Your personal workflow for creating torn cloth edges/holes?

YYEEAAAHHH

So I'm trying to recreate this samurai jack drawing and I'm onto the point of trying to grasp how to texture the torn cloth at the edges and holes of his sleeves

This is my base mesh

Should I keep some extra distance on the edges of the sleeves and use alpha-blending in substance painter to manually draw the torn edges?
Should I do use nano-mesh in zbrush to create some torn geometry onto the mesh?  I've been experimenting with this and I don't want to dive too far into it if there's an easier and better way.

I use Maya, zbrush and substance painter primarily for my workfow.

Obscura

Doing that as geometry is absolutely unnecessary and overkill, unless you are going to render some extreme close ups. Using textures with opacity map should work well enough from reasonable view distance.

Mark Dygert

I think if you're going to do any kind of rigging and animation that torn sleeve hole is going to be an unnecessarily annoying pain in the ass to deal with. But since it's already being sculpted in a pose I don't think that is the case? 

You might want to check out this tutorial on doing torn cloth in zBrush, it has some interesting approaches and techniques you might want to consider. http://archive.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?177722-Torn-Cloth-Tutorial

With that method you do have to be careful around the seams and with the masks, but I really like how the frayed edged are pulled from a woven cloth pattern and how well it flows together. If I was going for realism, had the time and this wasn't an in game model, I would probably take that route. 

Aside from that, yea like Obscura said doing it with opacity makes a lot of sense. Its a fast workflow, I've done that before and it gets the job done with good results and its open to rapid iteration and experimentation where the other method is a bit more tedious and meticulous. I would probably use opacity maps in a production setting for game.

If you're using Substance Painter at all, you might want to check out this tutorial also. It has some interesting ideas. some of them aren't specific to Painter and could be done in other ways in other apps.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/2xB4kx

Clark Coots

+1 for the above Zbrush Torn Cloth Tutorial