Diana and David: Tony Clark entry

[Pradeep_1989]

jacket looking awesome Clark

[clark3d]

Good job. It is very interesting to observe the process.

Thanks!

Dude! Some seriously good work! I'm really impressed how you have all those layers sim'ing ontop of one another! Do you keep the Layer assignments on for each pattern or is it just MD magic?

Thank you!  Yeah I've kept the layer assignments on for the most part.  To get everything into the initial pose, I had every garment active.  When working on the details, I will usually just work with one piece at a time and freeze the layer underneath with proper layer assignments to make sure they don't start intersecting.  It's been challenging for sure  

jacket looking awesome Clark

Thanks Pradeep, your entry is looking good as well!

[Pradeep_1989]

Thanks Clark

[clark3d]

I'm working on getting familiar with the workflow of bringing the MD mesh into Substance Painter.  I've never done that directly before, so I'm just making sure I can get something from MD into Substance with UVs, and bake out all of the necessary maps to start applying materials. 

I'm thinking everything will need to be exported out of MD at once, because I don't yet know of a way to import additional meshes into your Substance Painter scene for texturing.  I'll do some searches to see if that's been added or if I've just missed how to do it.  For now, I'll plan on exporting everything at once as a single sided mesh, bake the maps in Painter, and then eventually re-export the mesh out of MD with thickness and see how the materials look.  I'm hoping I can keep the thick rounded edges that you get out of MD and use the same materials that I made with the single sided mesh.

It's awesome to see all of the new entries! 

[justo_figueroa]

You're really outdoing yourself with all these progress pics Clark, it's looking great. I'm interested in your approach - are you exporting meshes from MD at a very low particle distance (in other words, very dense in geo) and using it as both your LP and HP to for bakes, or a lighter mesh, for better speed?

[clark3d]

You're really outdoing yourself with all these progress pics Clark, it's looking great. I'm interested in your approach - are you exporting meshes from MD at a very low particle distance (in other words, very dense in geo) and using it as both your LP and HP to for bakes, or a lighter mesh, for better speed?

Thanks Justo.  I know it's not super in depth but I always enjoy seeing other artists' process. 

So in this example, there's no high to low baking.  It is just baking the maps straight to the high density mesh that was exported out of MD.  The vest in this case was exported at the lowest particle distance (1), as a single sided mesh with temporary UVs set up in MD.  I've been finding that if you export the mesh with thickness, the UVs for the front and back come in overlapped, which isn't great for Substance Painter.  I'm hoping I can set up final UVs in MD (for the cloth parts anyway), export them as a single sided mesh all at once into Substance Painter, bake out the necessary maps for each material/garment, and then later apply the materials that I make to a "final" mesh with thickness that I export out of MD.  I'll just have to make sure it doesn't look strange around the edges.

I did do a quick test where I exported everything into Substance Painter at its current density, and the scene seemed to run okay for now (no stitches exported yet).  But yeah if speed becomes an issue, I may need to just increase the particle distance on a couple of the meshes and sacrifice some of the detail.  For now, the vest is the only object that has a particle distance of 1 in order to get those smaller micro folds.  Most of the other garments have a particle distance of 2.  For now, I don't really want to bother with baking a high mesh to a low mesh for now given the time constraints. 

I hope that helps!  It's all a very new workflow for me.  I'm curious to see what you can do using only MD and Substance Painter for the cloth parts.  I'll make all of the hardware bits (buttons etc.) in another program. 

[clark3d]

I started making the hardware bits and importing them in as avatar objects to check their placement and scale.  I see MD 7.5 has "metal" material options now.  Oooo shiny!

I built these on top of an exported MD mesh that was much lower resolution, so that I could quickly tumble around it. 

I'm wondering if anyone else has noticed this...  The default lighting in MD 7.5 appears very washed out, and it's a little more difficult to see the clothing forms.  I'm still working on how to adjust this, but it looks like a lot of the lighting options were removed in 7.5. 

Let me know if you guys find a way to adjust the lighting so it's easier to see the clothing, and I'll make sure to do the same!

[clark3d]

I've got the UVs all set up in MD.  I still need to set them up on the hardware bits, but that shouldn't take too long.

