I have followed the Custom CCCloth Tutorial for Blender and successfully (as far as I can tell) created some CCCloth items which I am able to put on to my CC Characters. However, some of these items seem to have issues when in iClone.

For example, I took the top of the basic CC Dress, modified it a bit, chopped off the bottom and created a new mesh for the bottom to implement a smooth mermaid dress (long straight slightly tapering dress). Once converted to CCCloth in CC, the conform function fixed the minor peek throughs...all good. However, when I bring the character and dress into iClone and get the character to walk, the dress stretches and/or rips.

OK...the mermaid dress was a little tight and probably, in real life, a person would also not be able to walk normally in it normally. So when iClone tried to implement the regular full size steps with no fabric to spare, the dress ripped. Ok...I accept that. However, I figured I could put a slit down the side of the dress and that should allow the dress, hopefully, to part enough for a normal walk. However, when I implemented the slit in the dress, I was surprised to find that it made no difference. It seemed like iClone was treating the slit as if it wasn't there. (And "yes" the mesh for the lower part of the dress was dense enough to allow bending).

This leads me to believe that iClone doesn't actually use the mesh to determine how the clothing can and can't fold, am I correct? Is this what that "mystery" key files is that we provide during the CCCloth import?

I recall from my DAZ Studio days that when the conforming function was used in DAZ Studio, the program offered a number of clothing "templates" to which the user clothing was conformed. This helped the software distinguish between things like a shirt or pants. You could still make clothing that did not have a template. You just chose the template to basically indicate what parts of the body the custom clothing was "attached" to and somewhat how (e.g. the difference between pants and skirt).

Is this currently a limitation of the CC import process or do I seem to be doing something wrong?

"We often compare ourselves to the U.S. and often they come out the best, but they only have the right to bear arms while we have the right to bare breasts"
Bowser and Blue, Busting The Breast

Double-check your weighting. If you extrude existing geometry that is weighted, like the bottom edge-loop, the weighting will be exactly the same for the extruded geometry. That would unexpcted deformation.

Post a pic or two. It'll help clarify what's going on. Maybe.....

I'll post a couple of screen shots tomorrow.

I was following the Blender tutorial provided in this section which, in a nutshell, does the following:

1. Import nude character (FBX) including the armature
2. Import clothing mesh (OBJ)
3. Create weights with empty weight groups
4. Transfer weights from armature body to clothing mesh
5. Export as FBX

If I understand you answer correctly, it is the process of transferring weights from the body armature to my clothing mesh that is causing the problem. That would make sense since the body is nude and thus would act line it is wearing pants and not a dress. In that case, as far as I can tell, I would either need an FBX which of a exported dress (where the transferred weights would already be correct for a dress) or I need to learn to adjust weights manually, correct? I must confess that manual weight painting is not in my set of skills - as of yet. Previous to iClone, I used DAZ Studio which allows manual weight painting but the automatic weight painting functions were good enough for my projects that I never had to resort to manual weight painting.

Assuming that I don't have time to learn manual weight painting at this time, do you believe it would work for me to export (3DXChange Pipeline) an FBX containing a character with a dress and then weight transfer that on to my custom dress (instead of using the body directly)? If so, it seems to me that creating a bunch of FBX exports of different clothing types to use as weight transfer templates for custom clothing would be ideal. That way all those people who are in a similar boat as me (savvy enough to want to create custom clothing but without knowledge of manual weight painting) could use these different templates to simplify the creation process.

Assuming you believe it would work, I will give it a try and see if I can't generate some of these templates. Mainly, I guess, it would just be a pants one (for which the nude works fine) and a dress one (to prevent dress shearing during walking).

BTW, if it is not too much trouble: What is the purpose of the "Key" file that needs to be provided when creating CC Cloth items in CC?      

"We often compare ourselves to the U.S. and often they come out the best, but they only have the right to bear arms while we have the right to bare breasts"
Bowser and Blue, Busting The Breast

BTW, if it is not too much trouble: What is the purpose of the "Key" file that needs to be provided when creating CC Cloth items in CC?

The "Key" file contains the item DRM information.

The Kingdom of Reallusion is watching what your Lordship is doing with their products.

Gerry

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System: Win 10 Pro (21H2), Asus X99-E WS, CPU i7-5930K -3,5 GHz, 32 GB DDR4 2666-16 RAM, NVidia GTX 1080 Ti GPU - 11 GB VRAM(Driver Studio-536.99), Samsung 850 Pro 512 GB SSD, 6 TB HD storage.

OBJ clothing should be no issue, as non of it is weighted yet. I just suggested that because you might have started with an existing base.

Transferring the weights is the correct method, but yeah, skirts can be tricky. You will find that they get rigged the same as pants. So you end up with half the skirt rigged to one leg, and half to the other, without a graceful blend across them. The only total fix that I know is to learn the weight painting. There's lots of tuts.

If you make one properly weighted dress, then you can use that as your weight template for any other dress/skirt/robe. Make a dress that is full-length, fairly form fitting, and long-sleeve.

The physics can be used to "cover-up" skirt weighting problems a bit, but you should have a go at weighting the skirt well for any commercial sale. I still suck at weighting skirts. It is tricky.

Thanks for the info. I was thinking that if I use Pipeline to export a CC character and CC Dress then I should be able to weight transfer from the CC Dress to my custom dress with better results than using the nude CC character (which then rigs the skirt like pants).

"We often compare ourselves to the U.S. and often they come out the best, but they only have the right to bear arms while we have the right to bare breasts"
Bowser and Blue, Busting The Breast