What’s the Best Way to clean up geometry and uvs from marvelous Designer?
Ask almost any 3D artist what they consider to be one of the most tedious and sometimes troublesome tasks of the 3D content creation process, and you could put money on them saying ‘UV mapping’. It’s why tools such as Zbrush give us the ability to paint without UVS, so that we can temporarily bypass a process that can interrupt our creative flow.
As much as many dislike working with them, UVS are an essential part of production. They allow us more control over our work than they are given credit for: they can be used for easier selections, to hold skinning data, and in our example today they can be used to help us generate new geometry.
Marvelous Designer is an amazing tool for artists. It enables us to generate simulated cloth realistically, and importantly it can do this quickly. It works by allowing the user to create a digital pattern of a garment and then virtually sew it together – much like the classic Maya Cloth System used to work.
However, one of the trade-offs for the excellent results we get from Marvelous Designer is that geometry is generally less than ideal for production work or for applying and painting textures. While you can output quad-poly meshes instead of the default triangulated mesh, we are still left with results that favour simulation. There is still, however, an excellent benefit to the workflow used in Marvelous Designer. The method used in creating and laying out a garment is actually able to produce a very effective (albeit not perfect) pattern for UVS.
In order to make things more production friendly we have to clean up the meshes we export from Marvelous, and there are a number of methods out there for doing this depending on your use case. The method we are going to be
looking at today is one I learned from a friend and colleague during my time with DNEG which I personally find to be the most useful.
We will be using the Transfer Attributes feature in Maya to first transfer UVS and then in turn use the newly generated UVS to create our final geometry. Transfer Attributes can be a little intimidating at first because of the wealth of options, which can produce strange results if you are unfamiliar with it.
Hopefully in the next few steps I can show you that it’s far easier than it may first appear.