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Realistic clothing?

Ok since my knowledge on 3D modeling is not great and there are people who know their 3D stuff in here, I ask you.

Is it possible to create custom clothing for characters?
 Is it easy or hard? What about polycount?

 I have seen some characters having their socks or gloves directly in their UV texture, but also some that have somewhat realistic clothing.

Please I must know.

Comments

  • Hi. First of all y its Possibel to do and import real Clothing as an 3d Object . But it has a heavy toll on the Poly count. Texture Clothing makes it easyer to make an Character to be still in the Vertikal limit for the Cloud uploading.
  • edited June 2020
    @Static_snowflake
    Is it possible to create custom clothing for characters?
    Yes, but there's currently no way to make the clothing mesh move in-game, so if you move the character's limbs around, the cloth won't follow, limiting you to one specific pose.

    There's ways around this, but it would involve rigging the character in another program (Blender, most likely) and using that as a base to model the clothing, using some tricks that make the new mesh retain the rigging of the base mesh. Unfortunately, you'll need to export each pose separately as a static 3D model, and it will very much be tailored to that one specific character, so it's very inflexible and a hassle to set up, not to mention filesize- and polycount-intensive if you've got a bunch of poses you want to do. Oh, and as a final hurdle, you'll need to manually pose the character again in YL2 once you've got the clothing meshes in.

    In short, doable, but costly in terms of time invested, especially if you need to learn your way around the software first.
    Is it easy or hard? What about polycount?

    Polycount's not too much of an issue (within reason, don't go making meshes with millions of them and not expect trouble), unless you're aiming to upload it to the in-app cloud system. I've not had a chance to test that in any way whatsoever yet though, so I can't tell you anything specific,  but it seems like there's a limit to how much custom shit you can bolt onto the character before it gets cranky.

    Still, that can be worked around by releasing the character for download on this forum through some file uploading service, and then maybe making a lite version for the cloud without so much stuff on it.

    I have seen some characters having their socks or gloves directly in their UV texture

    That's the best way to go currently if you want to have the "clothing" actually deform with the character's movements, but obviously, you're limited to more-or-less skintight designs with that.

    Still, there's ways of adding some illusion of heft and wrinkling to them with custom normal maps, but that involves sculpting the 3D mesh, baking that sculpt onto the original mesh and then setting up some texture masks in YL2 so that it doesn't affect areas outside of the clothing. Quite a bit of extra work that requires a good bit of familiarity with 3D editing yet again, in other words.

  • Thank you for your conclusive answer.
    I think I stay with texture clothing since making clothing is so long process with hoops and loops. And it may not even work out. Maybe I
    can spice them up with imported 3D objects.

    Do you or other people know any good sources to find objects for characters?
  • @Static_snowflake
    Maybe I can spice them up with imported 3D objects.
    That's what most of us have been doing thus far, yours truly included. Just keep in mind that deformations can play unexpected tricks on you, so keep the meshes in areas with minimal deformation or be prepared to do a lot of tweaking.
    Do you or other people know any good sources to find objects for characters?
    Been making them from scratch myself for the sake of practice, so I wouldn't know. I'm sure you can get something out of a search engine with keywords like "free 3D models" though. Just keep in mind the limits on cloud uploads; I finally got around to doing some preliminary tests on that, and you've got a limit of 50,000 extra triangles on the whole character.

    That's triangles, not polygons; whatever the polycount says, you can safely double to get a good estimate of the tricount. That's far more stringent than I was expecting and frankly, it's quite draconian. Something closer to the ballpark of 200,000 would work better, in my humble opinion. Part instancing gets you a bit more wiggle room, sure, but come on now, a machine that can run the base game should be able to handle a bit more than that.

    I'm gonna have to do some serious optimization on the assets I've made thus far. Be prepared to do the same with any potential assets you might find online, or figure out how to make your own; it's not as hard as one might think. Hell, if I'd known it was this easy, I'd have gotten in on it years ago.
  • Honestly I think the limit is appropiate and realistically not a small budget for one character.
    Let's say you have a scene with multiple characters in the future and each of them has 200.000+ triangles with multiple shaders, high res textures and unoptimized custom meshes and you add those to a more detailed and taxing future map, that adds up to a lot of possible performance issues...Especially on older systems.

    I understand not everyone is familiar with retopologizing, normalmap baking and the like but I can see why limiting and optimization is necessary.

    You could create a bracelet and assign it to the forearm and it would move with the forearm but long pants would require to be skinned to multiple bones (the pelvis, thighs and calves) which is not possible at the moment but will be implemented at some point. You could probably hack something together by splitting up the pants into static parts and assign them to the individual bones but it probably wouldn't look very smooth.
  • @thirteeenth
    Honestly I think the limit is appropiate and realistically not a small budget for one character.
    It's certainly enough to get away with a nude character plus a few props, but what about when we do get the skinned clothing? Those are going to require a majority of the budget, I'll wager, leaving little room for other fancy items like elaborate hairstyles.

