First I would like to stress out that this software is amazing.
I like how easy it is to create shirts/sweaters/tank tops without any tailor knowledge.
The speed upon which cloth and its animation are transferred back to Daz is also top notch.
I really hope Jim will continue to receive as much support as possible in order to keep him motivated.
With that being said here are some features that I hope would become available in future releases:
Ability to drag out multiple tubes from same component.
Iām having an idea of doing something like this:
It would be nice to be able to drag out multiple tubes from each segment in order to create frills midway the skirt like in the upper picture.
Skirt/Pants base patterns similiar to currently avaiable tank top.
I would like to move this post to āDiscussionā so that even people who are not signed up for Patreon can see it. I realize that there is not much clarity about where posts should go and will also add information somewhere that the intention is for most posts to go to the public Discussion folder - except when they are very explicitly tied to Patron benefits. Do you have any objections to that?
Ah, the frilly dress! I share your desire for this feature. Iāve put a lot of work into the underlying physics engine to handle cloth self-collisions and it sure seems a shame not to be able to take advantage of it with something like this.
This morning I was playing with a huge dress as an easy way to see what performance would be like on slower systems. Here are the two silly renders I captured of it.
This is technically harder than what youāre asking for - and it is also a lot uglier. Multiple tubes would be really nice.
Thank you so much for including this comment, and Iād like to add a little bit more context to it so you can understand where my motivations are most likely to come from.
I am incredibly motivated to keep working on this tool. I was surprised to find out how much fun cloth and general-purpose soft-body simulation has turned out to be. Positive feedback always helps - and I must confess to being a bit of a snowflake and seeing my productivity melt under sufficiently hostile communities.
The part of my motivation that I think you are probably the most interested in is figuring out which direction to take the project. If there are enough people excited to use the project even with the current Daz Studio and Genesis 3 (and probably other Genesis figures) then I will put my efforts towards more and better patterns, fun frills and buttons and zippers andā¦ However, if I donāt get a large enough group behind that, then I will put my initial efforts into expanding the set of supported platforms and thus the potential users.
Very explicit feedback like this about what you want will be very helpful in figuring this out.
By multiple tubes do you mean drag a tube out a little, add another tube, drag it out, lather-rinse-repeat? You can do that. Just hit the tube tool again after you drag the previous one out a bit.
It is v0.1 after all. Iām sure youāll add much more features than that.
You should have more confidence. What you creating here has the potential to take away all reasons for Daz3D users to ever bother with other software like Marvelous Designer. There are quite a few features I have in mind right now that you could implement but I dont want to overwhelm you.
Could the control points have adjustable handles like bezier curves? Or maybe just be able to switch between curved and sharp. Iām thinking specifically of V-neck collars.
Currently we can drag the collar-opening points up/down for a more closed or open collar, but it is always a nice curve.
Or is that a function of the pattern? EG, the pattern having a V-neck cut to begin with.
Well since this thread is so generically entitled āSome feature requests for clothing designā I thought I would list a few ideals for users like myself with a power-poor CPU/GPU combination.
It seems that something is always doing even when AT should be idle and just displaying the fitted clothing on the model. eg, when AT is first opened a animation is playing that takes unneeded processing power. Maybe start AT with the animation not playing?
I really like the UI for clothing design for non-3D modelers and non-tailors alike but if that method is compute intensive for folk like me that have poor computers. To remedy this and actually speed up clothing design for folk that have top of the line computers I would think being able to input changes numerically to your base clothing patterns is crucial for precision. Iām guessing though your AT algorithm is fixed in some ways as to where seems will be placed relative to body geometry if not how long those seems are once the seam is place, eg under the armpit on the torso and the arm. Of course in the computer 3D
world somethings are autofit so such such a feature doesnāt seem that crucial and might even seem a step back but the thing about it is one needs to know the inseam measurements of the pants, the shirt, the dress, and so on to properly place pockets, buttons, button holes, and such if Artful Tailor is ever going to be able to accurately design replica clothing of today styles and styles of the past. Maybe that is more than you intended for Artful Tailor to be able to do?
So basically if one can do 2) then one could extend that to use old patterns similar to the commercial clothing patterns my mom bought and made clothing out of when I was a child. Example brand or maybe the only brand of clothing patterns I know of is called āSimplicityā.
So to do those we should be able to give the body measurements of a 3D model also as well like we give our measurements to a tailor or use them to buy ready made clothing at the store. DAZ Store has a product called Measurement Metrics/Figure Metrics and while with outfit this requirement might seem to be a waste of time we need to know the measurements or failing measurements altogether the ratio of a pattern piece coverage of the body part being covered. I guess that is already partly done, creating different pattern zones as an analogue to 3D model āmaterial zonesā or āSurfacesā as they are called in DAZ Studio.
So maybe some or all of these of these are implemented already but it would be nice to be able to change a pattern numerically for a seam measurement. In which case I need to try & delve deeper into the program then editing a pattern with a mouse & control points.
Jim all I saw so far about the existent patterns are really stunning. But for this beginning, Iām really missing some pants and skirts, not worried about pockets, buttons or zippers at this moment just the basic. At least I was not able to create them through the Build Pattern tool. Or Am I missing something?
Would it work to have an open-front pattern? If the default tank-top were cut down the front, then we could make all kinds of open trench-coats and stuff.
Would the tubes be able to have a a cut in them? For the collar and hem on an open-front pattern?
