I'm working on a T-shirt visualizer project, with the goal of creating animated previews of dozens of shirts with different overprints.
I have a sewing pattern in a vector format (front, back, two sleeves and a collar). This pattern is used in shirt's real life production process. I'm processing this pattern almost automatically through the pipe, and as a result, I end up with a shirt nicely draped over the collision mesh. The draped cloth is unwrapped, and its UVs align with the vector pattern reference file (with acceptable precision). Its mesh are all tris (planar patch from curves).
That was the easy part.
Now, the problematic part of this project is creating a proper quad mesh for rendering and texturing, based on the draped shirt. In other words - converting this intermediate, draped mesh into quads in such way, that its edge loops and UV seams match the same edge loops and seams of the simulation mesh. I also require having each corresponding border edge that constitutes a sewing seam, to have the same point count, for example:
- left-front shoulder sewing seam's point count should match left-back shoulder sewing seam's point count,
- left seam of the front part (just below the sleeve) should match the left seam of the back part.
And so on.
Ideally, I would like to do it automatically, without a manual retopo of each part, because I would have to do it again and again if the input sewing pattern changes significantly. I tried some approaches with Quad Remesh: with guides and also with a reference mesh for edge flow (which by the way takes AGES to calculate - might be a bug?), but I find it too limiting, as there's no way of telling the operator to:
- Build the quad mesh topology based on selected edge loops. Ergo - follow their flow at all costs.
- Set a specific point count for certain edge loops (I tried to quadremesh each part individually and deform them afterward).
For what it's worth, I'm currently investigating TopoTransfer, and so far, it looks promising. Not perfect, but at least it gives hopes. I guess it could be used to construct the final render mesh. However, it does require manual retopo, if I'm to match point counts on seams for proper fuse operations. And the other thing it requires, is a careful match of reference points positions, so that those points would align as close as possible in the output to their corresponding seams of other parts of the pattern.
Sidenote: one big disadvantage in setting reference points for TopoTransfer, is that it's not possible to snap reference points to existing points of template and target meshes.
Do you guys have some advice regarding this subject that you are willing to share with me?
