Zbrush - Need help understanding clothes

Dante_mL

Hello everyone,

I'm working on a character for practice, and i was wondering about how to deal with clothes and their thickness. I'm aiming for the character to be low poly and game-able.

My issue is, that I don't know how to approach the clothes.
Should I start with a one sided surface and after I'm done with the sculpt add the thickness?
Should I start with already thick surface?
Should I curve the borders to fake thickness?
How to know when to use thickness? (Besides the whole "If you can't see it, no point of it")

And for re-topology for animation, what exactly should I be looking out for when making thick cloth?

Thanks.

Dave Jr

A good way to make a quick base for clothes would be to;

1. mask the area and shape; i.e. make a Zbrush mask of a tshirt like shape on the character/base.

2. use the "Extract" tool which will push this mask out; it has a thickeness amount; it doesnt need alot, its more about realism and by eye.

3. Use the "Split" command to split this into its own seperate subtool.

4. Finally you have a tshirt base; as a seperate subtool; with a realistic thickness that you can sculpt folds and alphas into.

Hope this helps, there is alot more info on the Wiki or on various threads in the P&P Forum.

nyx702

Personally I avoid sculpting on one sided surfaces. When you get near the open edges the mesh doesn't sculpt very well.

I cap pretty much everything so that it's one solid piece. If you Dynamesh it everything will be capped anyways and it may lead to unwanted results if you don't do it yourself.

For Jackets, Shorts and other open or layered clothing I make a single sided shape in Max and then use Shell to give it thickness. This gives an even thickness over the whole piece. Sometimes I delete the inner arms and inner back and cap the cuffs. Depends on the outfit.

I do use Extract often for pieces as well like Dave mentioned.

If the geo has thickness on the low poly just make sure the front and back has the same topo so that the verts have the same/similar weights.

Dante_mL

Thanks for the input, most of the time I've been using the mask and extract method, but those were for clothes that didn't particularly had any gaps between the body and the cloth.

How to deal with overlapping geometry? Like a dress shirt having an overlap in the middle

nyx702

It depends on what kind of time you have, how big they are on screen and how realistic you need it to be.

The most realistic way is to model it the way it is in real life. The two sides are separate and then overlapped. Otherwise just model in a lip where it overlaps. And/Or you can just mask off the middle part and pull up where it overlaps and maybe run a sharp brush like Dam_Standard along where it "overlaps." Either way try and use polygroups for each side so you can easily manipulate and mask the halves independently.