    I've had an idea for making a character in plate armour knockin' around my noggin for a while, as the lack of flexibility won't be too much of an issue with that, maybe I'll try it and see if I can squeeze a full-body suit plus a sword, shield and cloak into the 50.000 limit without going full retro low-poly on it.
  • Sorry but I'm having a hard time seeing how you could max out that polycount with just clothing if you do it correctly. Could you show some of your custom meshes so I can take a look at the topology?

    Usually when making real-time 3d assets you need to find a good balance between geometric detail and ultimate polycount. The game does support custom normalmaps so as long your mesh has enough detail to deform well and sell the shapes you can always reintroduce a lot of sculpted detail via normalmaps.

  • odesodes Administrator
    edited June 2020
    We intend to implement clothing, and that will be a separate systems from characters. I.e., clothing - while having their own tri count limits - will not influence the character tri count.
  • @thirteeenth
    Sorry but I'm having a hard time seeing how you could max out that polycount with just clothing if you do it correctly.
    By "do it correctly," I'm guessing you mean making a low-poly mesh, sculpting a copy of it further and then baking the high-poly details into a normal map for the low-poly mesh, correct? I know very low counts can be achieved with that, I've done it myself, but one must also consider that in this kind of game, you'll often be seeing things up close and personal in ways you wouldn't in others, so a higher level of fidelity is warranted. Guess I've been aiming a bit too high in my estimations of how much detail in the mesh you really need, though.
    Could you show some of your custom meshes so I can take a look at the topology?

    Sure. Spent yesterday agonizing over finding a way to decimate the numbers without having to redo everything from scratch with one of those meshes, in fact. Thankfully, I had enough foresight to save the mesh in question with non-destructive modifiers:


    The high totals are due to the exported YL2 character mesh I used for scale reference. At first, I tried to run a ProOptimizer modifier and bake the MeshSmooth-ed...


    ...version's details onto the optimized version (hell, I even cranked the smoothing up to 5 iterations to get it real high-poly for extra detail). Unfortunately, the end results left much to be desired:


    I tried a few more versions of this trick, to similar results, before I realized that I'm a dumbass; why the fuck am I trying to run ProOptimizer when I can just turn down the MeshSmooth? So I did just that:


    Here's the topology of the original 2-iteration MeshSmooth applied, in case it's educational...


    ...and here's how it looks without the lines getting in the way. So, let's take it down a notch...


    ...funnily enough, changing the subdivision method to classic looked better in this case. Not too much of a visual downgrade and over half as light as the original. Here's the topology:


    I did some preliminary tests, and it doesn't look like I really even need to bake a normal map, which is a relief, as I spent a couple of hours fighting with the UV unwrap on account of not remembering how I did it the first time around (just a simple cylinder projection, was a pain to clean up after the automated slice, though, let me tell ya) and I always seem to have trouble making the seams not look fucked on a normal map; I'm guessing the gamma correction settings on them are wonky, will need to trial-and-error it. Anyhow, the results:


    Next, I'll have to deal with this mess:


    I'll bet you're screaming internally at this. Those are the totals of the assets I made for Ameliée (and that's with all the references and unused meshes disabled and not contributing to it, at least they shouldn't be; sometimes the totals display hidden mesh data, too, so I can't be sure) and it doesn't even include the hair sculpt I did separately. Got rather carried away with all this, heh. All I can say in my defense is that I did this months ago and have learned a lot since then.

    I was actually surprised myself when the game ran without all that much trouble with them all in a single scene, but then, I've got a fairly beefy machine, so I doubt the same holds true for others. Tricky part here is that some of those meshes I collapsed the modifiers on while I was working, so it's not going to be quite so easy to undo my mistakes this time around.

  • edited June 2020
    Good job on the optimization, that horn is looking great! Yeah, normalmap baking can be a pain and subdivision can ramp up your polycount quickly. I guess it comes down to modeling your props efficiently, making sure you got the main forms down and placing custom edgeloops where you need them to add detail and removing them where they don't add a lot to the form, a lot of it comes down to the silhouette.
    You are of course correct in that you'll need to up resolution a bit if the prop is going to seen from close up because unclean edges/shading will be more obvious. No screaming here, those props look pretty good :)
    The way I usually work is I model a relatively low poly mesh and when I have everything in place I add one subdivision, collapse it and use that as my final model.

    I threw this together real quick to show what I mean.

  • Thank you all for this insight!

    We intend to implement clothing, and that will be a separate systems from characters.
    @odes It is good to know that the clothing is coming to YL2, even if it takes a long time to implement, but to know that Lustful Nun or Horny secretary may come to be is bringing a smile to my face.

    I've had an idea for making a character in plate armour knockin' around my noggin for a while
    @Brownmane I like your idea! I made plate armour skin for Charlotte with varying results so I cant wait to see your take on a knight in shining armour in 3d!

    @thirteeenth Thank you for your advice for polycount when making 3D obj. I'm sure to keep it in mind!

    It's not going to be easy but I guess i have do the 3D stuff like I did my YL1 skins...


  • WOW thanks alot for Guide to Mesh Optimations. Have to test it out in the Future @Brownmane
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