Hello All,
Since I'm very new to iClone, Character Creator, 3DXchange I'm doing my best to learn from Video Tutorials and mostly from experimenting by doing stuff.
The next issue I'm trying to understand is related to cloth in iClone, Hopefully I can get some help in this:

What I'm trying to do:
So I have my CC character finished and I'm happy with it, now it's time to put some clothes on it!
For what I want to accomplish, forget about the library and presets that came with CC + Essentials (which are amazing BTW), I want to go in a more dynamic way and CREATE MY OWN cloth designs for my character.
I can model the basic shape of the cloth based on the character's final shape, bring it to 3DXchange... but here starts the confusion of what's next?


Things I'm not sure how they are working and if possible to accomplish by myself in iClone:
If I drag and drop any of the CC library's cloth on the character it's calculating the best to fit to the character which seems like MAGIC! but as I described above I want to make my own Cloth Design and use it on my character, let's say a Hoodie for example.

1 - Is there a way to make this Hoodie which I can model by myself and export from 3DXchange to do this "MAGIC automatic fit" to all the CC characters?   I would like to understand how it works and if possible it will be great to learn!

2 - If it's not possible to do the automatic-fit from my very own Cloth Model, How can I still make it work on a specific character? how do I make the hoodie to not fall from the character.
I'm guessing it's up to the weight maps inside iClone based on the UV mapping (photoshop for black & white) but I still don't understand exactly the all process before I even get to the setup of the weights...

3 - But what makes part of the cloth to "fall down" and how do I "stick" other part of the cloth to the character's body?
Do I make the cloth as an extra part of the character inside 3DXchange first?  do I need to parent it somehow?
I'll be happy to understand how to make this from START to FINISH, a good explanation or a video tutorial to show how I can make my very own Cloth Model from 3DXchange to.... what's next, until it's actually works in iClone.

As you can see, even though I understand the basics of clothing and weight maps, I'm still confused about the all process from the beginning.
This may be simple for you guys who already have experienced with this so I would love to get any help to understand it so I'll be able to design my very own not-typical clothing for my characters.

Sorry about my bad English and thanks ahead!

The specs for doing it have not been released yet. Currently, you could only do this with a non-standard character. That means no auto-fitting or further editing in CC. It would be akin to converting a DAZ model.

The clothing needs to be rigged and weighted just like the body mesh. The "falling down" part is the physics, and it is controlled by a grayscale map that indicates which part follows the rigging, and which part follows the physics.

We are expecting a CC "Pipeline" version at some point that will make importing clothing for the CC possible.

Thank you for replying, I appreciate it!
I guess there is no solution to my clothing problems now... and that's kind of bad news for me, but if the CC Pipeline version is going to be released soon.... that will become good news for all.

About the weight maps (grayscale) I thought it only changes the amount of cloth affect, and not the physical (gravity) of specific parts of the cloth so I'm still not sure if I got how to control both in specific areas of an original cloth design.

Here's a pretty lengthy tutorial on Soft Cloth. It's showcasing a DAZ model, but it's the exact same method for the cloth of any model.

Thanks Rampa!
Actually I've already watched this tutorial (very helpful!) but it's different when it comes from Daz3D to what I'm trying to do from scratch, since it's mainly focus on the weight maps (grayscale) which is the easy part to understand in my opinion.
I still have no clue how to accomplish what I've describe on my first (too long) post, but from your early answer I understand it is impossible to do (without Daz3D) for an original cloth-model I made.

I hope that the awesome Reallusion developers will make a user-friendly tool for this purpose soon, maybe CC pipeline will be the answer... I have no idea.

NICE!!! Well, you bring back hope to me and that's cool!
So... I'm trying to follow your instructions, (I can also blame my bad English but I try my best to understand).

For learning purposes I've created a very basic CC female character for the cloth experiment.
First, I've exported it via 3DXchange to  .OBJ  Imported the naked CC female model to Blender. 
In Blender:
1. I've selected the part I want to create the ugly pants (real fast rough selection nothing special). 
2. I duplicated the selection of the Pants so I'll have a different Pants Object to play with. (the model is only for reference anyway) and I start Sculpting to oversize the pants so they will get a different shape, and to be a bit bigger than the body.

I double checked if any of the pants vertices are not touching the original body model, so far so good.

Now... I guess I'm ready to get back to 3DXchange, right?  
oh wait... before I do that, maybe I need to re-make a UV for the pants (I never liked UV, but it shouldn't be complicated) I understand I need these for the Grayscale weight maps settings inside iClone...  
OK, so let's say I have the UV's and I export .OBJ of the manipulated ugly pants to 3DXchange....
Do I need to set or change something in 3DXchange before I export it as iAvatar? 

Sorry for the massive confusion, I'm not even close to the rest of what you explained, but I'm trying to understand... it's hard for me if I don't see visual step-by-step like in video tutorials because of my bad English, but I really appreciate you're trying to help me so thank you very much for your patience with me!

Your going to need a skeleton (armature) to rig/weight the pants to. An OBJ does not have a skeleton. You can use any biped FBX model with a skeleton with enough bones to characterize in 3DXChange Pro. I've made avatars with Makehuman and Blender before.

These will be non-standard avatars, and will not have "magic" conforming clothing, nor will they be editable in the Character Creator.

If you download the demo version of 3DXchange Pipeline, it will allow 15 exports, and be usable for 30 days. You could export a CC character as an FBX using the that way. Then you could import that FBX into Blender to rig/weight your clothing.

Thanks Rampa!
Do I have to use a full-CC skeleton (armature) or only the bones for the pants part (hips & legs).
I have no idea how to bring the skeleton from the CC model, because when I tried .FBX to Blender the scene looked like a total mess with lots of nulls all over the place, the armature looked wierd and the model itself was flipped on the floor hehe... that's why I used OBJ... but as you said, that means no skeleton included.

So basically, if the pants will use skeleton it will count as a character itself right?  sounds complicated but I'm trying to follow and understand how it works so I can make it work.
I didn't gave up on this yet but I'm starting to think that it is very complicated to accomplish, and this is just simple ugly pants... what I really want to do (once I'll make sure it works) is much more complicated than typical pants or shirts.

Hi Alon
Your English is more than good enough so no worries

I'll keep it short and simple...

Custom conforming clothing is only possible for CC characters. For now.
But the mechanism is not yet ready. As mentioned, will be possible with CC Pipeline.
IClone community hasn't receive any official guideline on CC-specific clothing creation
So just model clothes against your CC's general body shape for now
Don't worry about skeleton in Blender
No point in importing clothing mesh via 3DX also
Focus on good UV mapping
Prepare it for CC auto-conforming once it's ready

Hope that puts things in clearer perspective...

And welcome to the forum


  >>> Indie Generalist modeler-rigger-animator <<< Hardware: AlienWare i7-HK 32G GTX1080 2T-SSDs BenqSW320 Wacom-Intuous 3Dconnexion ||| Software: IC6 Pipeline - CTA3 Pipeline - ATK2 - Indigo ||| Zbrush4R8. Blender 2.79. DazStudio 4.9. Carrara. Poser. Octane.

Thank you Bellatrix, you are very kind!
I Understand much better now, so once CC Pipeline will be released it will be much user-friendly and easier process to design clothes that will fit to CC characters, that's great!

I didn't know about CC Pipeline until you guys mentioned it in the post few times, so now I'm very curious if anyone (RL team?) knows if it's going to be released in the next couple of months or during 2016?
The reason I'm asking about the release date is because of  my current project, it could be extremely helpful.