Trim Clothing Details in Zbrush

apollo580

I need some guidance!

I'm working on the Art War 3 challenge (https://forums.cubebrush.co/t/art-war-3-3d-villains-the-fallen-goddess-rdzikh/6135/6) and am trying to figure out how to get a nice trim going on my poncho type cape. The idea I have is that it's details that are sown onto the main cloth.

So far my plan has been to generate a low polygon mesh and use the Frame Polygon button to get a curve that I can use. Then I used my custom insert curve mesh brush that has a square pattern similiar to this:

My Issue is that around the corners of my cape, the mesh has a hard time turning properly and it once the brush size gets too large it starts to "lift" off of the base mesh. I tried using the project setting (set to 100) but it pushes it even further from the mesh. I kind of want it to snap 100% to the mesh under neath so that I can add detail like stiches.

I hope this makes sense and can get some advice.

Here is a sketch I did of what I'm trying to get, the yellow trim on the top of the cape and probably a similiar method will be used for the trim on the bottom cloth parts.

Alex_J

Doing stuff like that by hand in 3d can be very time consuming and hard to make it look right. In my experience anyway. 

If you do a quick unwrap in zbrush, preferably getting the cloth's UV to be a nice rectangle as it would be in real life, applying a displacement map and converting it to geo might save you a lot of time and trouble. You can paint the map in photoshop or zbrush. I learned this technique from Georgian Avasilcutei's Amunet Tutorial, which you can find on gumroad.

If you are using Marvelous Designer, you can combine this technique with the workflow I'll link below. So what you end up with is perfect UV's to which you can apply patterns just as they would exist in real life. Very easy. 

https://lesterbanks.com/2016/11/marvelous-designer-uvs-maya/