stitching in sculpts

AA3D

hello polycounters
wanted to ask . regarding stitching , embroidery and all these fine details ... so far i personally add them in photoshop later in the texturing process ... so i dont do them in my sculpts mostly
but i see other artists that do all these fine details in their sculpts ... and it looks pretty awesome .
i was wondering on the process people do to have control using this method ...
because so far i had bad luck doing these fine details in my sculpts .. and then ending with poor control over them later ..i once wanted to change the color of the stitching ... and i had no way to select it since i made the stitching in zbrush .. and i ended up selecting every little piece of the stitching manually in PS
which took hours ( yeah it was stupid )

but how do people do these in the sculpt and still have control .
iv thought of making the stitching a seperate subtool in zbrush an do a color ID bake .. but i have no easy way to make the stitch a seperate subtool in zbrush

its a small thing really . but i was wondering



picture is not relevant ... but i just added it to make the thread more appealing lol

stevston89

Well there are three ways I handle it.

The best result though is making individual meshes for it. It's not as intense as it sounds. I usually make a single stitch in 3d max and duplicate it along a spline. This allows me to have control of each stitch and it gives the best bake results. Oh and you can get masking from this.

The second way is to do it how you have shown above. Go to a high subdivision and use a stitch brush. This looks good, but masking is a pain. You have to paint every stitch.

Last is photoshop. This doesn't look as good, but if it is a really small detail it doesn't matter as much. The upside is you get masking.

Personally I find it depends on the situation which to use. I prefer either modeling it or doing it in photoshop just because painting every stitch sucks. If it's a small detail I would say go ahead and use photoshop. If it's a large detail model it up and duplicate it around.

Swizzle

One of my favorite ways to do stitches is to have RGB turned on in Zbrush and then polypaint at the same time I'm sculpting. I then bake out the polypaint in xNormal and use it as the basis for masking in Photoshop.

Actually, I use baked polypainting for a ton of different things, including creating base textures and masks to use later. It's a really great tool as long as you don't try to push it too hard.

AA3D

stevston89 wrote: »

Well there are three ways I handle it.

The best result though is making individual meshes for it. It's not as intense as it sounds. I usually make a single stitch in 3d max and duplicate it along a spline. This allows me to have control of each stitch and it gives the best bake results. Oh and you can get masking from this.

The second way is to do it how you have shown above. Go to a high subdivision and use a stitch brush. This looks good, but masking is a pain. You have to paint every stitch.

Last is photoshop. This doesn't look as good, but if it is a really small detail it doesn't matter as much. The upside is you get masking.

Personally I find it depends on the situation which to use. I prefer either modeling it or doing it in photoshop just because painting every stitch sucks. If it's a small detail I would say go ahead and use photoshop. If it's a large detail model it up and duplicate it around.

thank you
the first method seems like it'll do the trick for me
personally i dont use max .. but ill try to come up with a similar method with the program im using ..

and thank you Swizzle
i never though of this before ... prolly because i only recently started using polypaint .. gotta give this a try

SuperFranky

I think the best way is to use insert curve mesh. It looks good and you can avoid using very high subdivisions for every mesh you need to stitch on, avoid doing even quads and save some time, you can also hide all the stitching by having it all in one subtool, you can add any color to it when you want for baking color mask later.