Sorry I have been busy but today it took all of 5 minutes to although the T-Shirt Dress into a Madonna robe as worn in old masters paintings even on my old laptop.
So I wanted to add a big cloth draped over the dress robe but there is no way to do that yet. I will do that in DAZ 3D instead. Also to create a headcloth like she typically wears and a swaddling blanket/cloths for the baby.
Which brings me to a more general purpose use of AT: that would be a nice to add just a square or circle or simply polygon shape of some sort and treat it as a pattern: e.g. then I could make easily that over drape for the Madonna robe (donāt know the technical term for such clothing) or I could make curtains, or table clothes, blankets, veils, even something way out in left field like leaves. So to be practical to import a table model or a set of curtain rods or a bed and then create a new pattern to create a table cloth, a set of curtains, or a blanket and so on.
And those are just generalizations of what Iād love to be able to give the AT program polygons of the sort from a pattern drawn on my tablet like those Simplicity clothing patterns.
Okay, this turns out to be a deep question. Hereās a really quick answer - but a lot more discussion is called for.
Under the hood, all of the patterns are built using bezier curves. The editor does a lot of work to try and create the ābestā curves based on how you edit things. There is an editor settings option to show patterns as āflatā which really looks like a sewing pattern and would probably just make you want this more.
There are two directions that this can go to give you the kind of things that youāre asking for.
Continuing on this direct manipulation path, there are a lot of additional configuration points that could be added. Right now, almost all of the control points are at corners. However, the point at the bottom of the shirt and the one around the waist are there to control the shapes of the curves. One approach would be to add a similar control point to the collar to control the shape here.
The other path is to start exposing more of the lower-level features and enabling things like direct bezier editing. This has a MUCH steeper learning curve for building patterns - but it offers vastly greater control for the designer.
And not to forget, there is also the option of balance that lies somewhere in between the extremes above.
That sort of work flow would be eventually be nice to have for some professional seamstresses I suppose in particular eventually but I think the way to that eventuality and have a good UI emerge that would enable that is to create 1st functions that would let us create customized Surfaces for a DAZ Studio model and be able to export those surfaces when the Send Anim jsim is export or maybe a separate file format is needed for the surfaces export. Now if you look at a DAZ Genesis Model the surfaces are biological surfaces such as eyes, head, lips, arms, torso and so on but if someone manually edited a model to reflect a Simplicity Clothing Pattern in 3D directly on the model and those surfaces had everything AT would to create the pattern in AT in 3D with a bit up scaling upwards of the pattern size otherwise it would be skin tight.
Iām more in favor of the direct manipulation, as you have been already progressing towards from your earlier videos. I think that eventually you might end up with a two-window UI that also could show the flat panel at the same time. But the direct manipulation is a big part of what makes it fun and easy to use. The UI is quite intuitive!
More control points could be great, but also may end up to crowded with spline-curves overlapping each other. I think being able to set āmid-pointā control points to sharp would make a big difference for sharp neck-lines, and triangular shaped hem-lines. I think having sharp corners becomes pretty important if there is an open-front pattern.
For my use in an external engine, Iāll start by just deleting a row of vertices to make an open front.
I like direct manipulation too as first choice but eventually for any intricate design flat patterns with measurements and being about to zoom in and out will be needed. Itās hard to stitch a smaller details called out in a pattern design that isnāt flat. To place buttons and button holes correctly will require measurements involving ratio of space between buttons on a seam at the least as to eyeball it wouldnāt be that accurate (Of course saying they are 7 button with an offset of 1" from the top of the seam would would too absent measurement except I am not sure does a Big & Tall shirt have more buttons than a regular shirt but they are just placed father apart or does it have more buttons? I guess clothing is more complicated that I thought.). Same with such things as placing belt loops and so many other things.
It isnāt practical to supply a comprehensive library of ready-made patterns for all the clothing styles out there and as Jim stated in his introductory video that massive library of DAZ clothing of all types isnāt practically useful for dynamic clothing simulations and animations. It would be nice if a tool like Artful Physics Tailor enabled me to take a book of turn of the 20th century clothing designs I bought on Amazon last year and replicate them in AT (alas those are male sports uniforms so they involve pants and lots of buttons and such thatāll have to wait ).
All-in-all I will be happy with either direction or both directions and have no qualms if flat patterns and such features come necessarily last (or maybe not at all).
Iāve been thinking about things such as pockets on pants, hip pocket and back pocket types, and other such things really makes the ideal to edit surfaces and make material groups not near as useful as youād think. Whatās needed is a special 2D notation to input a Simplicity type clothing pattern and that be converted to 3D.
For very simple template style clothing using material groups as a pattern would be OK but I donāt think enough is gained compared to the effort to code that sort of thing.
Do you want an open front pattern even if it doesnāt include any buttons, zippers or other clasps? I have been assuming that adding this feature would only be useful if clasps were also provided to keep it closed to varying degrees.
When I was playing with the collar before and got it to ājoinā, I thought that was a feature, and not a bug at all. So maybe that could work? If there were was a midpoint spline-control sphere that could be dragged inward for the two halves to join at a point or two?
I thought that was neat that it could do that, and never thought of it as a bug at all. Maybe it could be used for attaching additional pieces of fabric as well. I know someone else was requesting something like that.
EDIT:
Found an image of what I am imagining, more or less. I think the āgluingā would be like it was knit together, rather than the hidden button here.
).
