Modeling technique

Reverenddevil

I was wondering if anyone had any workflows for creating leather/cloth wraps on objects. By this I mean the types of wraps that you see on weapons and baseball bats on the handles. Right now I just model out and tweak the verts spiraling down the shaft of the said object. Is there a better workflow any of you use? Thanks.

Joseph Silverman

I would just clone a ring of faces from the base and model it into the wrap? i cant imagine it being essential for the whole thing to be one object. And if it is you can merge the objects and cut them back together with proper topology at the end.

For very lowpoly work where you want the wrap to have some silhouette effect but not to waste the plies you could also texture the wrap on and then clone/extrude out faces in key areas.

Edit: here, i took a screen from something old of mine showing how that would work. This was really inprecise, just planes floating over the top of the handle, but it looks more than good enough at most ranges. if it was a first person model i'd give them some depth.

MoP

Make a long thin poly strip with lots of divisions along the length, rotate it a little then slap a Twist deformer / modifier on it. Instant wrap.
If you're using Max you can put a Shell modifier on it to give it some depth, and if you're making it for highpoly you can then take it into zbrush and give it a nice texture pass.

For the lowpoly I probably wouldn't do it like SupRore showed, since with wrapping most of the time the silhouette is actually fairly straight with just a few raised areas or overlapping parts - which you can do with a simple cut and pull out a vertex or two to break up the straight edge.

Ghostscape

Since I do 3PS weapons, I found a while back that getting the wrap to actually physically continue all the way down (which is a pain, modeling wise) wasn't really worth the effort. It may be for an FPS weapon that gets seen from both sides, but I doubt it'd be worth it for a single model, either. Plus then you can't mirror the texture easily...which makes it even more awkward to model effectively to get the texture to wrap. And all of this is usually covered by a hand model that makes it difficult to really follow the wrap, anyways.

So now I just use a bunch of Torii that overlap, with the verts stretched out so it forms a shell. These are kicked diagonally and overlapped, so from one side it looks like its zigzagging or spiralling down...but if you look at both sides back and forth you'll notice its really just diagonal rings.

They overlap a bit and give a good thick wrap, let me mirror the texture, and nobody notices the difference. Only the most ardent artists are going to pay attention to the wrap and whether it really goes all the way around, but to be honest there are very, very few people that are going to break down your models like that, and they're pretty much just us industry folks. And even then, the only time they're going to get a good look both sides is standing straight up, tip down or something...which doesn't happen unless you've got some wonky collision

Of course if you were wrapping a non-handle, focal point piece that moves around, you'd want to wrap it differently, but 99% of the time you're wrapping a handle.

For 3PS weapons I do what MoP does. If you had some really built up wrapping like Sup you could do it like that...but typically I think its better to model it flatter anyways and use your polys more effectively elsewhere. If its going to be covered up by a hand model you shouldn't be dumping your polys there, imho.