without the original 45-pose on frame 1, the clothes will not correspondent correctly with the figure.
Blender will import a greyscale character with an armature. I order to move the vertices of the character and therefore have animation, the armature is linked to Vertex Groups. You need to copy the Vertex Groups of the animated character to our textured character. This is only possible when the character meshes are identical thus having the same amount of vertices. Importing the .fbx tends to mess that up for me so you need to check the vertex count first of both meshes. In the example, while importing the character back from Mixamo, it lost 8 vertices along the way. With the Knife tool in Edit mode, you can easily add 8 new vertices.
Once both meshes have the same vertex count, you can proceed to copy the Vertex Groups data. Select your textured character first, select the grey character second. Navigate to its Object Data Properties and under Vertex Groups, click the arrow (Vertex Groups Specials).
Delete the greyscale character. Right now you need to link the armature to the textured character by adding an Armature modifier. Under object, link the object to the armature.
Select the armature, and in Pose-mode, rotating a bone will show a rotation on the character.
To see if everything fits nicely, you need to simulate gravity on the clothes (Spacebar). Under the Simulation Properties, you can put the Particle Distance on 20 for a quicker but less strict result (Select all and navigate to the Property Editor). Once done, open the Animation viewport (Top-Right) and record the animation.
Exporting the animated garments will provide you with a .zip and .mmd file. The .mmd file has all the animated vertex data in it and you can use it to animate the .obj mesh that you can find in the .zip file.
Import the .obj in Blender. Make sure to select Keep Vert Order under Geometry when importing. If the order of the vertices changes, the .mmd file will not work.
I followed along the steps, everything was going well, but when the alembic file(avatar) is imported in Marvelous designer, then its not upright and is colored black. When I manually adjusted it rightly to the axis, then after simulation it again goes to its initial position.
Hi! Can you check your export settings? See if the textures and uv maps are included in the export?
It is best to change and set the rotation correctly in Blender itself. In Blender, you can press ALT+R to clear the rotation and CTRL+A to apply the rotation.
Hello everyone! This is my first Marvelous Designer project!I did this for an assignment for the CG Master at Bigrock School, and it was a very fun and formative project! After I made the clothing on Marvelous designer, I textured it in Substance Painter and then rendered on Maya. Hope you like it!
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