Hi chaps, let me get the ball rolling.

How do you guys deal with sculpting cloth? I'm finding it a bit of a challenge at the moment, aside from finding good reference there's certainly an art to making the fabric look correct and feel right.

Site looks fantastic by the way, and is sure to be a daily must-view.

Hey Paul

Firstly, welcome to the site! Great to have you on board.

Cloth modeling is definitely a tricky one to get right. Out of curiosity, are you creating the cloth for a static model or will it be animated?

Reference is always going to be key for recreating great looking folds, creases and fabric flow. If you can recreate at least a few key folds from an image you will be on your way to getting the right look. Start with the largest and most obvious folds too, the smaller ones are dependant on these anyway and if you do them well, the rest will look awesome. Check out some images of action figure toys, they are restricted by the amount of detail they can put in and as a result they concentrate only on the main cloth folds and they still look realistic.

As for techniques, there are a lot of people who will just fire up Zbrush/Mudbox and start going for it and using brushes with gravity etc, this is completely fine, but personally I try and build up a really solid looking base mesh in maya before I go anywhere. This really helps me to lock in the volume and I find it easier to photo model sections using maya too.

If you have any images or ref available upload them so we can take a look.

cheers
Andrew

Hey everyone!

Some great tips from Andrew there!

If you are sculpturing cloth on an object sometimes it's a good idea to plan how the cloth would flow on that object before jumping right into the modelling stage. With moving polygons and altering points it could in some cases become jumbled, and you could lose a focus on the flow of the cloth. So this could be one way to break it down even further if you needed to.

This may give you an idea of what I mean. Although it's 2D, the principles of the folds could be then translated onto your 3D object. Not only that, but it would also give an idea of the polyflow you would need to represent the material.




[These images are linked from www.polykarbon.com]

Great tips guys, thanks!

Yep.. it's for a static posed model. Actually it's a fairly simple T-Shirt and trousers combo. Thanks for those pictures Peter, it's got me thinking about how it would really look rather than doing generic folds.

I'll post a WIP when I've gone to town on it a bit.

Great! Looking foward to it.

how about using dynamics, i.e. in LightWave I'd use clothFX, it can take a while to set up but the results are good especially when animating

Hey dude,

Have a look at scott eaton tut its really good.

www.pixologic.com/zclassroom/artistinaction/scotteaton/


sam,

I'll have to agree with Andrew with the maya base mesh. I think many people fall into the trap of just winging it with zb. For the best results with the stuff we do at the studio plain poly modeling the main folds seems to give the best visual look, although it may take a bit longer. Then take it in for sculpting of the smaller folds etc.. Look forward to seeing what you come up with

Nice thread topic Paul, great Scott Eaton link Sam, truly amazin' sculpt in the vid! Sculpting cloth and material always scares the hell out of me, but as Andrew said never underestimate the power of research and even taking test shots of similar materials in different poses.

I can always see the differences in my researched cloth tests and the ones that I've made up from my imagination.

Also, I've come across cloth dynamics in 3DS Max but never used it...anyone ever tried it? Maybe exporting it into ZBrush to use with a model. Heck, i'm gonna have a look at it now, i'll let you know how it goes!

Well heres a little test vid (hope it works), the result isn't bad, some faces have intersected, but that can probably be sorted before simulating. It exported well into ZBrush and even if its not perfect it still might be a good way of finding out how a particular shaped cloth reacts to a specific shape.

Thanks for starting this thread Paul, I wouldn't have looked at this subject otherwise.

I couldn't resist one more, this time with a bit of tweaking in zbrush afterwards.

Hey man, that looks pretty fine I must say.

I recently bought this book off amazon (Dynamic Wrinkles and Drapery: Solutions for Drawing the Clothed Figure), and whilst its aimed at 2D its explanation of wrinkles and folds in cloth applies to 3D too, pretty cool.