How long would it take you to retopo something like this, and would that include maintaining or restoring the UVs?

Thanks.

Looking at the garish default background colors (JK !), I assume this is a Poser render ?

So, what's the problem ?

Clothes made from tris only always worked nicely in Poser, both as conforming as well as dynamic.

At last for me.

Or is the polygon count way over the top ?

BTW, that's some very nice clothing ! Especially compared to the 100% wrinkle-free vacuformed styrofoam type of clothing most people make these days.

If you are going to make it dynamic, then leave it as Tris for sure.  Dynamic cloth folds and flows much better with a tri mesh.  I believe it is the randomness of the tri mesh that helps, over the regulart pattern of 4 sided polys.

As to conforming the biggest issue I think with a tri mesh is grouping and making morphs.  The grounping isn't too much of a pain, I've tried it and it works ok.  Morphs however are something else, I find it very difficuly to get a nice share using a seemingly random tri mesh.

On the other hand MD2 does have some handy features that are very helpful.  You can control the polygon density even on a per panel basis.  That helps a lot when making dynamic cloth.  You can alse put cuts into a mesh panel that will leave a straight line of edges in the mesh, which can really help control how somethign flows and moves.

Once you get the hang of MD2 you can make some pretty complex clothing without too much effort, which is a real bonus.  For Tight clothes I think conforming is the way, but anything flowing I'd do dynamic, much nicer results :)

On the subject of turning the mesh into quads and how long would it take.  Well how long is a piece of string (no smart answers please).  It's always going to depend on the outfit.  For simple outfits ZBrushes quad tool could do almost all the work for you, for others it's going to be a long painstaking process, using ZBrushes manual retopo tool, or for me 3DCoats retopo room.

One last reason not to quad the mesh.  You will loose the lovely MD2 UVMap for the model, which as you know, is a very nice map to texture on :)

Hope that helps.

John

I can retopo a human in a day but I'm very familiar with Topogun and it's toolsets. Other people may take longer. Clothing I'd imagine would be about the same if not a little less depending on the detail level of the reference mesh and the desired final detail.

The main question would be ; WHY?
Why would you want to retope?
What is wrong with it "as is".
Too many polygons would be my first guess.

Lots of potential for discussion here, good stuff.

I'm just curious how long it takes with and without variables, for example, something like the pic.

Why?  For whatever, I don't want to get into a debate about the merits of quad vs tri, I just want to know how long it takes, generally.

 "I don't think I'm any good at it, and am starting to think that maybe farming it out would be a good idea if I wanted to make anything commercially.

How long would it take you to retopo something like this, and would that include maintaining or restoring the UVs?"

This.

Oh you'd have to make new UV's. That's just normal. Retopology is essentially creating a new mesh but one that lays on top of another mesh. Some applications will allow you to transfer textures between overalpping geometry despite different UV's but you'll still need to UV map the new mesh before you could do that.

It might take two or three work days in 3d Coat. You can't keep the UVs in that program either.

Why don't you give us a download link and you will a correct answer pretty quick- but my guess is ca 30 min.

I can tell you right now I won't be able to do it. I've got too much on my plate with Comic Con and Siggraph around the corner. Hopefully someone here can though.

Why don't you give us a download link and you will a correct answer pretty quick- but my guess is ca 30 min.

Good luck.

I didn't mean that I literally wanted this particular piece retopo-ed, I was just curious about how long something like this would take.

30 minutes is pretty ambitious though and has me intrigued.  Would that be with full UV's as they are?  If you're very bored, Vintorix, I'll send you the OBJ. 

shoot me an email at gboycott@wowway.com and I'll send off a zip. 

"Would that be with full UV's as they are?  If you're very bored, Vintorix, I'll send you the OBJ."

The answer to that is "that depends". We Marvelous Designer users are hardened after two years promises that quad mesh is just around the corner. We use not only one, but a variety of methods to quadify our MD mesh. And I have to say now, that even if MD should come up with a solution I would prefer the tools I have become used to because they give me more control.

I am not bored but I am willing to spend 30 min on that one method that is the fastest. I have no guaranties that is will work but if it doesn't I quadify as much as I can in 30 min- to give you a general idea. The UV maps will be preserved only if the first one method go through though.

I'll send you an email.

Here's a quick screen grab of Cute3d's Sport Time outfit at Daz, it's conforming clothing, it's all tri's and it's one of the most consistently convincing articles of clothing in my runtime.

Well, you certainly came through.  I had a quad mesh from Vintorix in less time than it took me to send over a better version.  The flow of quads was nice.

We didn't get UVs to work, but that's more on my end than his since I sent him scaled down poser versions

Example of Marvelous Designer retop-

I think it bloody amazing you retopoed that in 30 min. I looked at it and thought it would be a nightmare.

Maybe he's using the latest ZBrush update :)

Another example video.

That's insane!

No need for Zbrush 4R6, 4R5 + scripts from EZBrush did the job, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsEq1yf5KVY

To keep the UV though, you have to use this method, with 3ds max and Maya. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9s7Yab4nqU

Didn't work for some reason. I could have fiddled with it, exported in full size and maybe converted part of it at a time but I did not have access to the original MD file and also did not want to waste more time as the main point was proved already.

What is the actual advantage of having quads rather than tris?

Define "Actual"

There is endless debate but Quads always seem to win.  If you want to make a sellable CR2 instead of dynamic, you need to be Quad for, at the very least, value perception.

Vin-

So I tried the second method to keep UVs.

I tried a simple, two-panel shirt front and back with some draping detail just to keep it simple but not too simple.  Particle distance of 5.

The problem occurs Maya.  When I select both flat and 3d versions and try to transfer attributes the flat quad version becomes smaller and distorted terribly.

