How would you do chainmail?

Bigjohn

I've been playing The Witcher 2 recently, and I'm really impressed by the character art in that game. I've been analyzing it lately, and I'm stumped about the chainmail. I've seen some techniques where you wrap it around the UVs of an object. But they seem to be doing more than just that.

Scudz linked me the CGhub for one of the artist, and it made me wonder even more.

Here it is:
http://cghub.com/images/view/228284/

This picture in particular goes over my head:


I'm not sure about a lot of things there. For one, there seems to be some cloth folds and wrinkles in the chainmail. I would think you'd have to do that in zBrush some how. The other stuff is the irregularities, which means that there are actual modeled out links there and not some texture effect. And then there's that circular patch on his side.

What do you guys think? How would you accomplish this?

cryrid

Surface noise works well for areas that are covered up by cloth and plates, when you only need to catch a glimmer of the surface to see it's chainmail. Or when the edges have some kind of covering over top of them

For exposed ends (or just some more variety to the links), you should play with the newer IMM brush system. This can let you draw chainmail seamlessly across the surface, add in some variety by randomizing the meshes used, and will let you sculpt on top of the mesh with standard tools to create the subtle folds. Here's an example brush I made over the summer:



It works well for other patterns too, in case you wanted to lay down some scales or plates

Scruples

MoP's Mopknit works pretty well too, Passerby linked it here http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1649497&postcount=13
And if you use 3dsMax Slideknit should work except I can't find any working links, anyone?

cptSwing

https://www.dropbox.com/s/f37q9xdfbm1ya65/SlideTools-SlideKnit.mcr there you go

Bigjohn

Thanks for the advice guys. I'll definitely check all those out. Slideknit looks way interesting.

Actually, I've noticed on one of the images in the CGhub page he says this:

by hand mostly (Yes I'm a freak ) then put it in place using skinwrap in 3dsmax and move in zbrush

Which is interesting cause I never thought of using skinwrap in that way. Isn't that basically what Slideknit does, only with the object's UVs?

Joopson

This pretty much just agrees with everything that's been said, in tutorial form.
Check it out. Very informative.
From the Wiki:
(Things like this sure can make max look appealing)
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1115091&postcount=156

Bigjohn

Very interesting. Thanks for the info, I'll definitely check all this stuff out.

JohnnyRaptor

yeah he probably created the flat chainmail "sheet" manually by hand. then placed it over the UVs and skinwrapped it to that mesh and morphed it back. And then delete some links here and there etc. and then at this stage, you can import it in to zbrush and do sculpting on top of it.


edit. actually, with ZBrush UVMaster, you should be able to get the two meshes required to do this without any other plugins.

Bigjohn

Is there some built-in way in Max to flatten the UVs into a mesh for the morphing part? Or is that something that has to be done with a plugin/script?