In this article I’ll explain how apply a Mixamo animation to a Genesis 8 (or 3) character, then export the animation to Marvelous Designer, animate a garment and bring it back into DAZ Studio for rendering. This will give us both the rendered character and the garment. There are so many steps to this process, …
The Slash and Spread tool can be used to add fullness to a garment. In the above image I’ve made a simple skirt from two squares (on the left), but after a few strokes with the Slash and Spread tool it looks much neater (on the right). Here’s a clip from when I discovered it, …
In this article I’ll show you the steps necessary to export an animation as OBJ Sequence from DAZ Studio. There’s a script floating around the DAZ Forums by an unknown author, but sadly it’s stopped working after version 4.12. While I haven’t found a way to fix that script, there’s a workaround by importing the …
I always forget how to do this: most viewports can be changed into full screen mode by hovering over a window and selecting CTRL + SPACE BAR. This works great for 3D and node views, less so for things like the timeline or the outliner.
I came across a mystery the other day. It had to do with sewing pockets in Marvelous Designer. I did this in a stream recently, and Christina was kind enough to give me some tips. One of the things that came up was Turned Sewing, and I found the principle a little hard to grasp. …
This morning I’ve noticed that my measuring tool had disappeared from the 3D toolbar in Marvelous Designer. I was using it only last week. I could still get to it using Avatar – Measurement, but the icon had gone. How do we bring it back? And why did this happen in the first place? Thankfully …
Let’s talk about pleats! This has to be THE most award winning unintuitive and confusing tool in Marvelous Designer. Let me tell you what I’ve worked out: There are two pieces to the Pleats Puzzle, and they can be used independantly or in conjunction. We have the pleats fold tool and the pleats sewing tool. …
Sometimes I forget the simplest things, the ones you think you don’t need to make a note of. It’s those very things that can trip you up sometime in the future when you forgot the very basics that only a month ago were so engrained in your brain. True story, it happened to me today. …
If you’ve ever tried to use the Dart Tool to create a dart on the outside of a pattern, you’ll have noticed that it doesn’t work as you would expect. That’s because that Dart Tool is only meant to be used to create darts on the inside of a pattern. To create a dart on …
I had to calculate the length of a vector recently, and had no idea where to begin. In my little farm/planting project, I’ve used Line Tracing to plant a vegetable on the floor. However, I needed a limitation as to where the player can plant things. They should not be allowed to plant directly underneath …
I’ve been able to import Marvelous Designer animations into Blender for rendering! Here’s a short video I’ve tweeted showing my inflatable boat in action: This is how we make it happen in principle. In Marvelous Designer: animate your garment export an OBJ from the first frame export the animation as MDD using the same settings …
Sometimes you might find that the body of the avatar is poking through the garment, and no matter how hard you try, it just doesn’t seem to go away. I’m assuming you’ve already tried lowering the particle distance on the garment and smoothed the avatar, and you still have small poke through artefacts. Perhaps try …
Normal Maps contain data rather than colour. Even though we can see something like an image, and it’s technically a picture, the RGB values of each pixel are not treated as visuals by the render engine. To use a Normal Map in Blender’s node editor, do the following: create a texture node and open the …
Node Wrangler has an easy shortcut that lets us setup selected maps as a node tree in Blender. In the Shading tab, press CTRL + SHIFT + T while hovered over the BSDF node and a file dialogue will appear. Navigate to the folder containing your maps, select each one you’d like to use using …
Unreal Engine has a nice feature that allows us to break a connect between nodes. Blender does too, I just never knew it existed. I had always assumed that deleting a node and re-creating it would be the only way. Turns out there’ a better way: To delete a connection between nodes, CTRL + Right-Click …
I’m having great fun with the City Park Environment in Unreal Engine. I picked it up the moment it was released and have never regretted the amount of time I spent with it. Having done so, I understand that it’s not easy to get started with it when you’re a novice. The set takes long …
I’ve imported a mesh model as FBX that was setup with an opacity map. Most of the simple material was created for me by Unreal Engine, but the opacity (transparency) texture was not imported. I had no idea how to do this, but figured it out. Here’s what it should look like and how it …
When internal lines intersect with an external one, there’s no intersecting point with said outside line by default. In the example below, the top line (in yellow) is still in one piece. Let me explain how we can create a split at this exact point. Select the line tool (Z) and select the outside line, …
During yesterday’s Twitch Stream, I’ve built a camera animation with the Urban Future 6 set in Unreal Engine. I was wondering how to show the camera full screen while I was positioning it and found out this morning. That’s what a good night’s sleep can do to you 🙂 I thought I’d share it with …
It appears that most Synty Polygon packs share the same skeleton. Therefore we can mix and match characters from various packs and use them in the same project, without the need to retarget our characters again. I’ve explained in a previous post how to retarget a Synty skeleton to the Unreal Skeleton, however if we …
I’m getting back into MD (and a little CLO too), but it’s been a while since I’ve looked at the app so I’ll have to re-acquaint myself with some of the basics. Tracing patterns from images is one such thing I’ve never quite mastered, not until watching Lori’s new MD course about version 9.5. Here’s …
Unreal Engine has a nice feature that lets us build distributables (packages) for Linux on a Windows system. It’s a magic known as Cross Compiling. This doesn’t work out of the box, but it’s easy to implement with any Windows version of Unreal Engine. It’s not exactly oblivious how to get started with this magic …
Today I’ve learnt about something called the Game Instance. This is an object that exists only once in our games, is created when the game starts, and torn down only when it ends. It persists across level changes, making it the ideal candidate for storing variables across level loads. It’s one of the first things …
Every language has a way to modify strings: add something to the end, search for something in the middle, concatenate two pieces of text, that sort of thing. C++ is no exception, and Unreal Engine exposes that functionality in Blueprint. Let me give you an example: I wanted to find the name of a material …
I found a very elegant way to animate various properties of the UI widgets we can add to the screen in Unreal Engine. Anything from animating their position to opacity and all kinds of other things can be confined to a mini timeline, then queued programmatically when necessary. Let’s take a look how I’ve animated …
I’ve recently found a much easier way to use Unreal Guy’s animations with the Synty (Polygon) characters, thanks to TC Mabe’s video (and his other one too). This is an updated version of what I’ve described back in March, something I was never really happy with, nor did I fully understand all steps involved. The …
I was looking for a way to turn a string value into a Material Instance. I had hoped that Unreal Engine would have a node for that, but alas it does not. Nevertheless, I needed something that like a key/value lookup and came across Map Variables. Those work exactly like a mini-database right inside the …
For character selections, we may want to replace the skeletal mesh of a character according to a user selection. This comes in handy when we want players to be able to select a different character, or the same character wearing a different outfit. Assuming all meshes share the same skeleton, there’s a Blueprint way of …
Swimming mechanics are a tad tricky to get going in Unreal Engine. I’ve pieced this information together from various cowboy tutorials on YouTube, in the hope that I’ll be able to reproduce the principles without having to watch them again. In this article I’ll make the Third Person Character swim, letting him slowly drift up …
I was surprised to see how easy it was to setup cloth animations in Unreal Engine. It’s as simple as selecting part of a character we’d like to turn into cloth, painting a weight map onto the wafty parts, optionally adjust settings to make the cloth behave the way we want, and Unreal Engine handles …