Needless to say when I take it into c4d after that, there is no usable quad model.

What do you think I might be doing wrong?

Can you send me the model so I can try? The MD version this time.

sent.

No mail here!

Try again, sorry, I came back to find an email error...was too big a file. 

Ok, got it.

I used quad size 1% in max.

When you import in Maya first import the unflattened mesh, then the flattened. And select both of them before running the transfer utility.

There is one caveat with this method though. It doesn't weld the mesh so you have to do that manually which can be a pain. So you have to choose between welded mesh but no UV maps or unwelded mesh with UV maps. We are never allowed to be happy!

(I have to go to sleep the time is 5:50 am here and I have been awake all the night- see you tomorrow!)

Okay, I was leaving the seams on.  Will try again tomorrow. Thanks!

gosh long time since I looked at MD!! nice dress !!!! OT how much is MD at the mo?? have they sorted them selves out for poser stuff ? not being able to giveaway/sell my imagination was the big drawback for me

It used to cost 195 dollar but I think they will rise the price substantially for the new version MD3. You can download a 30 day trial version at their site.

Well, I've tried a bunch of times now and I can't get this process to work for me.

If I unify texture co-ordinates, it resets any editing I did to the UVs in Marv.  (Moving, Scaling, rotating, etc.)

That aside, when I transfer attributes in Maya, the flattened quad does take the shape but the UVs seem to go away with no way or option to save them.

In Max, the quads are mixed with tris still, and the quads are vomited out into crazy configurations that don't really satisfy.

I'll keep trying, but I must be doing something wrong at some point or another.

Finding that Quadrify in Max kills the UVs.  As soon as I apply it, differently mapped pieces all take on the same map.

You could send me a video of how do you do, possible you make a small mistake. You can get the UV maps but not the tiling and laying out of the texture through all the hoops from MD. But it may be worthwhile to check out the new ZBrush first to see what it can do. I used the max-Maya variant only in extreme cases when zbrush could not make it. Perhaps zBrush now is more powerful.

Well, like you said, we're not allowed to be happy.

Acquired 4.6 zb and retopo tool works miracles, however, it also eats the uv maps and any grouping you might have on the model.

So, I tried moving the panels away from each other in max, then going in for the retopo, but then the edges get lost or dulled and when you put the model back together in max there are gaps on what used to be seams.  No luck there.

This needs to be the next milestone...retaining uv. 

William_the_Bloody,

ha ha, you are trying all the things I did, in the same order. So much for originality! ;)
Well I guess if you are a rational and methodical being there are only one way of going about it..

The thing I end up with is as follows. For the first don't fall into the trap of doing the elaborate "real world patterns" that the Marvelous Team loves. Front-right , front-left + back + arms most often suffices. Instead make your beautiful patterns with internal lines. (Select all will show their positions). After export to Maya these lines will cut the mesh perfectly, even if they can be a little difficult to see first. Use these lines to make material zones. Then you will have some fabulous patterns to make UV from. For the retop export to ZBrush only those areas that do not touch each other - do the rest manually. Once you get the hang of it it goes very fast.

You could try reproject the UVs from the original mesh to the retopo one. I know for certain you can do this in Softimage and seem to recall something similar in C4D, Maya. MAX should also have something like that, try googling. Or else get the 30 day trial of Softimage and use that (look up GATOR in the Softimage docs)

The transfer wont always be perfect if the meshes are too different but it will give you a very good starting point for manual tweaking. eg I did this to the default cloth that comes with MD:

Oh, Hey!  That's pretty good right there.  Going to give that a try.  Thanks!

Quote - gosh long time since I looked at MD!! nice dress !!!! OT how much is MD at the mo?? have they sorted them selves out for poser stuff ? not being able to giveaway/sell my imagination was the big drawback for me

The only thing available at the moment appears to be an 'Open Beta' of MD3.  I have tried for two days and given up getting it working but others have been sucessful.  Then again I am having major problems with the site itself. Also it is a new site, or a revamp, and finding info is difficult and was much easier to find sometime ago when I tried the 30day trial of MD2.

Anyway I have decided it is not worth the hassle and now it will not let me deactivate the account. 

I wish others better luck but I am going to crawl back into my shell.

ghonma, a couple of questions?

I looked up "gator" in help and it says to do things that don't seem to exist in 2014.

It says go to "Get" and "Property" and "Transfer Attributes" easy enough, right?  But there is nothing that says "Transfer Attributes" in the property editor submenu.

Any pointers?

Why don't ghonma show how the transferred UV map look like instead of the finished dress which doesn't give us much to go on. The same function in C4D "Vamp" produce a very ugly useless UV map.

Okay, I click on the target mesh to recieve UVs, I click Gator and it asks me to pick the source of the transfer.  I pick the UV'd mesh from Marv and in the selection box it now says "Multi (2)" and I can't unselect the target.

This is a tshirt with 4 material zones.  It copied only one material zone and applied it all over the place, but definately preserved the main part.  I need to test further.  I can't figure out how to get textures to show up in the preview window in softimage, to make sure it understands my obj.

What you've got here is flat mapped cloth planes in a welded, quad mesh shirt that is ready for rigging and for selling (in theory.)

Now, a Timed Event.  8:50 EST.

From nothing to quad/uv'd

Quote - Why don't ghonma show how the transferred UV map look like instead of the finished dress which doesn't give us much to go on. The same function in C4D "Vamp" produce a very ugly useless UV map.

This is what I get with default transfer. The ZB retoper messes up in some areas so the UVs at the top are a bit bad but easily fixed. Also if you're doing complicated meshes, doing them in parts helps. Later you can weld the parts together.