Military Lolita

I've spent an afternoon putting this relatively simple render together, using a custom Genesis character and an MD outfit from Artstation together. It's called Military Lolita, available for under $3: https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/3YKrL/military-lolita-marvelous-designer-project-obj

It's been a good exercise piece for me, in which I had to pull out all the stops to make it happen. First I checked the outfit in MD 10 and 11 to make sure it would work in principle with Daz Studio. I changed the basic Genesis A-pose into something that would fit the resting pose of the garment better, then import a morph target for a pose that might work. That alone took an hour as I ran into mysterious issues with "ghost geometry" that I didn't quite understand. It kind of fixed itself somehow.

I decided not to use the seriously underwhelming UV editor in Marvelous Designer and export the garment into Blender, where I could pack the existing UVs much easier. While I was there, I renamed the material zones into something more memorable. With around 500k polygons, I decided not to remesh the outfit and leave all details intact. Next stop was Daz Studio, from where I exported two versions for further work in Substance Painter, in which I've re-created the materials of the original garment. Ideally we could just use the maps directly from Marvelous Designer, but without a decent UV editor, it's not going to happen. I'm really hoping they'll fix this in the next version.

Substance Painter is still one of those apps that has more to offer than I'll ever understand. Thanks to a couple of great tips from Chris Cox, more mysteries were solved and some usable maps could be baked. I've applied those to the outfit in Daz Studio and used one of Cake One's one-click light sets as a starting point. With a strong spotlight from the back and some particles courtesy of Matty Manx the picture came together after nearly 3 hours. I used the Blowout Hair by Linday with a few adjustments in ZBrush to add a bit of wind. Maybe next time I'll try using a dForce Wind Node for that.