Importing the entire thing into Substance Painter is taking some time, so for now my plan is this:

-Export each garment/UV sheet as a thin mesh, stitches included if available
-Set up Color ID maps manually in Photoshop as necessary (the jacket for example is all one one sheet, but includes the inner fabric of the sleeves and 2 different values of denim)
-Import into Substance Painter and bake out AO and Curvature maps (I think this is all I will likely use for texturing)
-Work on material on a per-garment basis, and save them out as Smart Materials once complete
-Re-import the entire set of clothing and statue with thickness into Substance Painter, and apply the materials I've made one by one.  It looks like UVs remain the same between a thin and thick mesh exported out of MD.

The baking process is a bit slow.  I will likely bake the maps out at 2048x2048, but keep the texture resolution on each piece at 4k so that the normal maps have enough resolution to show fabric detail.  (only the fabric detail will appear in the normal map, I'm not baking a normal map out from the mesh or anything).  But I think having the curvature and AO maps at 2k will work just fine.

[clark3d]

Ok!  Everything is in Substance painter ready for texturing.  This took a bit of time.  Lots of saving, waiting, importing, waiting, etc.  I found that it helped to assign a texture in the materials in MD for them to import properly into Substance Painter.  For example, a couple of times the pants and jacket imported with the same material, and so I assigned different temporary textures to them in MD and re-imported.  This seemed to do the trick for now. 

The only garments with physical stitches are the jacket and pants.  I did this because they'll be the most noticable.  Adding stitches to the orange vest really seemed to bog down my computer unfortunately.  They are so small however that I don't think they'll be missed. 

I wanted to share a cool trick you can use to add some extra detail to your textures in Substance Painter.  It can be tough to get the smaller details to appear how you want in MD, so instead, I'll use MD to generate small folds and apply these folds as a height map in Substance Painter exactly where I want. 

[clark3d]

I've been working on the jeans trying to match that stonewashed look, building the material up in layers using a mixture of the supplied base materials and grunge textures that come with Substance Painter, and some hand painted layers.

[clark3d]

I'm just about finished up.  I'll spend this weekend adding any final details like some more highlights/shadows in the denim, and making sure my scene is optimized.  The file size is just barely over 2GB.  I know Ican reduce the size of some of the AO maps without a drop in quality to bring the file size down.  Then I'll work on making some nice renders in iray.

The shots below are straight from the Substance Painter viewport.  You can see the images I brought in for this project along the bottom in the first screenshot.  For the most part, I used just AO and Curvature maps to help with the materials, rendered out at 2k. The texture size for each material however is at 4k.  ColorID maps were rendered out separately for any garment pieces that have more than 1 material variation (like the jacket for example, having 2 different shades of denim and an inner lining fabric.)  I've tried to hide any noticeable texture stretching along the edges of the garments as much as I can.  I couldn't find a way to export thickness out of MD with proper UVs, so maybe this is a feature that can be added down the road . 

One thing I would do differently is not have some of the fabric pieces be quite so thick when exporting out of MD.  I use varying thicknesses to make it look like one fabric seam is sitting on top of another one, but when you have to layer them up, the very top pieces end up being quite thick and don't look very realistic.  This is most apparent on the denim jacket where the top buttons are, but only when you're super up close.

I've really had a lot of fun working on this alongside all of the other artists, and I'm excited to finish it up for the final submission!

[clark3d]

Finished!

I'm submitting my source files and renders now.  I included a note with my submission about my first basic shot meeting the criteria.  This note was a bit confusing, "...with the size of the 3D model and angles as close as possible facing the camera."  So I'm hoping my first render meets the requirements.

For my second "free" shot, I applied the marble material that I made for David to the entire outfit, and rendered it with a different environment that had some nice top down lighting. 

I did one additional render for a 3rd shot:  a close up of the torso, using the tomaco_studio environment.

All 3 of my shots used some very minor post processing in iray.  The ones that had the biggest impact were Color Profile and Exposure in the camera. 

It feels great to finish this, and I enjoyed posting in these threads.  Thanks everyone who watched my progress!

Best of luck to everyone! 

[jbmiller]

Looks cool Tony!  I'm digging the puffy vest - would be fun to do the Doctor's outfit from that movie.   

[古色谷香]

Very great creation!

[clark3d]

Thank you both!