DForce Top Coat – Workflow for Marvelous Designer To Daz 3D Studio

I was not prepared for how popular and how many questions I quickly got regarding my Marvelous Designer to Daz 3D Studio workflow. Since I am on a stress-related creative kick I figured I will document and share another Marvelous Designer project with the same workflow used in the party dress.

You can see the party dress Marvelous Designer to Daz 3D project and workflow here: https://mooncraftrp.com/index.php/2020/06/25/creating-a-dforce-dress-daz3d-studio-marvelous-designer/

I am still very much learning Marvelous Designer, which is pretty much the King of 3d clothing making as I understand it. Though not cheap, this program is a real gem, and if you bring some knowledge of sewing with you this program is that much more powerful.

At this time I am experimenting with some very simple concepts in terms of clothing design. I am very much still learning about how Marvelous Designer works. My early creations will be free to download, and work in Daz 3D Studio with genesis 8 character models.

The workflow for this simple dforce g8f top coat was this (screenshots showing details of the workflow in both programs further below):

1. Open Marvelous Designer and import/open your G8F avatar (if you don’t know how to set up an avatar, you can google this). Your avatar is critical to your success and can’t be ignored.
2. Design top coat on G8F avatar. Any wrinkles in the clothing will carry over into the .obj file so many certain your fabric is laying how you want, and the wrinkles are not horrible.
3. Export dress without avatar as .obj and when doing so make certain you pay attention which options you want such as weld, or thin-walled in Marvelous Designer. Make certain you have set up your UV in Marvelous Designer before you export. A bad or sloppy UV will mess up your ability to do shaders and materials on the clothing in Daz. If you need help with UVs in Marvelous Designer, here is a tutorial I use: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7G2V2as9sd4
4. Open Daz 3D Studio, and add default G8f, leave in 0 pose at the center of world.
5. Import .obj file just created, should properly overlap with your g8 model.
6. Using geometry editor edit names and parts of the dress to make better sense for future reference.
7. Transfer utility from g8f to dress, use a smoothing modifier for better results.
8. Apply D-Force Modifier to the dress
9. Test posed and function of the dress to make certain it drapes and moves with dforce
10. Setup materials and surfaces
11. Save for sharing with others and setup metadata

As always, don’t ever underestimate the power of a nice map for your 3d content. For this dress, I made my own custom maps as well. Simple, and elegant in style.

Below are the breakdown screenshots from this workflow that will help you better see some of the processes, and my own settings. I am using Marvelous Designer 9, and Daz 3D Studio 4.12.

Here are my settings for exporting from Marvelous DEsigner 9 to Daz 3D Studio 4.12

Here are some additional tips for getting stuff from Marvelous Designer To Daz 3D Studio.

1) When exporting from MD, there are two methods:  Thin, and thick.  THIN is great for testing and applying textures, but thick provides more realistic looking output.  Thin (with welding) behaves better with smoothing and collision/dforce options in DAZ.  Thick, on the otherhand, does not and seams/corners will “break” and the two-sided meshes won’t simulate well.  THICK also gives you the option to create surfaces for the sides (edges) and backside of fabrics.

2) When exporting your final product from MD, enable quads for all your polygons and simulate one more time.  Triangles do not look good in DAZ when lighting hits from angles, and they do not smooth reliably – especially if you have wrinkles and folds.

3) While topstitching looks very nice in MD, it creates more a lot more vertices when exporting.  Whenever possible, use textures to immitate them instead.

4) If you see a lot of poke-through happening in MD with your imported DAZ figure, you should lower the pattern’s particle distance (which increases polygon count).  This slows down sims, so either do it as part of your final product, or use the newer versions of MD which let you increase polys for regions.  Ears, toes, fingernails, and nipples are examples of problem areas.

5) If you need to model something over hair, chances are poke-through will be unavoidable.  My solution to this has been “shrink wrapping” a lower poly object around the hair/head using blender, then using that wrapped object for draping in MD.

6) MD does not let you define material surfaces based on internal lines — which kinda sucks.  It does, however, let you arrange the UV map and output a UV stencil.  

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