Art - Marvelous Workflows

There are a couple of techniques that I have been using a lot recently and give me a good, quick turnaround from high poly detailed mesh to final game ready mesh and material. The first is to create the pieces of tarpaulin around the level, whether that be stretched draping tarp or tarp on the floor and walls. Using marvelous designer I create a square or rectangular pattern approximately the same rough size as real-world tarpaulin available for purchase. Using this I import my wall peices or floor pieces that are related to what I want this tarp to be like and proceed to pin the fabric to the wall and floor where appropriate. Its very easy to get sucked in by Marvelous' fabric simulator and play for a while trying to find different shapes and not actually acheiving much, but after the first couple of attempts I found myself getting the hang of it.

From here when I have some nice folds and interesting forms I then start to tweak the fabric's settings and adjust the tricount according to the desired high poly mesh. After making a quick low poly mesh either using zremesher in zBrush or graphite modelling tools in max I can set up the bakes and even get the tarpaulin material on the mesh straight away. To do this I take advantage of the nice clean UV's made by marvelous for the mesh and apply the tarpaulin textures to the the high poly, tile accordingly and I'm ready to bake out the base tarpaulin textures. This stage is really important and cool because it allows me to use my tilable tarpaulin textures to create a unique texture without having to manually warp the textures in photoshop, the baking takes care of all of that. I just need to overlay the detail normals on to the normals created by the base high poly.