Clothing Folds outside of Sculpting?
polycounter lvl 12
As the titles says, anyone knows of some goods ways to create some decent looking creases and folds on clothing without the core need to sculpt them?
Cheers in advance.
Cheers in advance.
Replies
Edit: For certain types of folds you might be able to make stampable brushes but you'll still need to sculpt, it just speeds it up a bit
Don't have access to Scans (you can guess why :P).
Marvelous Designers I tried as well, but it seems like it doesn't play nice with Prefabs (ei; pre-made clothing in external packages) since it needs edges where seams connects to make the compressions work (please note I did try messing around and watching the tuto's but they all seem to not delve too much in that) which isn't very time efficient as assets need to be rebuilt.
But other then that it seems to lacks that extra 'oomph' to make wrinkles and folds pop as well (doesn't have cloth memory) and needs mostly 'compressed' outfits to work, which just looks awkward as all my clothes end up looking like BDSM skin-thights. Again please note I could be missing something (I tried using the layers stuff to 'pin' and hold my wrinkles and folds, but it forces me to take into consideration clothing lenght as well to compensate for the 'forced compression', so my feet lenght skirts end up more like mini-skirts).
Cloth modifiers are something I'm trying to get into (they are pretty robust, more then Marvelous in some cases even), but as noted before they seems to lack 'wrinkle/fold memory' (foam memory if you will), they droop well over rigid bodies and have good self collision towards plance projectins, but they also relax too quickly, ereasing any folds they might have generated (or have sculpted in previously).
Or you could put the time into learning to sculpt cloth. This is obviously the long road as it's almost as in-depth a sculpting study as human anatomy.
Again, I could be talking out of my colon mind you, but the issues are for example; I cannot import old assets (like something I already made complex in Max or Maya) and add the extra pipes and details as well fabric quality to the garment (MD removes all UV's and doesn't accept proper external assets outside of an Avatar - and the fabric setting is borked for prefabs apparently, meaing you don't get the true quality of the settings). This means I have to recreate several dozen outfits in MD all over again (simple ones aren't an issue, but something like layers of robes and coats are not), again, understandable, but not everything can be free-formed. Sometimes, you need a part of the model to be a prefab, it's quicker and easier then moving and rerunning simulations on certain 'harder' parts of a clothing model. The control is simply not there.
Please note part of the problem is that you cannot 'stitch' prefabs with other prefabs (lack of UV's) and/or with shapes in MD, which is part of the issue.
Pin is either too harsh or soft (can't find any modifiers for pin other then distance compression) and internal lines (the stuff that you add inside the model as details) also seem to lack loads of functions (such as softness and spread on line itself), compared to splines in Max and Maya, this is horrifyingly outdated method of doing things, last time I saw this issue was when Max was still had Discreet in the name.
It also doesn't help that if you want to add 'volume' to a piece of clothing (ei; internal values on it's own, NOT PRESSURE, before coliding with the other objects or avatar) you have to insert seperate collidiers in said clothing, and because you're limited to the Plane system, you essentially end up with the hamburger effect on many items (something which isn't an issue in other software and have proper internal collision simulation on their properties alone).
Again, I could be missing something, I have only access to the Personal Version and watched several tutorials on the run, so I could be talking out of my colon, but so far, most tutorials are doing the same stuff (very floaty clothing) and with many restrictions.
all the good hands-on tutorials i have seen rely on a fair bit of cheating and take the short route into zbrush. if you want to build things properly in MD and have clothes that actually fit the avatar and not like something his mom would have bought for him then that takes effort. and the reward when you're done is to clean up the messy 'quad' output so you can reuse it for sculpting. not very enjoyable to me.
if only you could sculpt an asset, import into marvelous and run a simulation on it to create the cool folds and avoid all the headache in making it fit and rest well on the character.
that being said, recreating these folds by hand is very tricky in my opinion because they often extend a fair bit from the surface, can be quite sharp and more often than not create overlaps with the cloth. doing that manually means you have to spend a lot of time masking and you will end up distorting the mesh quite a bit. and if you don't then you end up with the typical hand sculpt look where folds appear to be doodled on. hard to accept that again after using MD.